Reflection For Week 1

I had decided to do a week reflection, this is because its easier for me and it also helps me in refreshing my memories such as the things i had learnt.

Monday 20th Oct

The day before monday i checked my timetable and found out that i got a module called EIR, i was surprised as i remember i didnt select any module with the name of "EIR". However that kept me looking forward for the first day of EIR. Initially i though EIR meant easy internet research cos the nearest module i could relate to EIR was UIR, therefore i thought it should be blah blah blah internet research.

Today is the first lesson for Effective Internet Research. My EIR's lecturer was Ms Noor Faridah. She is the tutor and subject leader for this module. Being wonderfully nice, she suggested us playing some ice breaking games to let us know our classmates better. We were divided into groups of 5 or 6 people each, playing a game on the net which required us to use the internet to check the answers for the questions. There are a varities of topics of questions to choose, they are celebrities, music, and etc. My group chose Celebrities as the topic and there are 5 questions in the topic. My group consist of 6 members : Kaisiong, Ivy, Samir, Colin, Donson and me. I was being selected as the group leader for the group. We split the questions between us and moved on to get the 5 answers for the questions. The first day required us to use our normal and ordinary research methods to find the answers. Therefore i realised this module is actually about making use of internet resources to get the informations i need.

Following on, i chose the discussion topic (Discuss the trends and developments of business blogging).After attending the first lesson of this new improved module, i realised that i am still new to the search engines out there in the internet. I also had to create my eir blog to post my reflections for each day. This is not my first time blogging as i myself had a personal blog for some time already.

Tuesday 21st Oct

This is the second day of my lesson, my lecturer began teaching the new module. I was taught of the different purpose of internet resources. They are Information, Advocacy, Business/ Marketing, News, Personal and Entertainment. Next we were given an assignment to use $500 to buy somethings online.

Thursday 23th Oct

This is officially the 3rd lesson i had attended, this is because theres no lesson on Wednesday. I learnt how to use effective ways through Advance Google Search and Scholar Google Search to search the information i needed. It is my first time hearing such search engines, and i realised that it is actually better than the usual google and yahoo search. This is because they contain more information than the usual google and yahoo search.

I think that google scholar is much precise regarding the information that you wanted as compared to advanced google search.

Google searches the Web for information and images. It also provide translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.

Google Scholar: Provides a search of more resources including books and articles. It also has a function that allows user to only search recent article if they are only looking for things that happen recently. And lastly it only shows the result that are more relevant.


Regarding the discussion topic, i had registered myself for http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/
to discuss about my topic: Discuss the trends and developments of business blogging. This is my first time to discuss an serious topic on the forum. Usually i will go to some game forums and dicuss about the game i played. However regarding to an academic topic, it is still my first time.
I admit i am anxious about the replies i would get because i am afraid that my thread would be ignored due to my lack in experience in forum participation. Therefore i always think twice before posting up my thread.

Before lesson is dismissed, Ms Faridah also taught me about the importance of citing and bibliography. This is not the first time i had been taught on this, my first lesson about citation and bibliography was in PcomD. That time i had learnt that citation and bibliography is to acknowledge the source and to avoid plagiarism.

Friday 24th Oct

Lessons as usual and i learnt another 2 new search engines. They are meta crawlers and yahoo directory.
Meta crawlers is something that searches results from google, yahoo and other search engines. It filters to get the information that is more relevant. It also allows users to choose which search engine they want Meta search engine to search on.

Whereas for Yahoo Directory, it is actually a category based search engines to allow the user to narrow down the search on what he wants to search about.

Initially i only know yahoo, google. Now i know around 6 search engines and 4 of them are learnt from EIR!!.
i think that meta search engines is more precise than the other search engines. It only provide up to 154 results when i type "(Business Blogging)". This shows its preciseness for the search it found, and it also shows the percentage of relevant it is to the keywords i typed.

When it is compared to google, i think that Meta Crawlers are much better as it provides the results from the other different search engines. In addition, the filtering of information to get more precious and relevant information.

I had also recieved replies from the thread i posted in the forum. Although there are some replies which are not so friendly, there are still some which gives me information. Maybe it is due to my lack of experience in the way of posting a question, thats why some replies are not so friendly. However i learnt something new from this module, especially posting a discussion topic in a forum.