Week 8 - Literature Review

Writing my literature review felt amazingly simple. Although I still need to see my grade...I think what made it such a breeze was the way the course was structured.  The 8 weeks of putting together research sources and learning about our topics and questions, increasingly got better each week.  By the time I sat down to began writing the paper, I felt I had most of everything ready to go.  All that was needed was to organize my sources to the outline of my paper and add my additional thoughts, introduction and conclusions.   Before this class, I do not think I would have been anywhere near ready to conduct research and organize properly. I am very  happy that I took this class, as I feel I have a lot more working knowledge to prepare me for future projects.   I would recommend anyone that is in school or just simply wanting to get better at researching, to take this class.   

Week 7 - Annotated Bibliography

For this week, the research compiled for my annotated bibliography added some new sources to my research topic and question.  Both go hand in hand and it has gotten a lot easier with the techniques and search engines learned from this course to find related sources.   I am much more confident in finalizing the answers to my questions.  This week research led me to focus a lot on the current issues with higher educational institutions and how effective they are in the workforce.   A lot of interesting data was able to be found, and my question being "With the current state of an unstable economy and politics; what are some possible bleak economical predictions and future world industries for a current or future college graduate to consider?"  - I feel my annotated bibliography has enough sources to complete the final answers.   

This week I used the OAJSE search engine learned from the previous week to find several journal articles that related to my topic and question.  I still had to strike certain keywords, but also used the hierarchy methods which have been helping tremendously.   In addition, doing simple google searches, on top of google scholar on subjects within the research topics I have found, have been helping me find other subjects.  

Week 6

Academic Integrity

In regards to plagiarism, academic integrity, intellectual property and alternatives to traditional copyright practices – it makes sense that ethically and legally, all societies should have rules and regulations to protect the ideologies and writings of the original authors.  It just wouldn’t be fair to have it any other way and I can imagine how little the world would be in terms of new creative ideas otherwise.   Having all these rules and regulations creates a better respect and deeper understanding of the ideology itself.  By respect, I mean that it forces the reader and researcher to form opinions for themselves without forgetting the origination and also spawns a hierarchy of new creative thinking.   As I move forward with researching anything personally and professionally, it raises my brows and makes me question the legitimacy of what I am reading.  Before it was a simple Google search, and these days I feel far too many people in the world put way too much emphasis on the first thing they read on the internet without really doing much research.   There are so many non-legitimate sources on the internet that negatively affect the origination of information and ideologies.  Society needs to protect information and how it is originated and processed, so that art, philosophy and any new or old ideology can be created and passed down with confidence.  

Week 5 - Empirical Research Articles

Empirical Research Articles

Although this weeks research on an empirical article was informing for my research question:  With the current state of an unstable economy and politics; what are some possible bleak economical predictions and future world industries for a current or future college graduate to consider? …I feel understanding metadata and use of it was a bit challenging.  Maybe I just did not get it as much from the readings.   I tried using it during this weeks research and turned out better not trying to use it.   Getting creative with different controlled vocabulary searches and keywords I feel I am getting better at.  This weeks research using the ERIC search engine was almost too easy I feel.  With that said, I hope I was doing it correctly!  My research question fell right in line with the search engine and categories of “Education/Early Childhood Development”.   However, I do feel like I am getting closer to answers to my topic:  “Small Business Triumphs and Downfalls Since the 2008 Recession.”   It’s getting a lot more interesting and all the different search engines that I have been learning about has opened up a whole new research world for me just by itself.  

Week 4 - Finding Articles

Finding Articles

This weeks research led me to some expand in to some other areas of my topic from another perspective that I hadn’t considered before.  Many other new sources are coming up that it seems now I will have plenty of information at my fingertips.   It been hard picking specific resources to primarily draw against, however its better than not finding anything I suppose. 

Some of the new search strategies I used were attempts at the new search engines that the Badke text cites for journal and article research.   However, this week I was honing my skills at using the hierarchy methods more.   I went back to the Leatherby Library to search journals and was having a hard time searching for journal entries.   In the end, I went back to the Discovery Search Engine to explore using the hierarchy methods and was able to find what I was looking for.   It seems to work for me, probably because its something we might tend to do when googling something often in the past.   Nevertheless, it works much better when researching on the current search engines that we have been learning about. 

At this point in the research I feel I’ve learned a lot about my topic already.   If you remember from my previous blog posts, this is a topic that I wanted to learn about because it was personal to me: ‘Small Business Triumphs and Downfalls Since the 2008 Recession’, and as I dive farther in to research, it will be interesting to see what other learning angles will come up.  

Week 3, Assignment 2

Finding Books

For week 3 assignment I chose the book “The First Great Financial Crisis of the 21^st Century: A Retrospective, by G. G. Kaufman and J.R. Barth.  First off, I want to add that it hasn’t been the easiest for me to find sources as I initially thought it would be.  It has definitely gotten much easier after these past few lessons and readings from the Badke text.  After applying the methods from the lessons, it’s like a whole new world opened up for me.  I was getting a little worried for minute there!  This week however, I was able to do much less keystrokes (ok maybe not much less), but definitely able to find much more substance than before.   I don’t feel so handicapped.  Previously I was thinking that due to my topic having two different parts to it, a lot more research was going to entail to find all the information that I would need.   After this week I don’t think this will be the case.   With the new book and additional sources I found while searching for the book; it seems the information I will need is in these sources.  I’d say I am a happy camper with at least this aspect since I feel like I am finally moving forward and not backwards. 

Some of the things that worked for me this week were definitely experimenting with different key work combinations, and using the hierarchy tree a little bit.  Prior to this week, I was using full sentences and phrases.   This week I learned how to cut out the words that weren’t helping.  Learning how to filter my searches more often so that I didn’t have to comb through the lists as much this time around was a sigh of relief as well.   That alone cut my time in half.  I am still learning how to navigate through the Leatherby Library, however, since I am a first time user - and it’s frustrating; but the practice is helping.

  

As my research continues, it’s definitely getting more interesting now that I sort of know what I am doing - I think.  So far so good and I don’t want to toot my horn too much right now, but I definitely feel a little more confident than before.   Nevertheless moving forward, I think that it will be a little more exciting for me stringing all these sources together and learning about my topic.  This is what I intended since the topic is an interest of mine.   Furthermore, I think learning how to research better is only going to help me from all angles in my professional and personal life.   This, I look forward to!

Week 2, Assignment 2

For my research topic I chose “Business Triumphs and Downfalls Since the 2008 Recession”.  Because I am a new student attending college and its been numerous years since I have actually had to do research on a topic, I feel this assignment had started out as a challenge.   However, since I began the research and finally got a grasp how to navigate and utilize the available resources on the internet and sources provided in our textbook, things got much easier.  I started out in the Leatherby Libarary search tools and did an online search of available topics through its e-book collections.  Although at first I wasn’t able to locate a huge amount of available resources, there were some topics that led me to do other searches on the web that helped tremendously.  The textbook has many resources outlined in Chapter 6.  It actually turned what could have been a nightmare for me in to interesting research.  I have learned a lot about the topic, and feel that it will help me in my current profession.   

One thing that led me to desire further research on my topic, was the lending practices that small businesses had to incur since the recession.   I found this particular interesting because that aspect of the industry has changed dramatically since the 2008 recession moving forward.   Armed with the new resource strategies that I am now learning in the textbook and through this course, I feel I can now expand in to this particular topic with much more depth.   This is particularly exciting for me, as I feel like it may shed some new light in to my current profession, as where I may have not had the audacity to find on my own.