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.
Inga, I'm glad you were able to meet with your mentee and that you found out what she is good at and what she needs help with. It's great that you two are opposites!
ReplyDeleteDitto what Amy said. Sometimes just figuring out how to make a connection can be some of the hardest work and from there it is comparatively easy. . . although, I don't want to speak too soon :)
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