Research Topic

Posted on March 20, 2012 by cruzanthonymark

Creating and catering a research topic from a list of what the class has discussed over the past few weeks is a daunting task and intimidating knowing that I will be stuck with what I pick for the rest of the semester. Regardless, the invasion of privacy in the modern world, specifically social networks and cellphone applications is a pretty interesting topic that I think will provide me pretty good arguments throughout my research paper. The writing is hard and ideas don’t materialize easily all the time but there isn’t anything that trial and error cannot fix.

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Notes from today, and reading/homework for Wednesday, March 21

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Anne Leonard

Concept Map for plagiarism

Today we discussed more research strategies and used bubbl.us to map concepts and identify questions and concepts related to your research questions. On Wednesday, we’ll discuss (and do) advanced internet searching, using some of the tools from last week: Boolean operators, nesting, truncation, and phrase searching. Please read Badke, chapter 6 (all) and Ch. 7 pp. 122-124 (in 3rd ed) or 155-157 (in 4th ed) and watch the Common Craft web search strategies video.

Your research topic proposal is due Wednesday at the beginning of class, either as a document attached to an email to me or on paper in class.

Slides from today are available here.

~Prof. Leonard

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Research Topic

Posted on March 19, 2012 by darren732

 

Not as easy as it sounds when you have to make it as narrow as possible. During this past week I have centered mine around piracy and copyright law. Yet it is a wide subject and filtering and changing the question down to something specific is like looking at a deck of cards and guessing which one is the queen of hearts. Still it indicates to me that this process is not something one pulls out of a hat. Careful thought and reason goes into choosing the path you will walk to answer the research question you ask.

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Research Topics

Posted on March 19, 2012 by mbottaro

I didn’t know it was going to be this hard to find an interesting research topic.  We have discussed so many different topics and yet it is still very difficult to choose.  I’ve decided to look back on every assignment we have had so far and see what I am most interested in writing about.  So with that said I’ve narrowed it down to two choices: the regulation of gatekeeping in digital media or when does research cross the line and be considered plagiarism?  From the first day we spoke about gatekeeping I took an interest to it.  It made me really wonder how things are monitored and allowed.  However, I have always been interested in plagiarism seeing as how one person thinks that their research isn’t violating any rules and yet their professor thinks otherwise.  So this decision may not be as difficult as it sounds, but it’s not easy.

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RESEARCH TOPIC MY “NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.”

Posted on March 19, 2012 by ragoo8111

Finding my research topic has ,I admit really been a challenge to me . I have been exposed to so much information lately. All of which has been equally beneficial to me. Badke offers me some sort of formula through this. But as much as I enjoy his anecdotal readings. I am still at a lost. He still is no GPS to me. So I guess I am on my own. Take for example, the topic that keeps reverberating in my head is “media bias.” I find it quite broad and what he might consider a “fuzzy question.”  I am at the crossroads, a junction with about twenty different options. In my attempt to follow his advice, I create ” How has media bias in the last decade , influenced popularity and frequency  on the World Wide Web?” See what I mean? The question is narrower, but where do I begin? Let alone, how do I fix it?  I applied some of Badke’s fixes as suggested in his Rubrics but I am still at a loss to my custom fix. Maybe I should chose another topic or still toy with it . There is a good fix in there some where, I will just have to do some more detective work. Maybe I should watch some “Cold Case Files,” re-runs on Netflix for inspiration….

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Research Development

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Suly Paredes

Coming up with a question for a research paper, became much harder than I beleived. Aside from picking a very broad topic, the main question I ask myself is, “how can I narrow down this topic?”. I tend to look for videos and books refering to different genres on my topic just to try and narrow it down. So far i came up with the affection on economic values and reality problem solving through video games. I know for a fact that doing research in video games will be interesting for me, but starting off is always the hard part.

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Research Journal Entry #1

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Ian Pei

For some reason, developing a research/essay proposal has always been difficult for me. From knowing what to say, how to say it, and making sure if it’s all relevant to my topic. Unfortunately, I’m still having some difficultly trying to word my information of Government’s involvement of personal privacy digitally today, and by non-digital means Pre-Revolutionary War and how they are similar though the time difference is nearly two and a half centuries. And i sometimes don’t know if it’s better to be more detailed or less at specific points in the proposal. I guess the best thing that has been helping me with my problem of syntax is typing what I think sounds right then revising it right after typing to make sure the sentences all flow together. Like they say, “If it doesn’t work the first time, try and try again.”

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Researching SOPA and Copyright Laws

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Liza

Having read Badke’s words on picking a research topic, choosing SOPA and copyright laws could be equated to shooting my own foot (sorry. I just finished watching the Season Finale of The Walking Dead), since SOPA is a fairly recent topic, so I can’t really expect to find much information from academic sources on it.

SOPA’s been around for a while now, though, so I might get lucky. And that’s only one of the problems I’ve encountered while working on my proposal. According to Badke, great research involves analyzing data and using it to solve a question about a topic. In addition, research is supposed to advance knowledge.

So what could I possibly add to what people already know about SOPA aside from the fact that it violates the First Amendment (specifically, freedom of speech) and that it’s a nightmare for many people who use and/or share copyrighted material on the Internet?

Badke’s advice on identifying controversies related to the topic of choice , along with thinking laterally – in other words, looking at SOPA from a different perspective, came in quite handy for me. Otherwise, I’d probably be forced to pick another topic or be stuck wondering what to write for my research proposal.

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Coming Up with a topic to Research

Posted on March 18, 2012 by itohanedoloyi

I wouldn’t say that writing the paper is the difficult part about this project, but instead, it is coming up with a topic that you won’t lose interest in. I seem to have a lot of ideas that could turn into research paper-worthy topics, but I’m often stuck in narrowing down those ideas so they’re aren’t too vague a topic. In terms of strategies, I’ve found that if you have a topic you feel confident enough to write about for 5-8 pages to enhance the context of that paper, you should generate ideas within the main idea that will help you produce a great paper. Also, researching more into your topic is key, so you can have an idea of what exactly is going into your paper, and that research could be used as an example to elaborate further on an idea.

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Research Topic

Posted on March 18, 2012 by egonzalez

While working on choosing a topic and developing a research question I find that a difficulty that I’m continuously having is that rather then come up with a question that my paper will answer, I’m coming up with thesis statements that my paper would back up. I’m teetering between two broad topics but haven’t yet zeroed in on what aspect I plan to focus on. The topics I had in mind are the lack of internet privacy users now deal with or the lack of e-books available on campus because of the ridiculous fees publishers want to charge.

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