I wish that I had gotten to this point prior to the concepts assignment being completed. My thoughts during that exercise, were: why am I doing annotations to a reference site? This seems to be a waste of time.

I no longer think this way. I can now see the point. What I needed to appreciate was that the information I was using to make my case was reliable. I also needed to show my reader(s) why I thought this was the case.

So, what makes one site more reliable than the next. The tutorial form Ohio SU net.Tutor sets out 6 points to determine a sites reliability:

  • Purpose
  • Author
  • Content
  • Coverage
  • Currency
  • Recognition

My process in determining the reliability of a site is to take much of what is written with a grain of salt. A commercial site is always going to be biased towards it own products. An author is always going to be biased depending on his own prejudices etc. It is up to me as the user to determine whether the author has the experience or credentials to hold that opinion and whether his arguments make sense. An author and site will also be stronger if other sites and authors have used them as a citation.

Annotation
This is the annotation I wrote for one of the topics in the concepts assignment :
Suler ,J. (1997) The Blackhole of Cyberspace(and the unanswered email)

John Suler, PhD. is Professor of Psychology at Rider University who explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks.

This article explains the thought that go through our minds when we are waiting for a reply to an email that never comes. The first thought are immediate that our mail servers failed to transmit or the communication has been sent into the blackhole of cyberspace.
How do we feel when a blog we have written fails to attract a comment? Suler points out that we need people to react to us and are consistent. I tend to feel a disappointment and endeavour to do better next time. We need to invoke a reply or a comment. Not by being provocative but by asking for a response.

Reflections

Social Bookmarking sites have a space that enables a user to provide an annotation of the site being bookmarked. This annotation is more useful to me and external users than the usual information used to identify bookmarked sites. It is my intention to utilise this facility in the future . Many is the time I have forgotten why a particular site has been saved. Social bookmarking sites also utilise the tagging concept. My tags need to be a little more descriptive to enable me to easily retrieve the stored information.
In this blog site I ensure that all blogs are tagged Curtin University and NET11, I then use the module number as the next level of tag. After that I may add specific words to identify a subject , e.g web 2.0. In Iterasi I create separate folders to group like topics together and have started to consistently apply tags.

This topic has been an important step in my learning journey. In the past I have searched and found information, but this module has provided me with a better armoury to store and evaluate information than I previously utilised.