Practical 3 Reflection

During Practical 3, we were required to evaluate the search functions, the reliability of the search results, and the strengths and weaknesses of the search engine. We also conclude whether Google was effective in helping us in our research. I am impressed by the Google's search functions and features as it was able to refine my search and remove unnecessary and irrelevant results that was useless for my research and narrow the total amount of results returned. This allows me to concentrate more on finding more information about my current topic.

We also learnt about boolean operators like AND and OR. We also learn about using the wildcard operator *, and the "words in between" operators like N/2. I feel that these will be very useful in my future researches as it allows me to refine my search and also exposes me to a wider range of information, as the operators allow more keywords to be searched in a document. This allows unlimited possibilities when doing research.

I feel that it can be fun in participation in discussion forum is fun. I do not feel anxious about talking to strangers as I did participate before in other forums and thus I met a lot of strangers in the internet before. Therefore, I know how to communicate with people on forums and will know where's the limit in expressing yourself (as posting too much about yourself can attract unwanted attention...)

While I feel that it can be useful and helpful for my research when I post on discussion forums, I also feel uncomfortable in posting to forums straight away after I found one. This is because it is a known taboo that posting a topic that was previously discussed before is bad. Even if the old threads that have a same topic as your new thread is 3 years old and older, people would most likely ask you to search the forum for it and end up not providing any useful response to your topic. A worse case scenario is a moderator closing or even deleting your thread. Therefore, when doing researches using forum, we have to be mindful of whether someone else could have already asked the same question before. If not, then we can start a new thread.



It is important to do citation and bibliography. Anyone claiming that they know everything without reading or searching for resources is probably lying. Thus, it is important to give credit to people who have helped us in our research by providing useful information. By citing resources, we can also allow people to read further on our topic, if we happen not to cover it, as some might be beyond the range of our topic. If we do not cite sources, people will naturally think that what we wrote is original research (or in other words, things that we find out ourselves without help from others), which is not usually the case.