Cody's Blog 2/21

Thursday Ms. Lang opened class by discussing and going  more in depth about the media paper that is coming up as well as ironing out any details that we still may be having about the project. Furthermore, if anybody has any questions you can check out the requirements located here: https://campus.fsu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_6376613_1%26url%3D

Next came the Chapter Three presentation out of The Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger, from Nate, Garrison, Julian, and Sam. The group went on to discuss the two steps of "Getting into a Conversation with a Fact" and talked about the proper way to summarize as well as paraphrase. Next topic was plagiarism in general and also how to avoid it. The group told us that whether intentional, or not, that plagiarism is a serious offense and highly punishable. Also noted is that there is a fine line between paraphrasing and plagiarism to which the group gave us a helpful guideline that explained how we were to never use more than ten to twenty percent of quotations in your research paper because after that point it becomes less and less your own words and more of reproducing the words of other people. Their group also spoke to us about note taking, specifically double entry journal. All of these points where geared toward helping us with our research paper to make sure its done well and correctly.

Continuing their presentation, they directed us to use the computers at our desks and we practiced narrative note taking on the article "Baghdad Burning" by Riverbend. To do narrative note taking you are supposed to read the article for about three to five minutes and then start writing with the leading phrase being "What I understand this to be saying is.." and then continue to respond on the piece that you just read.

Finally to wrap up class we split into groups by counting off one, two, three, four,.. to read about "Level Up" exercises which are as follows:
1-Credibility check
2-Purpose
3-Context
4-Audience
5-Argument
Each group was passed out a packet about alien articles and we went through the steps to determine if they were sources that we would want to use for a paper. After each group had presented a little bit about the article that Ms. Lang had given to them, we went through as a class classifying them into the five different levels (noted above) and it was determined that if you "leveled up" to level four or five then it was an acceptable source to use in a research paper.

That pretty much wrapped up class and everybody's homework was to do some research and be prepared for class on Tuesday when the librarian is coming to class to show us how to use FSU's library system.

Hope everyone found this useful and informative!