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Week 13: Finders, keepers.

After reading that article it had me thinking about how we store information these days, and it had me analyzing how I do it myself. Aside from E-mails, I keep my personal information pretty organized. This article brought up a lot of thoughts in my head however, about how we can simplify our lives in many ways. We live in a day and age where we don’t necessarily need to save information that we receive online, because we can just google it or access it later. I am way more a fan of discarding information versus keeping it. Too much information can cause clutter and stress and don’t want either one of those things. It is pretty easy to stay organized with personal information using various folders on your computer. That is one area of my life that I feel very organized in. 

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Copyright

Honestly, when I think about copyright issues with pictures I have never really thought it was that big of a deal. Unless the photographer clearly states that they want that credit, but honestly if you are posting something on the internet or on different social media websites you have to know that your work might not always get credited to you. 

 Today with all of the different social media sites out there every user is a publisher of sorts and is probably not aware of the copyright laws. It is really easy to post/share photos and a lot of the images shown were just borrowed from websites.  Some original authors will probably want their material posted and shared with others, because it gets their work out there and exposure is huge in that field. I think the big issue here is that most people aren’t really aware of the copyright laws, and the social media websites that we use aren’t very clear either. All of that being said, I do think that credit should be given where credit is due.

[miward10]

Online Filters/Biased Research

Before I had watched the ted talk on online filters, I felt very comfortable using the internet and confident that it was a fairly good tool to use. After watching this ted talk, my brain instantly started racing through all the scenarios that google could be doing with just my search history. I couldn’t believe that even when you are not online, google is running through 57 different tests to see what type of person you are, and what type of personality you have shown through your search engine. It has definitely changed my perspective and I am starting to believe that the internet is a bad thing. One thing I have always feared is our world turning to technology too much, and eventually someday our earth would be ran by robots and computers instead of humans like it was intended to be. After watching this, that fear of mine is becoming closer and closer to real life than I ever thought it would be. I completely disagree with what websites like google and Facebook are doing to “help” our searching of the web.

I believe that in today’s age, it can be very difficult to find research that isn’t biased. Every show you put on television has some kind of bias in it, most posts on the internet are bias towards one side or the other. It can be very difficult to find research without the bias, and one way I would approach this is by researching both sides of the bias and writing about the pros and cons of each side.

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Ethical Citation

I found that article to be very informative. It was written well and had some really great points. One thing I always have to remind myself about when I am writing a research paper, is plagiarism. If you aren’t staying organized in your research it can be really easy to have an idea written down, and not remembering if that was information you had before you started doing research, or something you learned after. 

I sometimes have a hard time differentiating between what is common knowledge, and what you need to back up with research/stats, because a lot of the areas that i tend to focus on in my research papers overlap each other. That is where it can get dangerous. Always back it up with citations and giving credit where credit is due. I have found it very helpful to keep organized in the beginning of my research and write down all of my sources right away. Working on your reference page as you go saves you a lot of headache and a lot of time instead of waiting until you are done with your paper. 

I did’t realize plagiarism was such a problem in college until one of my professors told some stories about what some of her students have done. She decided to let students submit their paper on D2l through a different portal first, that would check to see if their was plagiarism within the paper. That gave you the opportunity to re-do your paper if need be. 

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Online-Offline

For one of my education classes that I took a couple of semesters ago, we spent a lot of time talking about Cyberbullying. We watched numerous videos that interviewed kids that had been cyberbulied and it really opened my eyes to how big of an issue this is. Technology has changed in a lot of ways the way we interact with people. It is so easy to text, call, or whatever is convenient for you instead of directly interacting with that person. That is convenient, but also can be a problem when we are talking about this subject. Social media is HUGE in kids’ life. It is a measure of popularity and status. I volunteer as a mentor in town and work with high-schoolers and it is amazing to me how much they care about how many “likes” they get on a photo, or how many followers they have. So getting publicly dissed on a site can be the biggest blow to ones confidence. I definitely think you act differently online vs. offline. It is so much easier to sit in front of a computer screen and post what you are thinking/feeling than it is face to face with someone. That can be a good and a bad thing. You have a lot more time to think about what you want to say/ or what you are feeling when you are online, versus when you are face to face you can’t have awkward silence, you have to have a response immediately. I think in a way it is making it harder for people to interact socially face to face, because we don’t practice it as much.

I really enjoyed reading that second article. It was probably the best that I have read when talking about this subject. Social media is a reality now. I have a couple friends who don’t have a facebook, or an instagram, and honestly they miss out on a lot. There is this kind of disconnect unfortunately. There have been many times when I have wanted to delete my social media accounts, but honestly I love knowing what my friends are doing, and getting to see the pictures they post. I feel closer to them, and I feel like I know them on a deeper level, because I see who they are “online vs. offline. I think the difficult part is balancing the amount of time you spend online, which the article did a good job of explaining. 

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Ethical Pitfalls

My view on citations is probably similar to many students, and that is how pointless citations seem to be for how hard they are to create. It makes it very difficult for a student to want to create citations for a paper or project when the steps and time it takes to create the citation is very long and difficult, mostly when there’s nothing to show why you had to do the citation except for the teacher instructing you too. One thing about citations that also make them very difficult is how easy it can be to mess up a citation and have it be considered plagiarism because you misspelled an author’s name or got the page number wrong. I wish it was easier to create citations for a paper, or I would have learned about them more in high school because it was a big learning curve for me when coming to Montana State University.

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Citation Nightmare

Citations are the number one problem that I have with writing research papers. I dread them every time. I related to that article on so many levels, especially when it comes to scrambling at the last minute to get all of my references together. I usually try and leave all of my tabs open too, so that I can remember where I got my information, or sometimes I will save the article as a file in my computer and keep track of the name of it so that I can go and find it later. I have never used hyperlinks, but it is clearly something that I should do in order to save a lot of headache. I will have to do some research on how to use those properly, because it seems like an easy way to stay organized and could really help me improve on my research papers as a whole. 

Citations are important on many levels, for yourself and also your professor. When you are working on your reference page and keeping track of your citations, it requires you to seek out whether or not the information is applicable and reliable to your area of study. It is important for your professors so that they can tell whether or not you are plagiarizing, and also whether or not you know how to seek out reliable information. 

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Week 5- Different Types of Sources.

Throughout my collegiate career I have encountered and used all of the different types of sources. I am a senior this year, so I have had to write all sorts of papers, and while doing that was forced in a way to use various sources.

I have had to interview people for papers and that would count as a primary source. I use secondary sources the most while doing research. I would say I use secondary sources weekly, and those are the most helpful to me when it comes to writing papers. 

Tertiary sources I don't use as often, but when I was in various psychology classes, my textbooks were very helpful for papers, because I could just quote a section in the book since I knew it was a reliable source.