Learning to Find and Use Information Effectively

...

Activity 4 – Evaluating and Synthesizing

Your thoughts in sorting through information and how it was done in the cell phone case.

My thought about sorting through information is that it can be difficult to sort through all the information on the internet. When you type something into google you get over a million results for that topic. Narrowing them down can be hard if you don’t know the steps needed to find the right sources. I think it is important to sort through information to be able to find effective and reliable sources for your topic. My process in finding the right sources was to find a reliable website or newspaper company and then find a creditable author of that article. By doing this, it made it easier for me to find the material I needed. What I learned about my scenario is that there are a lot of sources that believe that what kids watch on TV effects their behavior. The general believe is that kids who watch violent shows tend to have a more aggressive approach to things. Their behavior starts to change for the worse. Research has been done about this topic and from the sources I read through it has a negative effect on children. Most children have a hard time differentiating between what is real and what is make believe on the television and video games. Also a creditable source I found was published by the American Psychological Association about this topic. In this article it divides the harmful effect that violent television has on children into three categories. Those three primary categories are the learning of aggressive attitudes, desensitization (increased callousness towards victims of violence), and increased fear of being victimized by violence. All of the questions I had about my scenario have been answered by the sources I found. The main questions I had before doing the research was why are parents allowing this and what can they do to stop this from happening. The sources answered my questions by giving me detailed steps that parents can do to limit their children’s exposer to violent games and television. I think that there may be conflict over values with the information. I believe that each parent values different things and may have different views about their children watching and playing violent materials. I also believe that I found enough information to make an informed decision that a majority of children exposed to violent behave have either child anxiety or aggressive behavior. The cell phone used effective strategy to come up with a result to the researcher’s questions. She went and found a credible US government website by the National Institutes of Health. There she found information about the exposure of radiation though cell phones, but she didn’t find the effects of long term exposure to radiation. The researcher then went to look through other sources to have her questions answered. She came across an article by Dr. Aurelie Laurence. Before reading the article she looked up this person and found information to validate their credibility. I thought her process was effective in evaluating her sources. She was able to conclude that Bluetooth may become more important to companies and to people’s health. The researcher also used Wikipedia as a resort to find information about her topic. Wikipedia can be effective and can lead you to effective websites on the reference page at the end.

Activity 5 – Seek More Information

Your thoughts on looking for more information and the cell phone case to this point.

I believe that doing more searching, reading, and sorting is important to a person’s success. You need to be able to compare material to each other in order to get the most effective material you can. I also want to find at least five reliable sources to get my information from when I am searching for a topic. Doing more searching for a particular subject can never be a bad thing in my opinion as long as they are creditable sources. After searching for the creditable sources, you want to read through all the material in the article. You want to find information that supports the topic you are talking about. Reading thru new material allows you to find new points to talk about. It can also help answer some of the questions you had about a specific scenario. Reading the material you can sometimes determine if the author is being bias with the material or is he using facts to make an opinion. After doing those two steps it is important to sort the information that you have found. You want to sort and present the material in an effective way. You want to go into detail and stay on the current issue you are talking about. When you finish talking about that issue, you want to make a smooth transition into the next article or material that supports your findings. I believe that I was successful in finding new material. When searching for new material I went to the LSU databases and used the Academic Search Complete and the Google Scholar search engine. In the search engines, I was able to find many reliable sources of information such as scholarly (peer reviewed journals), magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. This new information helped my understanding of the effects that violent television and games has on children’s behavior. I was able to find experimental studies on this topic. I was able to find how boys and girls react differently to violent games and television. For girls who were exposed to violent games, their condition afterword’s was not related to aggression. The girls didn’t have a dramatic change in their behavior. For guys in the experiment it was a different story. The guys had a more aggressive behavior after watching violent television and playing violent games. Their real life aggression during recess at school was more obvious. That study had also concluded that violent video games lead to more aggressive behavior in boys then watching violent television. When comparing my initial information with this information, I can see that this information is more detailed in their article. I was able to find articles that give me exact studies that had been done and the percentages of boys and girls who are affected by violent material. I found that I was able to find more effective information using the library search versus using the internet. The main difference was that for the library databases I was able to see a reference page for those articles. The reference page allowed me to go back and see where the information and surveys came from. The internet results didn’t have that so I had to decide whether or not the articles were being bias with their opinions. I had searched the internet and library databases the same way using the same keywords and phrase.