Reflection for Day 2

Until now, I still enjoy this subject the most. Today is very different from yesterday. We had some jokes and fun from the ice-breaking, however I am not saying that we didn't have fun today. It is just that we get into the mood of doing some serious work and start doing research on the topic that we had chosen yesterday. Before we started doing the research, we learnt about using keywords and Boolean operators. Using keywords and Boolean operators has greatly improves and enhance the search result. That is because the Boolean operators had helped us narrow down the search and increase the relevancy of the given result. I am surprise by the time taken to generate the result. In merely a split second, thousands of results are generated. That is no wonder Google is ranked as one of the top search engine. That is something that we will not be able to do manually. Although I heard of Boolean operators in the past, but I never take it seriously and never even used it until today. Even with the Boolean operators and keywords, there will still be some results that are not relevant to what I am searching on, hence we do need patient when doing search. Patient is need so that we can find the best answer to what we want. After this lesson, I will continue to use what I learnt in this lesson in my future research as that had been proved to be very useful. If I had learnt this skill much earlier, I believe I will fare much better for all my previous researches.

Search engine is very important to us now especially when we have load of projects and research to do. We no longer have to go to go the library to find book related to what we need. There is also no need to carry loads of heavy books back home. All the research can be done with comfort within our house and almost anytime. Lots of time was also required to search for the books since there are so many books available in the library. Hence I think that we are very fortunate to be living in a world with internet. But with the ease of conducting research, we are expected to produce work with higher level of standard. So after all we will not have a easy time scoring higher marks for our projects. The result will also include opinions and views by the netizens which are also very important because if we are creating a certain product, we need to know the response of the public. Those opinions are usually found in forums and blog. That is something which cannot be found from the books in the library.

Google was my main search engine but I did try using Google Scholar. This is my first attempt in using Google Scholar. However I did not get a very good search result from that. It could either be that I was not used to using it or the results are too profound for our level. That is because Google Scholar is designed specially for researchers and this search program is still under beta, therefore there can be more improvement make as time goes by. Overall Google is more effective in helping me in finding resources related to my research topic.

Participation in discussion forum is not something new to me. Discussion in forum is more relaxing. In the past, I always go to the game forum and discuss issues related to game; in fact I am still doing so now. I don't feel anxious talking to others that i do not know on the internet, but i may feel anxious if that is real life. Even if we said the wrong things on the forum, nobody will know who the person behind it is unless it is something against the law. However in game forum, the people that are viewing the post might have poor attitude and often like to flame or scold people. I think that is something that will not happen in more formal forum such as one which is use to discuses about work. From the forum, much different information is being share and exchange. Forum is a good place to get conduct research. We can ask for opinion or views of a certain subject and let the public or people viewing it give their comments. Sometime it is very important to listen to people views on certain issues, and a forum is a good platform to do so. Even then, there are people around the forum like is fooling around and giving rubbish answer.

Although doing citation and bibliography seem troublesome to us, but I think that it is important that we do so. The troublesome part is that we have to include so many details such as the author, date of publish, link to that website and date of retrieving. We all know that it is rude to use someone else’s work, however there is no way we can tell the people that we taken the work from about it. Hence the least that we can do is to give credit to them, so when people are reading our work they will understand that we had referred to someone else’s work. I don't think that there are any reports that are done by only a single person. Referencing has to be done in one way or so because one can write a detail report. Some of the articles in Wikipedia have more than fifty references and I think that is pretty normal. That is because the report and data with the most details are often compounded by gathering information from many other sites.