Web Research
“Research is an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry in order to discover, interpret or revise facts, events, behaviours, or theories, or to make practical applications with the help of such facts, laws or theories. The term “research” is also used to describe the collection of information about a particular subject.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research]
Web Research is - in my understanding - nothing different at all, but is based on research you do on the Internet, online. It doesn’t change the way you start, conduct and process your research, it only helps you to speed up the process and if you follow a clear structred approach it doesn’t have to be as time consuming as some people think.
The reason I put up this site and write down my rants & roars about online research is that in my teaching and in my professional career I have seen a lot of people wasting so much time “looking for things” online or simply finding the web too overwhelming to use it efficiently.
Particularly in the courses I have been teaching on university level, I always provided an additional lecture on online research and students have let me know that this was quite helpful for them not only for the courses they took with me.
So this page will try to give an overview on how I use the Internet for my daily research both professionally and privately.
Main points being covered (work in progress)
- How to get started
- Economy of research
- Online tools available
- How to use tools available
- Google from all angles
- Additional tools of interest
- How to get started
…..
This page is a work in progress and I will continue to review, update and write on this page. For the moment these links are a good starting point:
Google for Educators: Web Research: Web Research, a good starting point to learn the basics of a resourceful and efficient way of using the Google search engine.
The Internet Archive: a “way back machine” allowing you to look for websites that are not online anymore (ever wanted to check how the website of XY looked like in 1997? This is the place to check.
Google Finance: for research on financial things, not complete yet but fantastic already.
More to follow.