Reading chapter 1 of Badke’s book my impressions of it is it puts up a solid effort in engaging you for some boring old school text book. The author clearly has a sense of humor which finds its way into his writing. I never thought I could laugh reading a book on effective ways of studying. The information present in chapter 1 and the examples made to explain them were once again engaging. Badke goes on about how a traditional society handles information, to the invention of the printing press and World Wide Web and what changes they brought to the game. Terms such as “gatekeeping” which was a consequence of the printing press was a fairly new term to me that easily describes something I already knew. He also goes into ebooks and how they shook up the industry of print and how they changed the way we get our information and who publishes this information. Chapter 1 over all was a great way to introduce the book.
Initially I thought our professor made a typo; why in the world would she ask us to read chapter 1 then jump ALL THE WAY to chapter 8? Surely there must a method to her madness. I was right. Each so called chapter pretty much stands on its own. I figure I can use this book to suit a very specific need in studying different kinds of materials. This chapter goes on about connoisseur and glutton reading, interesting terms to describe two kinds of readers. A reader who is a “mindless sponge” reading for entertainment is classified as the glutton reader and the reader who is ruthless in only using the information who needs is the connoisseur. He also explains in this chapter why plagiarism is a serious offense and 5 steps to zero in on the content you need from a book. I never actually considered using a books index to help me research and a feel like a fool for not doing so before. Promptly taking his advice a simply read all the study questions at the end of the chapter to do this homework assignment as they basically clued me on to what to look out for and what to retain.
