week 3 - wednesday 18 january
Finding and Evaluating Online Communications
Questions for Discussion (not all-inclusive)- Do you believe that information overload will become progressively worse? Do you believe that the internet will continue to be the main source of information overload?
- What are the advantages/disadvantages of finding information online versus trying to find specific, relevant information in a library?
- What exactly is the 'Deep Web' and 'Gopher Space'?
- Is there anyway that these huge amounts of information can be organized or sorted by dates somehow? (ie, ppl would not come across outdated material when researching specific subjects)
- How does SPAM work, is there anyway to control it?
- If you were allowed to make one change to the way information is organized on the web, what would the change be?
- How is “technostress” caused? What suggestions do you have to decrease the likelihood of “technostress”?
- Dr. Carlson suggests that enhancing skills in evaluating retrieval results will relieve Information Overload. What are some practical steps that he lists which will help us to evaluate the usefulness of information resources? Do you think these suggestions are helpful?
- How do we view the future of search engines? Is Google going to take over the market or will there be many more to come?
- Knowing that there are many causes to information overload, how do we think that the problem will ultimately be solved? What solution seems most logical?
- What other aspects of new media besides the internet are affected by information?
- Is there a way that we can educate users to proficiently perform Internet research and be able to ‘sift through’ the unnecessary information?
- Being brought up in the beginnings of this technological revolution, do you think we are actually dependant on information overload?
- How do you know for sure if a source is credible?
- Would you rather have the information overload that is present now, or a lack of information that is easier to manage and retrieve?
- Does information overload change with economic status?
- Do others believe they are recieving too much information on average but far too little information with any value?
- Keeping in mind that in the past, more efforts have been put into generating information than retrieving information, do you think there is a hopeful future in terms of finding a solution for affective information searching on the internet?
- What would be your suggestions for limiting the amounts of redundant information found on the internet? Do you think this would be a fair process?
- Can you think of one media that your life would be better off without? What it is and why would your life benefit from its dissapearance?
- It is possible for us to "turn off" our machines? What would be the social impacts of turning of the technology we created to run our society? Could we now survive without it?
- How do you determine the accuracy and trustworthiness of an information source?
- In what ways can content producers more effectively deliver information to help prevent user confusion?