The Education for Hire

On page 10 of the Martin 7 reading, there is a box that consist of the ideas for knowledge which are very accurate on how we as students have to go through during our education. But one point stands out very much to me and it is:

“Scholarly openness and cooperation take second place to
the academic rat race and power struggle which involves
toadying, backstabbing, aggrandisement of resources and
suppression of dissidents”.

This part of the reading is very interesting because this topic involves not only the use of power struggling but also the idea of taking ones work as themselves and whats makes another person do it. The thought of scholarly information is a “rat race” tells me that even in writing daily information to writing a book we as students aren’t the only ones that have to follow the rules of plagiarism and for a writer one must always be careful of how they store their findings due the the idea of “backstabbing” your work might be lost.

-Rchen

Blog Response2

Since the start of the well known existence of the “WEB”, the reading questions whether or not is it good for the economy and for the writers themselves and how it affects the world. As we know today, publishers have always been tough on what type of materials they want to help publish because of the word money. With the WEB now, it is easier for new writers and those who want to share their thoughts express themselves freely and easier since at this time, technology is booming worldwide.

Because of this existence, it is true the writing community might not like all these “unsupervised” expressions on thoughts yet without the WEB, we see that there was always a limit to where the writings of today and of the past ends up. One important thing in the WEB is just like what we use in class which is this very Blog. In this blog, we as students can share our thoughts and ideas throughout the world and read the thoughts of others. Of course there are problems with the WEB from glitches to bugs that exist daily, but this doesn’t mean that we will abandon every other ways to transfer out thoughts and creations. Just because of the WEB, we as humans aren’t going to give up writing on paper and pens so that in the future if anything happens to the WEB, we won’t depend fully on it. It is always better to have a extra “hard/physical” draft or everything we post online or on paper.

Subject headings:

Z- Books

ZA-Information Resources

-Richard Chen

Blog Response 1

At times learning how to read for research is something I find complicated because I can’t  determine what information is more important than the other. Chapter eight addressed this problem with solutions and introduced different techniques, of learning how to read for research. A technique I found quite interesting is-being “ruthless”- going straight to what you’re looking for and eliminating extraneous information. In books this can easily be done by looking at the title. And by looking at the subtitle we can determine the books main focus. The preface and forward  is a preview to the reader-on what the author will discuss in the upcoming chapters. The table of contents and index is where you evaluate and examine what you need and what to omit. Chapter eight also suggests to ask constant questions about the book such as “How does this author’s beliefs compare or contrast with other things you’ve been reading?”(pg140).  A question I always ask myself is “is the information 100% accurate?”  This is very important because sometimes even the most reliable sources seem to make mistakes. For example, my brother’s high school history textbook (we would define this as a scholarly text, the information in this textbook has been “supposedly” verified by 100 professionals in the field of history)  labeled two prime minister’s names wrong (they were switched). Now imagine thousands of students in America being educated through this same textbook. In the bigger picture, its always good to find more then one reliable source for accuracy.

Another helpful technique everyone should be practicing is note-taking. Note-taking can be difficult, especially when the lecturer or pages of an encyclopedia seem to go on forever. But it’s actually quite easy. One way to ace this is to create a simple outline and to make sure you answer your research question.

My question: How do we research information through encyclopedias, do we follow the same format as we would for a book?

-SSIRA9018