Week 7

Path of inquiry: When you step back for a moment to look at the whole what does academic research look like?  What are you learning from your mentees?  What does it mean to you now to engage in a collaborative learning process?

In the reading, it states, " That they know there are moments in time, even preceding defeat, where people learn more about themselves, and feel a greater sense of inspiration from what they're experiencing".  This was discussed thoroughly in a class session, about the definition of failure and what it means to each of us.  There was a common consensus that when one fails, it does not mean that nothing was gained. The experience of failing to achieve a goal only sets the stage to improve and/or change one's method(s) for succeeding. 

Academic research looks like using databases and narrowing your search by utilizing tools such the sidebar (limiting to peer reviewed resources), it includes a lot of shifting through material and knowing how to navigate through websites such as our library homepage.

I'm learning that my mentees are all very different, and communicating effectively, with no expectations is optimal -one I haven't even met, and am editing her paper for her (which I received just yesterday), two of the others are more intrigued by what I have to offer, and have verbally expressed that they appreciated the library resources I shared with them, and the last seems to be very self-sustained.  So they have really taught me the value and difficulty in a engaging in a collaborative learning process-which has taken on a prominent meaning in my life. It has really come to light the importance in collaboratively learning-to work together, to communicate and listen, this process illustrates that perfectly, from within the classroom to the relationship with my mentees.   

Week of 10/26

Path of inquiry: What are some free Internet resources that we might use in the research process?  What are some techniques to critically analyzing Internet resources?  How are they different from the databases we used last week? 

Some free internet resources include: Google scholar, Google docs, zotero, easy bibs, Wikipedia, and I'm sure there are more.  Some of my professors in the past have specified to only use websites with .org .gov or .edu, never .com! This rules out Wikipedia-however Wikipedia shouldn’t be your main source anyway.  Other than that, I would think that checking the credibility of the source is important; such as if it published, what is the objective or theme of the website (is it from a university or scholarly article or is someone's blog?). The databases we used last week, all derived from our university's library page are guaranteed to yield scholarly resources and are reliable-hence why you need to be a part of this academic society in order to obtain a lot of the resources. Free internet resources are available to everyone-and with the case of Wikipedia are subject to anyone's opinion-which makes it more intriguing as well as more susceptible to error.   

I was lucky enough to acquire one more mentee, whom I had met in the beginning, but our attempt to contact each other had been lost in translation. We met at the library on Thursday and did the tour-while explaining the reference desk, one of the experts was there (I forget his name) and was willing to show us an effective way to locate an encyclopedia on her topic. He was even willing to show us the location of the book, but I thought it would be productive for me and my mentee to locate it.  It was very pleasant meeting with her; she seems to express a real passion for her topic (because it’s directly related to her heritage) and also was confident in her progress.  She explained to me that her strength when writing papers resides in grammar proficiency and she lacks in sentence structure and making the paper ‘flow’.  This is great for me, one, because I’m the exact opposite and two because she expressed what she wants from me! I told her to email me with any questions/comments/concerns.