Week 12: Evaluating Information & Academic Research

Good day to all that read this blog! If you read this blog weekly, I do the 'usual' and will go through the course of my week quickly and then lead into the discussions and topics addressed in the FYE classes from Monday and Wednesday of last week. There is not much to go over from the last week but there are some highlights. On Monday, I had to get up early in the morning in order to sign up for classes for the spring semester. Getting up early to do that made the rest of the day pretty long and tiring as I typically don't wake up prior to 7 on a weekday. Besides that, the beginning of the week was bland like normal but the week got interesting one I got to Thursday. On Thursday, I got to play in a kickball playoff tournament since the team I was on won a game earlier in the season. We won the first game of the tournament off the other team forfeiting. Winning that game we made it to the final four. Our competitors did decide to show up, and we ended up playing a good game but ended up losing in the end 11-9. On Friday, I had to attend a 'round table' discussion for my ENGL 1102 class over establishing a topic for our up and coming paper for the class. I enjoyed listening to other people's ideas for topics that related to their research and fields of study. In the midst of a bouncy up and down week, FYE classes tackled quite an interesting set of topics that will extend further into my college career.

On Monday, we spent the majority of class talking about evaluating sources that news come from. To get straight to the point, the gist of the class period was to identify what sources, sites, newspapers, magazines, etc are reliable and can provide trustworthy information. Our professor presented a powerpoint presentation which provided screenshots of articles from various different various, and all the students were given the task to identify what sources are reliable and which ones are not. After this fun and interactive presentation, we were given another task to complete out of class. Out of class before Wednesday, we as students were required to come up with a powerful research-type question that we could provide sources towards our 'research'. We had to get one source from a news type article and another source from the Galileo which is an online library source that allows us as students to look up detailed research and topics. With our professor not in class on Wednesday, we spent the whole class analyzing and depicting how reliable and credible our two sources were with the 'CRAAP' standard which identified currency, relevancy, authority, accuracy, and purpose of the writing. My two sources went over the topic of alternative fuels and countries trying to switch their cars over to electric in a set amount of time. Both of my sources followed the guidelines pretty well. The only standard that was iffy for the news type source was the accuracy because particular data was not repeated in a different source.

Personal Reflection

Doing research on several different topics and ideas this week proved to be very crucial as I am doing research in my ENGL 1102 class for a big assignment. The topics and assignments I am doing in my FYE class line up pretty well with what I am doing in the Composition class which is very helpful as it gives me time to do more research and look into my topic a bit more as I am essentially doing mirror assignments in two classes. Thank you for reading my blog once again this week, and my sources for this blog are listed below.

Sources:
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