Instituto de Educación Superior Almafuerte

Lengua y Cultura III

Blas Bigatti
2010

Second Assignment:
American colonies - web search

Task:

This will be our second and last assignment before the first partial exam and
it will help us practise how to use some important tools we’ll need for the exam.

You have to pick out one of the many European colonies or settlements
(mentioned or not in the texts discussed in class) and carry out a web
search for historical information about it. These are the steps to follow:

1) Look for web pages1 containing information about the colony you
chose and select three of these pages that you consider the most
reliable ones and containing the most relevant information2.

2) Compare the information from the three web pages.

3) Write a report containing the following sections:

a) The three sites’ URLs (addresses) together with one paragraph

(for web page) explaining why you considered it reliable and
relevant.
b) One paragraph commenting on differences and similarities
between the information from the three pages.

4) Write a brief historical summary of the chosen colony combining

the information from the three web pages. This summary will be
posted on our blog.

5) Deliver a short oral presentation to your class. DON’T PANIC! I will

send you instructions for this when the time comes.

Things to have in mind for this assignment:

1) When choosing the colony: Before choosing a colony, I’d ask you to enter
the blog and click on the label ‘colonies and settlements’ (on the sidebar, at
the bottom); you won’t be allowed to choose a topic that has already been

1
These instructions contain an Appendix with Internet terminology that may be useful if
you’re new into this.
2
These two words will be very important this year: a) ‘Reliability’ refers to how much we
can trust the source we are using. The Internet is full of information, but not all the people
publishing are well-qualified for this. There’s a lot of incorrect and false information on the
web. b) ‘Relevance’ refers to the pertinence of the information according to our needs. The
web can contain millions of sites about a same topic, but that doesn’t mean that all these
sites have the information we are looking for. For example, if we were looking for
information about James I’s biography, an essay on absolutism wouldn’t be exactly what we
need.
 published, unless you can find new and different information from the one
already posted.

2) During the web search: Consider the tips given in the texts about web
search from the Appendix. They are VERY useful. Mostly the text on
reliability. Remember that anyone can publish on the web, but we will only
use reliable sources.

Also remember that there are different kinds of text on the net, from articles
to complete books. Although articles are more specific, books can also
contain relevant information. Of course you don’t need to read the books
complete. There are many online libraries where you can pick out books by
searching the titles or even their content3.

3) During the selection and comparison: Have in mind (as Jenkins states)
that different people may have different perspectives about a same topic. So
don’t expect to find the same things in all the sites. Most interestingly,
variety of points of views can enrich your understanding of the colony you
chose. I’d recommend to select information that is reliable, but also varied
(if you select three sites that say exactly the same, only one site will be
relevant; the rest will be redundant).

4) When writing the report: Follow the style guidelines for the First
Assignment and include subtitles for each section.

5) When writing the summary: The correction of the summary will be done
through two drafts, just as we did with the First Assignment.

6) Doubts: Any doubts you have, you can always consult me by e-mail. I
check it almost daily. So, if there is any doubt concerning the assignment, or
about how to handle the PC stuff, just let me know.

7) These are the elements I will assess in your final version (report +
biography):

Assessment chart:
Argumentation: organisation,
coherence, clarity. (30%)
Language: correction of form and
register. (20%)
Bibliography: correct conceptualisation
and use of bibliography. (15%)
Style: Conformity to style guidelines.
(5%)
Search: reliability and relevance of the
information selected.
(15%)
Process: improvement out of
corrections and class discussion. (15%)
Final assessment

3
You can access a list of useful libraries by clicking on the ‘Link’ button on the menu bar of
our blog.
8) DEADLINES:
May 19: Report
May 22: Summary - First draft
May 29: Summary – Final draft

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APPENDIX

Terminology (to have in mind):

Whenever you search the web you are directed to different web pages:

• Web pages are individual documents that you can read or view
on the net (each individual ‘screen’ is a different web page).

Web pages are part of web sites:

• A web site is a collection of web pages, like a book which

contains many pages.

Web sites have a home page:

• The Home page is something similar to the cover, the title page
or the content page in a book. It is usually the main address of a web site.

Each page has an address, that we call URL (Uniform Resource Locator):

• The URL is the address each page has on the web. The URL of
the Home page is usually the first part of the address (e.g.:
http://www.wikipedia.org/). The URLs of all the web pages from that site
will derive from this one (e.g.: http://www.wikipedia.org/South_Park).

For example:

Wikipedia is the name of the site.

www.wikipedia.org is the Home page.

The entry on South Park that you read for

the previous assignment was just one web
page (of the many that this site has).

The entry on South Park had a URL derived

from the main one:
http://www.wikipedia.org/South_Park

This means that if the web page you’re

interested in hasn’t got information about
the author or organisation who published it,
you can go to the Home Page and try to
find it.
For example, if you were on http://www.wikipedia.org/South_Park, and wanted to
find information about the organization who published this, the best thing would be
to delete the last part of the URL (in this case: South_Park) and go to the Home
page. There you could start looking for information about the organization.

We can think of a web site as a book with a content page (the

Home page), different sections, pages (the web pages) and page
numbers (the URLs). This means that many times, in order to check
the seriousness of a web page, we have to consider the web site as a
whole, the same we do when we evaluate a chapter from a book by
taking into account not only the text, but also the author, the editor
and printing house.