As part of the Learning Communities program, Prof. Garral and I will be hosting a last-day-of-classes pizza party for our class on Wednesday (December 14). We will meet up at Patsy’s Pizza at 12:30 pm (sharp!)
Patsy’s has several locations. We’ll be going to the one on the east side of Third Avenue between 34th and 35th streets.
On National Public Radio this week, I listened to a fascinating episode of the show, “On the Media,” that featured a segment about an economist who analyzed Google search data for key words to assess levels of racism in different states.
We feel that this class furthered our ability to make detailed and relevant searches to aid us in our work. It helped us to understand how to develop an accurate, descriptive, specific research question. It also helped us distinguish the differences and similarities between various articles, journals, peer-reviewed journals, etc.
One thing that we’ve wished we had spent more time covering is evaluating the quality of information provided by a given source/various sources and whether they’re reliable in terms of helping us in our work.
What we agreed upon that was most important was how the use of “And” or “Or” narrows down your searches. Another one is how to develop and construct a specific and good research question. We also agreed that knowing the author’s background and history can help us determine how viable a source is.
One thing that we agreed that we wished we spent more time on is the history of Google and how it was developed.
1. We liked how we were opened to new research sources rather than just the typical type in the Google box and pressing all the results that came up on the first page.
2. I was impressed by all these Google services, like the documents on Gmail, the advanced search option, and Google plus.
3. The different kinds of plagiarism, we thought it was the typical copy and paste one.
1. The things that we learned that were useful were learning about databases, authority of authors, and field searching. Databases will be useful for us because we learned how to find relevant sources while researching and we can use this technique when we have to research in the future. Authority of authors will be useful for us because we now know how to identify and determine if an author is credible and reliable. Field searching will be useful because we can narrow down our searches and get sources that are more specific to what we are trying to research about.
2. One thing that we all think we should have learned more about was BEAM. We feel like we did not cover this topic as much as we covered topics. We think that we should have focused on it more than we did.
-Erum Zubair, Amanda Zeng, Kyungheon Chung
This group assignment is by Daniel Park, Mike Alberto, and Yvgeny Neverov.
We like that we had a groups when working on hands-on material and not just textbook notes and such.
We dislike that we didn’t go see anything about Google in person like the building located downtown.
We like that we went in-depth about researching authors and sources which would help greatly in the future, especially graduate level courses.
1) The three things that have been most useful to us as a group was the focused research question, because it taught us how to narrow down our search topics. The second thing was the BEAM model, because it made it easier for us to know how to use sources in a research paper. Lastly, we now have a better understanding of how to use databases properly.
2) We would like to have spent more time distinguishing between peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed articles.
There are many things I learned about searching in this class, but the three things that I will try to apply on a daily basis would be how to:
What I wish we spent more time on is identifying what type of source we are using. BEAM helps a lot, and so did the graphs, but it’s a slippery slope trying to differentiate between sources.
1) Many things we have learned this semester has been very useful and will be in the future. Of theses topics I fell the most useful things we’ve learned are citations and complex and accurate searches as well as being able to crate a focused research topic and focused question.
2) I would have spent more time on is how to narrow down database searches even further
