Week 6 Ass 2: Academic Integrity

This week's subject was academic integrity. I think that this is a subject that I have a lot of experience with, and most of the readings and preparations were actually fairly familiar ground for me. My entire college career has emphasized the importance of sourcing, averting plagiarism, and ethical use of information, and this week's topics were no different.

As someone who has been plagiarized by other students, I often consider how information is being used in my various papers and reports. Thankfully, we have so many tools available in order to ensure that credit is given properly and appropriately. Informing readers and peers has a lot of rules and conventions, but they are meant to help things be clearer and consistent, rather than more complicated.

Even in this age of free information and anonymous accomplishments, I think it is important to give credit where it's due. As this week's lecture pointed out, even with something like a Creative Commons license, credit is still an important part of academic protocol, and for good reason.

Week 5 Assignment 2: Guided Search Ass

For the assignment this week, I did a guided search assignment, and ended up annotating an  article about different teaching strategies , and how they relate to children with special needs.

One of the new ideas that this article introduced me to was the importance of diagnosis. While having full information is of course important to teaching, it is easy to forget that often teachers need to keep an eye out for indicators; not all students/parents are perfectly informed.

While I originally made my question a bit vaguer because of the greater number of school age over preschool information, this article had some interesting information about toddlers/infants. I think I'd still like to focus on preschool, but it did remind me of some scope I had not quite considered before.

Several of the references in the article related to curriculum and teaching plans. While some of them appear to be very technical, I will have to give them a more thorough look as our assignments continue.

Overall, this week was a lot more productive than the previous ones. Using the subject specific databases made it much easier to find relevant information, and the frustration of some of my previous searches was noticeably missing. Hopefully this trend continues.

Week 4 Assignment 2: Research knowledge

This week we researched scholarly journals. The goal was to locate journals that related to our topic and annotate them/review them.

I think that this week's research finally convinced me that my original plan for a research topic was too narrow. As my assignments have noted, one of the most consistent obstacles/frustrations to finding information was the amount of it available on my topic.

The main difference this week was that  I started with very broad/few terms and slowly added more. In past weeks I tended to start with a lot of terms and narrow it after the fact, which didn't always have optimal results.








As I continue to research, I'm hoping that I will discover some thing related to my original topic that are still useful. While it is a bit annoying to have to change one's plans, the amount of research I've been seeing so far doesn't leave me much choice.

Week 3, Assignment 2: Blog Post

For my book and assignment this week, I chose No Limits to Literacy for Preschool English Learners by
T.A. Roberts. It covers teaching strategies and learning differences related to dual language/English as a Second Language learners. It provided some new information about the interplay and similarities between native English speakers and ESL students, which is relevant to my research topic.

The main strategy that helped most was the importance of the Subject v. Text selections and the importance of search terms. I suppose that these aren't really new strategies or lessons for me, but their importance is something it is easy to forget.

The main frustration was the lack of content concerning my original topic. I had wanted to tie my research into different income levels, but there was nothing available along those lines. As i continue to research my topic, I am hoping that something related to that will still appear, even though it is now clear that there is not enough info to integrate that fully into my topic.

Week 2, Assignment 2; Evaluating Research

For my research this week I studied preschool teaching strategies, a topic which I am certainly familiar with. I wanted to research a topic that I was familiar with, but also don't have as much experience with the most recent research on (since coursework is often a bit behind the latest research). What I learned was that, despite the gaps between some of my coursework and the most recent research, the techniques and skills I was taught are still fairly up-to-date. Of course, the research I chose was not brand-new, but given the pace of research in the field, I do not think that is too big of a detriment to my research.

When it came to the actual search, this is the first time I used Google's advanced search function. The domain limiter was an interesting tool that I wasn't aware of. I have used EBSCOhost many times before, though, so that was not a new experience. As far as evaluations go, the CRAAP system was intuitive enough, and applying it to my sources was a fairly simple process.

After this week's research, I think that I may want to focus my topic on how teaching strategies are used, possibly with dual-language learners (a different course I am taking) or in different income areas (a topic that comes up a lot in my field)

Week 1, Assignment 2; Introductory blog post

Hello, and welcome to the blog. This is the research blog for Spencer Lipori, for the LBSU 302 course at Brandman University.

I am an ECED major. I have an Associates of Science in the field from Monterey Peninsula Community College. This is my second trimester at Brandman, working towards my Bachelors in the field. I attempted to enter the job market after getting my Associates, but there was a very minimal amount of work available. I hope to become a preschool teacher working at a center, and all the professional I know say that getting a Bachelors will make that goal much easier. Hopefully after spending some time working in the field and decreasing my student debts, I can start work on my Masters, but that is a ways off yet.

In my years as a student, both in college and before, I have had to assemble many research papers and bibliographies. I like to think of myself as a competent individual when it comes to processing and searching for information. Things like Standard one; "The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed." are things that are crucial for writing papers in a timely and readable way. This is true of all the standards, of course, but this (and to a slightly lesser extent Standards four and five) are the ones that I feel most familiar with after writing so many papers.

When it comes to improvement, I think that time management is often a weakness of mine. This most closely relates to Standard two; "The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently." Using one's time well is not merely a matter of doing things quickly nor of doing them slowly, but of efficiency, and this standard best relates to that weakness of mine.

Here's hoping that every member of this course will learn something from it, and I wish everyone luck when it comes to the coursework.