Blog Prompt 10/22/12

What is a filter bubble?- A filter bubble is an online "circle" of information that is filtered towards you and your most frequent searches. What are the potential personal drawbacks of these filter bubbles? What are the potential problems these filter bubbles might cause for your academic research?- I feel like the personal drawbacks are similar to the drawbacks that could occur while researching. If the search only turns out information that is specific to the things I commonly search for then I am going to be getting very biased information, resulting in invalid research. What are some filter bubbles that you've noticed in your own life?- I have notices some filter bubbles in my circle of close friends. I tend to surround myself with people that believe generally the same beliefs as I do so the information I hear and the discussions I have with my friends is usually one sided. Word Count: 245

Blog Prompt 10/15/12

The Appeal to Emotion Logical Fallacy This fallacy is often used in PSA commercials as well as many "anti-" commercials. In this particular commerical, we see it being used to make viewers connect emotionally with the topic of the commercial. This commerial is an anti-texting and driving commerical that subjects arounds the story of a young girl and her story about the tragic end to her sister's life due to her reading a text from her sister while driving. This comercial uses the "Appeal to Emotion" fallacy by telling the personal story of this family's tragedy to inform people about the dangers of texting and driving. I feel that this fallacy is often very effective, I know it is for me. Whenever I see this commercial my heart breaks for this family and definitely makes me think twice before I try to text and drive. That is the point of commercials such as this, usually to make you think twice before doing whatever the commercial is against (texting and driving, drugs, alcohol, unprotected sex, ect.)or to persuade you to donate to their cause (animal shelters). These often work because of our emotions, especially for women.

Research Portfolio 10/10/12

My research question is "What negative effects is texting in the classroom having on student's grades and behavior?" My argument is that texting in the classroom is distracting students from their learning. It is negatively effecting their grades and behavior because their attention is being drawn away from using the full potential of their brain to learn. Students are more interested in the latest status update or the conversation they are having via text message with their friend that is sitting right beside them. These distractions are causing a slide in grades and causing issues with student behavior because it is causing tension between teachers and their students. Teachers want and expect the full attention of their students and the students expect to be able to do whatever they want to do (and they assume that their social media world is more important than anything else going on.) To support my argument, I would need statistics, articles (both popular and scholarly) and interviews with possibly students and teachers (getting their view of this topic.) These are the sources that I feel will be the most useful to me in my research process! With our topic being relevant and very current in the news, magazine (a credible one) articles are going to be very beneficial to me! Word Count: 216

Blog Prompt for 10/8/12

Major Discipline: Communications Database: Alt-Press Watch The results that I got from this database were really informative. There were a lot of articles about the subject I am researching specifically. I am really excited to use these kind of databases for my research. The difference between searching in a subject specific database and in Discovery?- Searching in a subject specific database narrows down specifically what I am looking for, making the process much faster I think. With Discovery, which is great because most of the results were accessible through the library, but it brings up a lot of articles and such that are not always relevant to what I need. Using the subject specific database was much easier and the majority of the articles weren't exactly relevant to what I was looking for. I think I would use both of them but probably the subject specific searching over Discovery. Discovery is a great resource because most of the results it turns out are available in the library which is very convenant but it didn't do a very good job initially of filtering out irrelevant results. If I refined research, I got some better results but that is a step more in the process than required by the subject specific databases. Word Count: 210

Research Portfolio Entry 2

Scholarly Article: Effects of Classroom Clee Phone Use on Expected and Actual Learning JASMIN D. CHACON, et al. "Effects Of Classroom Cell Phone Use On Expected And Actual Learning." College Student Journal 46.2 (2012): 323-332. Sociological Collection. Web. 7 Oct. 2012. This article looks at the risk of texting in the classroom. It mainly looks the risk of divided attention in the classroom and how it effects behavior and performance in the classroom. I plan to use this article as a part of my research by using the information about divided attention in the classroom. This will be beneficial because it will show me a first hand look into how text messaging distracts and effects students in the classroom. Popular Article: The Negative Effects of Text Messaging Burgess, Louisa. "The Negative Effects of Text Messaging." Yahoo! Contributor Network. N.p., 24 May 2008. Web. 07 Oct. 2012. . This article looks at the negative effects of text messaging in general. It looks at texting and driving, texting in the classroom as well as the negative effects of texting on our intrapersonal communications skills. I would use this article to back up the idea that texting messaging is a bad distraction in the classroom as well as other aspects of our daily lives. Word Count: 211

GALILEO Blog Prompt

In your own words, what is GALILEO? GALILEO stands for Georgia Library Learning Online and it is a public online library. They are full of articles, databases, maps, government documents, etc.
How does it organize information? GALILEO organizes information into databases which are then organized by disciplines.
What are databases? Databases are the way that online libraries organize the articles they house.
How do they organize data? Databases organize their articles by the articles discipline. Making the process of finding a desired article much easier. For example, if a person is looking for a book on cancer research. They would first search for material under the subject of medical. Then gorgeous narrow their search to articles about cancer and even more specifically cancer research.