I am Alexandra Plummer, a third year professional writing major in the periodical stream. I hope to also study communications sometime in the future. I am not exactly sure what I would like to do after graduating but I know it will involve reading and writing because those are my areas of strength. I enjoy reading anything from drama and crime fiction to reference books and newspaper articles and I also enjoy writing essays.
I’m interested in learning new ways of finding and organizing research as it is the foundation of any project or assignment at school and occasionally at work. I hope this course will improve my research gathering skills and suggest better methods of arranging the research. In doing so I hope the process of completing research-extensive assignments and projects will become easier for me as well.
Research I collect on a regular basis usually involves searching for media reports, definitions of words, historical events and well-known people. I realize that on a daily basis I do most of my research on the internet, however, when it comes to academic research I find that the library has better resources like reference books, novels and research texts. In general, some of my favourite research tools are the York online library catalogue and JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/), an online database for scholarly journals.
As far as information management, I have never used Zotero or RefWorks. I have always found it easier to record all of my reference information without using software but, as I take on different research assignments in the future I may consider using them. Having the opportunity to use software and research tools that I have never used before is exciting. For this reason, I look forward to the upcoming podcast assignment.
I have no experience with either radio or podcasting but I have completed various voice recording projects in elementary school and high school which I enjoyed. For this assignment the topics I have considered so far are “Grammar Girl”, “Lexicon Valley” and “Spark”. Grammar Girl and Lexicon Valley caught my attention because I enjoy learning about grammar and language usage rules so I thought it would be interesting to explain them in my podcast, creatively. I also think it’s easier to explain topics you are passionate about which I can use to my benefit. “Spark” also interested me because researching technological innovations could be a really fascinating topic for the audience of my podcast, especially in light of the countless, bizarre innovations that exist.
It’s always fun taking part in creative projects like this; I look forward to all of the research skills I will learn in this course and can’t wait to begin the podcast assignment!
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