Thursday, April 11, 2013

Prezi


I have never used anything like these websites before so I felt very out of my comfort zone when I first started experimenting with them. The two I tried were Prezi and Weebly which are both very new to me. Both are very interesting sites with a great deal of cool tools that people can use in order to create presentations but I had not a clue as to what I was doing. I wasn’t a fan of how all our projects and what not would be made public. I decided to go with Prezi just because I had seen it used before and it really can create some great projects but it took me quite a while to figure out what to do. I decided not to use Weebly or some of the other sites because it was more like creating a website and I feel more comfortable with Powerpoints or anything along the lines of that.
I believe I am either going to stick with Prezi and just watch a lot of tutorials to attempt to figure it out or just go the old fashioned route and use Powerpoint to create my presentation. 

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

plagiarism

The concept of plagiarism has changed so much now that the internet is so readily available to anyone and everyone. An excellent point was made in the first article that because libraries aren't used as much anymore, the idea of physically holding another person's piece of work has greatly diminished.
“Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.” (Ms. Brookover)
It has become so hard to discern what should be cited and what shouldn't now because this information is so available to us. The most difficult thing to deal with when writing is a paper is being sure to cite information even if you may think that the information that you have found would be considered common sense. If you took it from someone then it has to be cited no matter what it is.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

social media



1. I tried the majority of the different social media in order to find relevant information on my topic dealing with anesthesia. In attempt to keep it broad, I just simply searched anesthesia to see what would come up. Facebook and Twitter were not very successful. A great deal of posts came up relating to anesthesia, but nothing medically relevant. Reddit and Newsvine were a little more productive in my research, but still nothing that really sparked my interest in the way of research.
2. The Social Medias that I use on a regular basis are Facebook and Pinterest. Facebook is my original social media that I use to keep in touch with people who I do not see on a regular basis. It gives me a way of seeing how their lives are going that I normally wouldn’t get to see through just a phone call or text message. It is also a way of learning about new friends whom you do not know much about yet. Pinterest is my new favorite social media. It is a community of mainly woman where ideas, pictures, jokes, fashion, and more are shared through people’s “pinboards” on their personal profile.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

how's my research going??



1.  During my presearch I tried to really focus on things that would interest me but that I did not know a great deal of information about. I had always had an interest in event planning and anesthesia but when I started really diving into research, I found a great deal more credible sources for the topic of anesthesia. Quite a few showed up for event planning as well, but as I had assumed, they were not academic sources. Instead, event planning had more sources such as blogs and “how tos” which would not give me enough bulk for my project.
Once I chose to focus on anesthesia I knew immediately that I just wanted my research question to focus on an overall view of anesthesia because I knew nothing about it before beginning this project. I had undergone it a few times but I always wanted to know how it worked and what different forms there were. I am currently debating whether or not to narrow it down and how I would do that in a way that would still be able to fully explain anesthesia and how it works.  
2. I would still like to find out some history behind anesthesia and how it began so I am going to try this book:
The First Anesthetic; The Story of Crawford Long.
RD80 .L9 B6

research process



The research that I am doing now is definitely a lot more thorough than how I used to research. Before, I would just focus on using web sources and typically they were not very credible sources unless I was doing a research paper. I would normally just stick with quick info sources such as Wikipedia because I did not have such easy access to sources like the library. Now I am able to go onto the West Ga Library page and quickly access the West Ga catalog as well as the University System catalog.
The class has been pretty straight forward and easy to understand, but still providing useful information. The only things that I think that I am still having trouble with are the types of sources like primary, secondary, and tertiary. I have always had a hard time grasping these completely so I will need to spend some extra time reviewing them so that I will be prepared for our exam as well as the sources that we need for the research project.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

special collections



Learning about special collections today was very cool because I did not know about all of the rare documents that we have in our very own library. I had heard about the lower level in the library but I was not sure that students were allowed to access those sources. I am very excited about being able to apply things that are so rich in history to my studies. The easiest class I could probably apply the special collections to would be my US history class. This class is limited from 1865 to the present so now that we are coming up onto the 1900s I could more than likely gain some further knowledge from the special collections.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

information sources



The topic of anesthesia is one that has many information sources that I will be able to rely on to help me with research. I have a wide variety of resources ranging from books, articles, journals, as well as credible websites. The medical field is something that is constantly advancing which will only aid me in my research because most information will be up to date. People who may be interested in this project would be anyone in the medical field because anesthesia affects almost every part of medicine from dentistry to a woman in labor. All of the people in these lines of work would probably have an opinion on anesthesia. I assume the majority would be positive, but that will be the interesting information that I find out while further researching this topic.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

anesthesia


In class today, I learned the importance of narrowing down my research topic. I have officially decided to further research anesthesia but I was not sure which direction to take with it in order to concentrate my research. I believe the area that I would like to focus on would be the history of anesthesia and then dive into the different sections of the field ranging from local anesthesia to general. The words I have come up to better my research are anesthesia, local, general, epidural, history, among others. The sources on westga’s website also seem like they are going to help a great deal and I cannot wait to see what interesting information I will be able to find on there.