It seems that Anne (that's my new daughter born on Thursday, Sep 21) is a natural researcher. She understands that to conduct research, she needs to collect data and interpret it. Not too many hours outside the womb, she cried somewhat loudly and persistently, "Waaaaah!!" (Translation: I have some tactile data indicating that my diaper is wet). "What does that mean?" I asked. She spoke with another cry, "Waah, Waaaah!!" (Translation: My interpretation of these data is that the diaper should be changed.) The interpretation seemed reasonable, so I changed her diaper.

Previously, I emailed to everyone a list of Bloglines addresses to subscribe to. As a reminder for how this works, here are some guidelines for subscribing and reading.

To subscribe:

1. Click on "Add" under "My Feeds" (which is to the left of "My Blog" and "Clippings")
2. After the right windown changes, put your classmate's address (one at a time) in the box that says "Blog or Feed URL" and click on "Subscribe".
3. Another window comes up. Click on "Subscribe" at the bottom. (You can also click on the "Private" button next to "Access."

You should now be able to see the subscription in the left window. To read your subscriptions, do the following:

1. Click on either "Updated Feeds" or "Show All." ("Updated Feeds" have only those subscriptions who have posts that you haven't read yet.)
2. Click on any of the "feeds" and in the right window, you can see what they have posted.
3. If you see nothing, look to the right of the sentence that says, "Display items within the last," and you'll see a button saying "All items." (You can click on this button to change it to just items in the last month, week, etc.) Click on the button to the right, saying "Display."

You should now be able to read what your classmate (or someone else) has posted.

Citation will be used as a combination note-taking tool and also research tool in which you put all your sources (all the information on them including abstract, quotations, and comments). You should make 3 or more entries in a week in Citation.

For Bloglines, you will take your favorite entry in Citation (perhaps it will be the most useful entry to you that week or for some other reason) and post it to Bloglines. This way, other students can see what you are doing and thinking in your writing and in your research.

So, each week, you should have 3 entries in Citation, and one of those should be posted to Bloglines each week.

For your research paper, you need to find a problem or question in your major that you would like to answer. It cannot be simply a question like, How much money do people in my field make? This sort of question can be answered by simply collecting information without interpreting the information. Instead, the question or problem requires not only collecting data but also interpreting that data. T

For instance, if you collected data on salaries for accountants across the U.S., you would simply report what the salaries were. There's no interpretation here. But suppose you noticed that the salaries varied according to region (or perhaps according to city within one state), then one question might be, Why do accountants in different regions receive different salaries? Then you would need to collect data that might answer that question. This data would probably be different from the earlier data because the first set of data answers the question, "How much?" while the second set of data will need to answer the question, "Why do the salaries vary?"

As our book notes, "Research is not mere information gathering" (p. 1), even if you bring together information that has not been brought together before and rearrange in a new way. You can bring together data and different analyses of that data with respect to a problem, but it's still not research. Research must have data that you interpret; that is, you--not someone else--must analyze data and explain how it answers a particular question.

Here's one more example of summarizing an article in a newspaper:

Tara Bahrampour and Lori Aratani's article "Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools" (Washington Post) write about schools "warning students [and parents] that their online activities may affect not only their safety, but also their academic and professional lives" and also even taking disciplinary action against students, including suspension and expulsion. The author quotes teenagers and parents about the youngsters' writing on the Internet.

As the article noted, teenagers have always kept diaries in which they wrote their inner thoughts, including derogatory and discrminatory comments. But now these thoughts are in the open for millions of people to read. Not too long ago, schools had the authority of parents, but no longer today. Although schools can control use of school-owed computers and resources, computers at home are private property. How schools will tackle comments by students that target others at the school is still uncertain. This topic is a new arena in which old theories of psychology and sociological can be tested.

In Citation, when you summarize an article in the abstract or comment on it in a note, all the information about the author and source is already there, it's not necessary to put that information into your abstract or comments. When posting a summary online, however, you will need to include that information, and if the information was found online (not including those in the library's database), then there should be a link to it. Here's an example for an article about text-messaging in the NY Times.

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Almost everyone under the age of 20 text-message. Why? According to Charles McGrath in his article "The Pleasures of the Text" (The New York Times), text-messaging is

"a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance."

Besides writing about the why of text-messaging, McGrath's article covers the nature of text-messaging, giving examples of how users achieve efficiency and style, and writes about its greater use outside of the U.S.

McGrath's main claim about avoiding intimacy and substance is interesting. Is this a byproduct or a subconscious desire? Is it even an accurate description? I can imagine that when one is constantly text-messaging, not much is new, and so not much is of substance. Actually, when I ask my 6-year-old son what he did in school today, he almost always says, "I don't know." Is he avoiding intimacy? Certainly not when he climbs all over me, trying to get my attention. Similary, when someone asks me what is new, I generally respond, "Not much." Rather than an avoidance of intimacy, I imagine it's simply the reality of much being the same. Yet people ask the same questions every day as a matter of keeping social contact. It's not clear why text-messaging should be considered different from normal conversations.

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Note that in this example, the first part is summary without any of my opinion about the article. The second part is my thoughts, my opinion, my response to the article.

Most writing in the university is an argument. That is, it attempts to persuade others about something, whether it's as complex as the Iraq war or as common as which brand of clothes to buy. The difference between argument and research is that research is an argument that includes collecting data concerning a question or problem, interpreting the data, and generating theories, or arguments about the question/problem, in a systematic manner.

Communication can be broken down into the two categories of informing and arguing. Generally speaking, informing is communicating about something that there is no disagreement on, while argument is an attempt to persuade someone to take some action or to believe something. For instance, giving a classmate the address to the class home page would be informing, while telling a classmate that the design of one home page was better than another would be the beginning of an argument, an attempt to persuade the classmate. It's the beginning because to be an argument, one needs not only the claim concerning the homepages but also the reasoning for the evaluation of the homepages.

In using Citation to create a bibliography, it's important that you first open MS Word and through MS Word open Citation. Here are the specific details:

1. Open MS Word (or Wordperfect).
2. On the menubar under "Tools", click on Citation 9 to open it.
3. Open the datafile (under File) that you wish to use.
4. In Citation, under Generate, click on Bibliography from Datafile.
5. Put check marks in Alphabetize and Include Abstracts.
6. Find the style you want. (If you don't know, just take the first one.)
7. Click on OK.

This will put the bibliography into your MS Word document, which you can then print out either at home or at school, or email as an attachment.

Today in both of my classes, we continued to get our blogs and RSS feeds ready on Bloglines. It seems that when we set up our blogs, we have to give it a title. Otherwise, we continue to get a message to set up our "clip blog." I've inputted all of the blog addresses so far and can read what the students are writing.

Citation is our bibliography and note-taking application. It's pretty easy to input the information. Plus there's a "tutor" to follow and remind us how to do it. Perhaps the difficult part will be to download and install the program. It's a large program and takes some time to download. The second difficult part will be to print out the bibliography and notes. We need access to a computer that has the program, so it has to be done either on our own computer or on one of the computers in CAS 304 or 306. Probably these will have some open times, especially Monday and Wednesday during college hour (3:30-5:00 pm). But there may be other times, too. One good thing about Citation is that I can keep all of my notes in it and search for them when I need to re-read them.

This is the last day that we take the entire class for these electronic tools. If we have questions, we need to ask our classmates or the teacher (either by email or in his office). Next week, we start reading our textbooks and begin our path to better writing.