Lab Activity, Week Three

In this week's group lab the discussion was focused on defining our research methods/schedules and discussing search terms and methods that have worked well for us.  I will start out by first discussing the latter.


As far as searching for information, search terms that work well on the Google machine don't always work as well when searching academic databases.  On Google, while I can use broad or narrow search terms and yield plenty of results, the challenge then becomes determining whether or not the source is a good source or not.  When searching in the library databases, I found that coming up with search results that were relevant was much more difficult.  To aid in my searches, I used the "Ask a librarian" service to determine how to yield better search results.  One tip that the librarian gave me was to use "computer forensics" (with the quotes) AND "social media" (with quotes) to glue the terms together.  The librarian also taught me a new term in which I had not heard before which is "cybersluething."

When it comes to the schedule I plan to keep for my research, it will look similar to the standard plan that is laid out in the syllabus only instead of having weeks 3 - 4 for searching, weeks 4 - 5 for reading and evaluating, and weeks 6 - 8 for outlining and drafting, I will be using weeks 3 - 8 for all of the above.  My process is more of a continual process of researching, reading, evaluating, outlining and drafting.