Week 4: Not as Bad as I thought

I don’t know but for some reason I was really nervous about this week. I guess it was because we were going to start the research week. It was not bad as I thought. My goal this week was to try and get all the assignments done before Thursday so I could just have the weekend to relax. Well I got my work done before Thursday but I did not get to do the relax part yet. Hopefully I will but I doubt it. I have been re-painting the picnic table and helping my fiancée build my mom a garden, which is extremely time-consuming.

This weeks assignments were to revise our essential and foundation questions in a list of how we would like to answer them. We were then to read the articles about how to develop a search strategy. Then we needed to read several articles about how to evaluate an internet article and then we were to evaluate “Sign Language Communication with Elephants.” Then we were to evaluate an article pertaining to our topic. Then we were to evaluate any article and use an evaluation form to rate that site. We needed to think about everybody’s topic and if we were to come across information to them we should sent that to the list. We needed to continue doing our webliography. We needed to keep reading our mail from our professional mailing list and read the project prospectus.

The first assignment was to develop a search strategy which gave good information on how to search for our topic and find answers to our foundation questions. Then after this I revised my essential and foundation questions and made a list of how I would want to order it. Next we were to read information on how to evaluate articles that we read. The information on how to evaluate internet article was real helpful. I know that we should not believe everything that we read on the internet but often when researching topics I do not question the articles I read. Having read these articles really opened my eyes to have to pay close attention to the articles I read. When I evaluated the “Sign Language Communication with Elephants,” the article was not real reliable information because it had no address, no author, no web page address, or other links and this was a sign that it was not valid information. Having thought about this there are numerous times when I am researching topics that I have not found authors on the page, contact addresses or e-mail addresses, yet I would still use them. If, you can not find an author for a web document then you just use the web site in your reference. However, this does not mean that it is a reliable article. Reading this article lets me no that I have to be careful about the validity of the article. These articles that I read and the evaluation form gives good advice of how to tell if and article is a good source or not. Next I evaluated an article on my topic, “PACT: A broad- based approach to Phonological Therapy.” I evaluated the article based on authorship, publishing body, and currency. It took a while to go through and evaluate the article but after evaluating the article it came out to be a reliable source. I think that it is a good idea to do this for all the articles so I can make sure I am receiving valid information. Learning to evaluate information based on this form will come in handy when I am researching further on my topic. The last evaluation assignment was to evaluate any site and rate the site based on currency, content, authority, navigation, experience, multimedia, treatment, access, and miscellaneous. This was an interesting way to evaluate an article. I chose one of my favorite sites that I go to often which was Dustin’s Days Page. This assignment was fun it was a good stress relief assignment. The whole time I was doing this assignment I kept thinking to myself I can’t believe I am actually evaluating this site. I guess I felt guilty that maybe I should evaluate another research site on my topic but I decided to do evaluate on one of my interest. After evaluating this site my site turned out to be average which still meant that the information was pretty good. I think it is a good idea to use these evaluation forms when evaluating a source. The next thing I did was rearrange by webliography. The first one I did was extremely rough so I went back and changed it a little and now I am working on adding my discipline and research sites and I want to add a couple more things to my fun stuff. As for problems I did not really have any problems with this week’s assignments. The only thing that I experienced this week is when I was doing my webliography I pressed save and it was taking an long time to post my work so I copied it and pasted it to works and printed it out and exited my blog and when I did this I received information that antville had an error and was not working. The next day when I went to my blog everything was working and it saved my work anyways. That was a relief.

I enjoyed moo this week. It really cleared up the directions about the MRP. All the examples that were given of how to approach this project was helpful. I also thought it was interesting to have a guest visit us. I though that was cool. It was too bad that we did not get to talk to him to long. I am looking forward to when we can interact with other people at the moo.

This week was a real interesting week. I have learned a lot of valuable information about the internet. This information will really help me with my research project. Just seems every week I am learning a lot of new and important information that I did not know before. By the time the class ends I think I will accomplish my goal of this class which is to become computer literate.

I have 2 questions. My first question,
I have been reading my mailing list and I have found some e-mails that are pertaining to my subject. However, most of them are just symptoms and asking the mailing list of what can this be. Not all of the lists deal with phonological disorders. I was wondering if I can sign up to another mailing list to see what other information I can get.

The second question is for the MRP we have to have 3 point of views. I was wondering if it was o.k. that 2 of the points of view are addressed in my questions which are parents and SLP’s. Or do I need to change the question to where some of my points of view won’t already be addressed in the question.