Homework 10/29

An annotated bibliography is a list of books or articles with notes, which includes a summary of the sources. An annotated bibliography consists of three major parts, which are a citation, a summary and an annotation. With the citation, it just consists of about one or two lines, depending on which citation the professor wants. The summary is no more than a few sentences, while the annotation is the rest of the annotated bibliography. This is when I include most of my information about the topic. I would say how and why the annotated bibliography is important and how it relates and ties into my research topic. I believe the reason why you want us to write an annotated bibliography is because as the guy in the video said, it makes us do our research early and we learn how to do research selectively and carefully. And of course, we learn about how to correctly research topics. It helps us learn about our topic further and the research that has already been done. Another thing it helps with is preparing us for a research project. If we do this, we have an idea of where we want to go and more details on our research project.

October 17th Homework

The Trouble for Elsevier snippet is about the cost of scholarly articles and how it started a major boycott. It is talking about how scholarly articles are being restricted and that universities pay too much to get the articles but it takes too long to get it to the readers. They want librarians to boycott for-profit scholarly articles. The New England Journal of Medicine snippet is about the Journal of Medicine’s 200^th anniversary. The lady talks to the editor and chief about its highs and lows of the Journal including the mistakes they have made over the years. He said that the first treatment of leukemia is one of the published achievements. The Changing Nature of Knowledge snippet is about how the nature of knowledge is shifting on the internet. The guy talking states that knowledge over the internet is turning in to big contradictory connections that travel on forever, that the facts are not the facts anymore, and that the facts do not solve disputes anymore, but the nature of knowledge is more open and has a bigger horizon than it did. How these articles relate to each other is that knowledge is attained to write this journal and scholarly articles. How knowledge is shifting today because of the internet is how some of the scholarly articles are trying to make a profit off of them and that the horizon of knowledge has grown over the years is how the New England Journal’s successes increases by the more informed and better quality of information they write about. I was quite bored listening to these snippets but I can say it was quite informal. These stories definitely have to do with me as an undergrad student because I am in the society where the nature of knowledge is growing and how some of my research is or might be limited because of the major companies trying to make a profit. And for my field of study the Journal of Medicine is a great way of me keeping up with information around the world in the medical field.

Filter Bubbles

Filter bubbles can be good and bad at the same time. The good thing about filter bubbles is that it is basically catered to what us as an individual research about or look up. The bad thing about filter bubbles is that we don’t even choose our filter bubbles. Eli Pariser said that search engines like Google and Yahoo and even Netflix and Facebook do the filters for us as individuals. I think it is horrible that we don’t even get a say on what we would want to filter our search on. Some people probably would not want to have filter bubbles, but because people do not know about it, they cannot say anything about it. I think just the simple research that Pariser did as far as have some friends look for a specific topic, which was Egypt. The fact that two of his friends had different results is not cool at all. I think it is crazy that this is actually happening and we do not have a say in what gets filters for us. When trying to do research for any type of topic, even if a person is just looking for some simple quick information, they will not get all the information. The filter bubbles stop people from getting all the possible information they could obtain for that specific topic. With academic research especially, we as students or individuals, are researching to get all types of information for that topic, but if there are filter bubbles, we can’t get all the information which could make a difference for a grade of a B to an A, or just well-rounded knowledge on that specific topic. I think the page that Ms. Pashia had on this assignment is a good way to get rid of the filter bubbles and it turns out that I have already been eliminating filter bubbles because I randomly clear out my history and delete cookies and do some of the other things that are on the site. I would definitely suggest that people should do this in order to eliminate these filter bubbles.

September 10 Homework

My group members and I decided to make our project about the health viruses that are occurring in the word, especially in the United States. I went to the librarian at the front desk for help with some possible options on books for our topic. I started off with a lot of options. There were so many good sources but I narrowed it down to the top four based on the title and the subjects of the books. I looked at all four of them. Two of the books were on Galileo so I looked those up as well. I did an overview of the two books that were in the library and on Galileo. I narrowed my search to the two sources online, mainly because they were more recent than the books on the shelves. The two electronic books were Viruses and Human Disease by James H. Strauss and Ellen G. Strauss and Human Viruses in Water by Albert Bosch. After I chose these two options I read them completely and it was very hard to choose just one that would be best for our topic because they both had recent and up to date information that will be used. They both dealt specifically with human viruses, but still had information that showed where viruses can be, like in the water. People need to be aware of things like this and both of these sources gave me great insight on it. I think both of the books are beneficial to our research in different ways, but still coincides with one another. 

Interviewing an upperclassman

When interviewing my friend who’s an upperclassman, he had a lot of similarities I had. This is my third year at the West Georgia and I know a few things about papers, projects, and all other assignments given by college professors. We agreed on the same things. First, all assignments including research papers are completely different in college than high school. It was funny how my other upperclassmen friends and I agreed that high school did not prepare us for college. With research papers in high school, we did not have to do much, but look online and cite our sources. In college, there is a lot more work. I personally have not had to do a research paper yet but my friend said it was not as simple as high school research papers. My friend said his professor did not really give him any limitations on how to research the topic other than to use credible sources and cite the sources correctly when writing the paper. Although they basically could do whatever they wanted with their papers, the professor had specific questions they had to answer and he said those questions made the paper difficult besides looking for multiple credible sources. Overall he said the paper was an okay paper and he got an okay grade. He said it was a lot of work and that if he started as soon as he got it, he might have gotten a better grade and it might have been just a little bit easier.

Library Ethnography Project

http://www.slideshare.net/acs589/library-ethnography-project    In this project, I took pictures and I found the book we were looking for.