Canoical vs robots disallow for sorted content [duplicate]

Question

I have a web page that displays 5 items (each with a headline, image and short content like in a microblog).

Item 1
Item 2
...
Item 5

Based on the query parameter in the URL, I will be sorting the items by date, votes, etc.

I in a dilemma to choose from one of the below solutions to avoid duplicate content issues.

1. Should I stick with a rel canonical tag to point to the original page from all the pages with query parameters (for sort)?
2. Or will it be better to disallow robots when query parameters are present in the URL?