Confused And Lost

Let me start off by saying I've been confused about the schedule from our syllabus since the first week when we changed the topic from "Reflection on Ball Point, Chapters 1& 2" to the search for Jill D. Jenson's "It's the Information Age, So Where's the Information? Why Our Students Can't Find It and What We Can Do to Help". I'm used to getting an updated schedule when it changes since almost all of my prior classes here at Ball State refer me back to the syllabus if I had a question about the schedule. With this in mind my journal entries are behind and I'm not really sure what is due when so I will just keep posting entries in the order they are in my current syllabus.

Chapter five was rather short and I felt that most of the methods of research discussed were not methods I would ever use. With the type of writing I expect to do in the future I feel I will be using library resources most often. The idea of doing interviews doesn't interest me much probably because I don't like questioning people, I'd rather just have a conversation and if any questions arise it feels more comfortable to me. The use of surveys is interesting but I've always felt it was to easy for the surveyor to skew the questions to get the results they are looking for instead of a random sample.

Chapter eight was far more interesting with it's discussion of plagiarism and I didn't realize until reading that there was a difference between blatant plagiarism and careless plagiarism. I always thought plagiarism was always the same thing, presenting somebody elses work as your own without giving any credit. The section on copyrights and copyright laws was rather vague and they only touched on the basics, it is a good idea to do some deeper research when dealing with copyright material instead of relying on the one page of text in our book.