Using google notebook for research

I’m working on a paper – Library as a place or service. Trying out google notebook to organize my research.

Sections:

• Paper basics
• Reading list
• Works Consulted – formatting as I go. Hoping this will help at the end.
• Notes and quotes for each consulted work worthy of noting
• Emerging outline

So far so good.

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My most referenced book

I absolutely abhor the fact that the book I pick up most often is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Why don’t I have this stuff memorized by now!?!

A Cog in the Cheating Wheel

The Shadow Scholar – written by Ed Dante, a shadowy name.This guy makes $66,000 to write student papers. Maybe I’m in the wrong field. What was rather ironic through the essay was that he could point out the inadequacies and lack of ethics in his clients, but didn’t mention his participation in the cheating process as cheating. He is providing a service. He is working.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

He does ask this and it’s a very good question:

Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

So how do they? Has education become such a big-business that we can let an utterly under-qualified student make it from admissions to graduation with no one noticing?

Appalling.

HT

How often do you keep . . .

journal articles that you’ve used in your research? How do you choose which ones to keep? And how do you organize them if you do keep any of them?

My first inclination is to just keep them all, but they are starting to take up quite a bit of room. I’m thinking I need to weed. The easiest weeding is to toss them all. It will take time to go through them.

New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar

Career Advice: Using Library Specialists Wisely – Inside Higher Ed

Career Advice: Using Library Specialists Wisely – Inside Higher Ed.

Wow! By strategically planning assignments, classes and working with the librarian for very specific library instruction and help, this instructor saw a rise in library materials quoted. Very good story of using a valuable resource (or resources in the library and librarian) appropriately.

The things I’ve learned so far in my reference course

General items:

• some information is just really hard to find.
• college libraries have some resources (like specialized databases) that are far superior to those found other types of libraries.
• google.com/scholar can be helpful.
• google.com/books can also be helpful.
• there are encyclopedias or dictionaries for more topics that I probably even know exist.
• some things are bears to cite.
• sometimes you have to break down and ask someone else for help.

Specific items:

• Vita Sackville-West, her husband and children.
• The book that ran for the most weeks on the NYT bestseller’s list.
• There is a very nicely annotated list of all the Coretta Scott King award winners from the time of it’s inception to present.
• The advantages and disadvantages of English as the official language of the USA.
• There are other poems that begin with “I wandered lonely as a cloud” than the one I learned in middle school.
• O’Henry worked under an unusual set of circumstances writing “The Gift of the Magi.”
• Libby Gelman-Waxner
• Ockham’s Razor
• The particulars of the “Old Deluder Satan Act.”
• There are formulas for wind chill and the heat index that made me as a math teacher shudder.
• Camille St. Saens and some of his students
• The chemical properties of caffeine.
• “Bien amicalement”
• Derivations of “momick”
• Once-removed as it pertains to kin.
• Marriages of first cousins and double first cousins.
• North Carolina has a publication that tells all the local and state election results
• NC and VA share many things
• GNP and GDP
• The ALA puts out an annual publication that you can find anything and everything about current libraries. Need a name and address?
• Dame of Sark
• Mary Renault
• Trouser roles, mezzo-sopranos, Americans that sing them.
• Howard Allen O’Brien
• counties surrounding Pitt county.
• Novels set in the Urals.
• ND longitude and latitude.
• Where to purchase wall mounted maps.
• What the first publication of a law is called.
• History of the census.
• SuDocs classification.
• Where to find biographies of past and present congressional members.

Comparison of 3 Search Engines

Search topic: Interactive weather activities to use in the classroom

Compared top page of returned sites for each search engine and search

Terms & Analysis	Google Search	Yahoo Search	Exalead
weather interactive activities For this search, Google provided the best sites in the first few results. However, Yahoo also had some very good sites to use. Both had more useable sites on the first page. Exalead’s first link was about the only useable one.	Google returned 10 sites and was 100% weather related. Some returns were lessons, some returns were games. One site offered weather lesson power points.	10 sites were returned on Yahoo. 10 seems to be the norm. All sites were science related. One was the local interactive map for weather.com. Not what I had in mind, but still useable and did get me thinking about ways it could be effectively used.	10 sites returned on Exalead. Most were vacation packages to sunny places. One looked really promising with an ESL connection, but the link was broken. Scholastic.com’s weather page was mentioned though and it’s a good one but was also mentioned on Yahoo and Google.
weather interactive activities students Adding the word studentsdidn’t change things much on Yahoo or Google, but it did appear to help some on Exalead – at first glance. Once I got into the sites though, I found out that it really didn’t help all that much.	All sites related in some fashion. One was a page of interactive links for teachers covering all subject areas. Science was included, but only one link pertained to weather.	All the sites did have something on them that could be used for weather. Most were weather related. There were some lesson sites, and one was a technology in science site.	Two of the sites got a “don’t open – malware” warning from my browser. One was a newspaper article about a classroom doing science. One was a course list for a uni. One was an ad for a book to get ready for kindergarten. One was a travel brochure. That left four sites to work with. The Sherman School district page had some good links on it.
weather online interactive activities students Google and Yahoo returned more useable sites again.	All sites looked good at first glance. One was a premium site. One was the national science standards that included weather. They did have a popup to let a visitor know that the standards were not current. Another page I hadn’t seen anywhere else had weather activities across the elementary grade levels from Utah’s Educational Project.	All sites had something useable on them. Many sites were repeats of above searches. Most of them were weather specific. A couple of the sites were science specific with weather sites and/or activities listed.	This page was almost 100% what I was looking for  – again at first glance. One page got the malware warning. One page was a broken link. Some of the pages were lessons. There were two working ESL-connection pages, but they were a little skimpy on information. One page offered premium content subscription before I could get to the free stuff.

I looked for interactive science activities focused on weather. I planned to begin with broader terms and move to more specific terms for comparison of not only the search engines but also to compare the returns within each search engine.  Of the three search engines, Google and Yahoo gave consistently comparable results. Each returned ten sites that were on topic for the most part. Exalead was disappointing. I had not heard of it before but used it because it was mentioned in the “Recommended Search Engines” article from Berkeley. While the returns looked alright on the more specific searches, there were just too many broken links and malware warnings.  The sites returned within each search engine were better as the search terms became more specific. However, there were sites listed in Google and Yahoo in the broader searches that were on topic and appropriate for what I was looking for that were not returned on the top page of the more specific searches.  I normally use Google for searching, but Yahoo provided some sites not returned on Google and vice versa. I think using the two search engines together with the same search terms could be very helpful.