7 The Internet: The World’s Memory
The Internet is a like a giant nervous system for the planet, connecting people to information from all over the world. Knowledge used to be housed primarily in libraries of physical books. To learn things, you needed to travel to the library. Now you can access knowledge in great depth just through Internet search. For this reason, the Internet changes the rules for deciding what is most important to learn. Remember, computers – and by extension, all the computers on the Internet – are going to memorize facts better than you can. Memorizing facts is not the main problem for students today. Knowing what to do with all the facts is the main problem! You need to find an Internet search strategy for getting the facts you need, when you need them. Here are few tips for using Internet search to get information you need about IT.
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- Do not trust any single web site. Cross check any information you learn from 3 or 4 different web sites to be sure the information is accurate.
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- If you are new to a topic, add the search term “tutorial” to your search. For example, notice the difference between searching for “JavaScript” and “JavaScript tutorial”. The links with “tutorial” included assume you are a beginner.
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- Skip the ads. There are paid links at the topic of each search that are ads. You can check these out if you want to, but in general I prefer to skip down to the links that are not ads. Likewise, if a site starts showing a lot of popups, I prefer to leave that site and try a different one.
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- Sites that URLs that end with .org or .edu are often helpful. These sites are published be non-profit or educational groups. They often feature better information, with fewer ads.
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- Once you find a site you like for reference information about a particular topic, keep going back to it. The more you learn about a particular site, the easier you can find things there any time you need more.
- Many students prefer to learn from videos. A search for any IT topics will usually also show you links to several videos.
Example
Suppose you want to find a Spanish language tutorial for JavaScript. Here is one of those:
https://es.javascript.info/Links to an external site.
To get this took a few steps:
- Put “JavaScript tutorial” into Google Translate, translating from English to Spanish.
- The result of this was: “tutoría javascript”
- Then go to Settings in Google Search and change the language setting to “español de latinoamérica”
- Then search for “tutoría javascript”