Blog Post #11

Some research strategies that I have found from this class were to how to use advanced searches on Google, how to look for news report sections only on Google, how to look for magazines and alternate magazines as well as newspaper reports and articles using the Marymount website and their library database, but one of the most useful was learning how to evaluate and judge an adequate website from an inadequate one. Other useful tips included how to look for certain select websites only, like educational, commercial, or government websites. I also learned the value of how Google actually works, the importance of keywords, the importance of links, how to do an important research paper and I learned how to categorize research sources into their appropriate categories, why these sources are defined that way and what use they are, such as how to research and categorize books, dictionaries, websites, magazines, newspapers, etc. I also learned the value of the form of media and the news in general, how a topic is brought about and what sources report on it, when and for how long, also what sources come from an event and what sources change over a period of time and the change in the flow of information.

What I enjoyed learning the most about the class was how to tell a good resource website from a bad one, what the differences are, the tricks to spotting them and how to avoid inadequate websites. I also enjoyed learning how adequate other resources are, for example just how poor a blog can be for research because of bias opinions, etc. Some information I would like to have learned was how radio and social networking sites work in the process of acquiring information, we only covered a small portion and I would like to have learned the difference between the two and how social networking really worked, eg. if it really is a credible source or the general process.

My thinking has really changed on the sorting excercises. I first thought that you couldn't categorize scholarly journals at first, but I managed to this time, to make it into a category and then put in textbooks, books, and such under it, I wasn't able to dot his before. Also I managed to adequately categorize government websites into statistics, which I didn't know before and also didn't realize that newspapers could also be classified as this as well as under popular journals, which was a concept I was unfamiliar with in terms of magazines and such. THis time I was able to categorize some stuff I wasn't able to do more specifically before such as scholarly journals, statistics, research, etc. My thinking on these subjects has greatly changed, I was able to use periodicals and label everything more accurately than before, such as Editorials, Periodicals, Scholarly Journals, Popular Periodicals, Scholarly etc. Also Peer reviews, which I learned to be a valuable category, learning categories that I did not know before and applying them more specifically.

Kevin Bruehl