Category Archives: Class Discussions

I first take a look at assigned topic. If I don’t know much about the topic, I search online and see what I can write about  it. Then, I come up with the basic idea of what to research. I go onto databases and other places to find sources using keywords. From the results, I find sources and skim to see if it is relevant to my topic. If I find the source useful, I use the source for the assignment.

I don’t think I finished explaining why the article by Weaver and Bimber about Google News and LexisNexis connects up with the learning goals for this class:

• It’s partly about Google. The more you know about Google and its many services the better you’ll be able to design a research question about Google for your final project in this class.
• The article exposes some of the inner workings of databases (specifically, LexisNexis) and search engines (Google), which will strengthen your overall understanding of the tools you use to find sources.
• The article is a nice model of a scholarly journal article, a genre of writing that is probably new to most of you but is one that you’ll need to become familiar with as college students working on research assignments throughout your years here at Baruch.
• The authors offer on page 519 three nicely crafted research questions that model what I expect of you for your final projects.

Weaver, David A., and Bruce Bimber. “Finding News Stories: A Comparison of Searches Using LexisNexis and Google News.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85.3 (2008): 515-530. Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Aug. 2011.

If you didn’t get a chance to speak up in class today, you can earn points for class participation by writing your own blog post here or by commenting on a recent post written by me or one of your classmates. If you’re looking for something to write about that was discussed in class, here are some provocations to respond to here:

• Good research begins with a question and ends up with new ones. What does this mean exactly?
• What is a data dump and in what ways is not the same thing as real research?
• In the article by Weaver and Bimber we talked about today, where you can see evidence of existing discourses that they authors were tapping into?

After watching this video about Google, I have gather new insight towards this company how it functions. Before watching this video i kept wondering how Google made it’s money. I thought since Google was free to use how did they make money? However after watching this video i realized the enormous amounts of advertising Google contributes to.

On another note, i feel that if i were to start a research project on Google, i believe that the Wikipedia entry would be a more viable source. Wikipedia offers more recent and more detailed information on the company and its progressions.

In class today, we watched “Inside the Mind of Google,” which was originally broadcast on CNBC on February 9, 2010. We then compared it to the entries in Wikipedia for “Google” and “Googlization.” Here are some questions you can respond to either as a comment on this post, or as a comment on another post that one of your classmates has published about today’s discussion, or as your own original post.

• What are three things that you learned about Google that you think are essential to understanding the company? Defend why those things are important to an understanding of Google?
• If you could make an updated version of the video, what content would you add?
• If you were about to start a research project that involved Google in some way, which source would give you a better overview: the video or the Wikipedia entry on Google?

I found the privacy issue the most shocking part of today’s video. I did not know that google stores all your searches. It was understanding that they use such information to evaluate their system and such, but it can be used to track people down and know the darkest secrets of a person. Especially, if you are using a google account, it stores your searches under the IP address and the user’s account. It made me think that I should think about what I enter into the search box before I search anything.

Despite the privacy stuff, Google has become part of everyone’s lives and influence the world and will continue to be for quite some time.

Although both, the video and Wikipedia, informed people about Google. each had different information regarding the famous search engine. I felt that video was much more detailed than Wikipedia in all the information that was seen throughout it. Some things that were seen in great detail in the video and were not really mentioned in Wikipedia were the corporate culture of Google and privacy problems Google may have. On the other hand, there were also some things that were seen in Wikipedia that the video did not consist of. For example, information about the influence of Google in China can be seen in the Wikipedia article.