Final Exam Blog Post

1.   Are e-textbooks as or more beneficial than regular physical textbooks for students?Keywords: electronic textbook, students, paper textbooks, benefits

2.   E*textbooks AND students AND textbooks AND benefits

As I was typing the search terms into the Academic Search Premier search boxes, I though that using the phrase "electronic textbook" might limit out the types of articles that I was looking for. e-books/e-textbooks has become a more common way of referring to electronic books or textbooks. I may have been able to leave the search term student out, but I did not and I got the results that I wanted so I didn't feel the need to go back and re-search for it without that term.

George Van Horn, et al. "Trading Textbook For Technology." Phi Delta Kappan 92.7 (2011): 46-50. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Mar. 2013.

3.   Authority: All four authors have education background and credentials that make me think that they are very qualified to write this article. Phi Delta Kappa also called The Professional  Association in Education is a reputable organization that publishes journal articles related to education. This is specifically from their publication the Phi Delta Kappan, a journal for the latest research on standards and accountability in education. I feel like the publishers of Phi Delta Kappan would definitely do their research and only ask reputable educators to collaborate on articles that they put in their journal.

Sources: The articles contains several reputable sources in it's reference section .

Purpose: The purpose of the articles seems to be to tell others about the Indiana school district trying digital textbooks and that advantages that they found from using them.

Evenness: The articles is not very even. It focuses on the advantages of digital textbooks but fails to even mention disadvantages. I would still use this source for my paper, but I would make sure that other articles I use talked about disadvantages of using digital textbooks.

Coverage: The entire article focuses on the advantages of trading textbooks for technology. It covers that advantages fairly well in its six pages, but I will need to find at least one more source that also talks about some of the disadvantages of trading textbooks for technology.

Timeliness: The articles was published about a two years ago, however I believe that the Indiana school district's experience with digital textbook is still relevant after only two years

4.   That article starts by introducing a fictional 10th grader, Alexis. She is an average 10th grader, average grades, only disciplined once, she thinks that school is an, "Ok place," and she doesn't like social studies and the huge, boring textbooks. She is told the beginning of this school year that her class will be using the Internet and other electronic sources to get their information and she thinks that it could be a better year.

      Many educators in Columbus, Indiana were not happy with the textbooks series offered to teach the subjects for their district. So when they learned that the school district would consider digital alternatives the textbook adoption team consisting of  teachers from elementary, middle, and high school, department chairs from secondary schools, and literary coaches realized that a two part lesson design would better fit their needs. The first part was setting up platform for students, teachers, and parents. The second part was finding trustworthy sources for information.

       They found that students were more interested and likely to do their homework and be engaged in the subject when using digital sources. Students found these "customized" e-resources applied better to modern technology and caused them to use more problem solving and team work skills.

      This article is very one sided to my overall question, though there is relevant information for the benefits of electronic resources it doesn't talk about some of the difficulties involved with a transition to non-traditional textbooks. These kind of resources are not available to schools and the students in lower income areas. Even if the school gets funding to switch over to electronic resources such as e-textbooks many of the students may not have access to reliable computers or Internet outside of school. This article covers only one part of a large topic, but I would still use it in a report.

Research Journal Part 10: Create a Web Page

Though this assignment did not turn out to be as bad as I thought that it was going to be. Thanks to all of those super smart people out there that understand how HTML works I was able to do a little research of my own to figure out how to add a background picture, instead of just changing the color of the background. I even found a .gif background where the stars twinkle in the background. I was also able to add a picture of  the infamous Tardar Sauce aka Grumpy cat. I am not sure if this activity increased my understanding of web pages very much. I knew before that everything you see on a web pages has code.  I am not really interested in learning html code, I know that there is lots of free software out there that will build the codes for you and all you have to do is tell the program what you what it to do and how you want it to look.

Research Journal 9: Finding Information on the Open Web

Yahoo Search:
1.  Patriot Act AND rights AND protect* AND privacy:.com

Minow, Mary. "The USA PATRIOT Act." Library Journal. (2002): n. page. Web. 8 Mar. 2013. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprintcurrentissue/878423-403/the_usa_patriot_act.html.csp.

Purpose: The Library Journal  is in it's 133rd year of publication and it is the oldest and most respected publication covering the library field. The author of this article was a public librarian for over 10 years and is currently the President of the California Association of Library Trustees and Commissioners.

Coverage: My focus is less to do with how the Patriot Act affects libraries however, it is still related to the privacy rights  and so I would include information from this article to ensure my research is well rounded.

2.  Patriot Act AND rights AND protect* AND privacy:.gov

Gottfried, David. "Legal Digest: Important Investigative Tools for Joint Terrorism Task Force Officers." The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d. Web. 8 Mar 2013. http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/2013/january/legal-digest-important-investigative-tools-for-joint-terrorism-task-force-offcers-part-2.

Authority: Not to say that the FBI may not post accurate information, but because they are a government agency they are under a lot of scrutiny. It is probably somewhat bias, but I couldn't find a .gov website related to my topic that wasn't probably somewhat biased.

Sources: This article references many sources in it's end notes. Many of the sources are references to specific United States Codes (laws), there are also references to court cases and their decisions.

3.  Patriot Act AND rights AND protect* AND privacy:.org

Wikipedia contributors, . "Patriot Act." . Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 01 Mar 2013. Web. 08 Mar 2013.

Evenness: This article is mostly unbiased. The contributors for this topic equally covered the two main sides of this topic.

Coverage: The information presented in this article matches very closely with other sources I have been looking at. It also presents the information in a way that makes it easier to comprehend and digest.

4.  Patriot Act AND rights AND protect* AND privacy:.edu

"The USA PATRIOT Act." Department of Government & Justice Studies: Appalachian State University. Department of Government & Justice Studies: Appalachian State University, n.d. Web. 8 Mar 2013.

Sources: This article list more than 50 sources used to write it. Just by scanning those resources and by clicking on a random selection of them, I think that this is a credible article containing statistics data that is back with facts.

Evenness: The author or authors did a very thorough job of including the two main sides of this issue. They have quotes and statistics that represent both people and agencies that support the Patriot Act and those who are against the Patriot Act, or at least parts of it.


To get the text of the Patriot Act the ".gov" websites were best and most likely to be accurate. However the ".gov" websites tend to lean towards supporting the Patriot Act rather than presenting both sides of the issue. I had to look through a lot of ".edu" articles to find one that I trusted based on the A.S.P.E.C.T. method. Many ".edu" articles or websites didn't have source information and I still ended up choosing an article that did not list an author. I can only assume that it was written by a single person for the college website or was a compilation of information from many authors. The ".com" article that I found did not meet my overall needs for information exactly, however, I trusted the source based on many factors referenced in the A.S.P.E.C.T. method. There were several sections of the article that would be useful to touch on in my research.

Research Journal Part 8: Types of Information: FOcus on Search Engines and Web Sites

Search Tools: DuckDuckGo

Search Features:

1.      If you are not getting the results you want from DuckDuckGo there is the option to change to a different parts of different search website right there on the DuckDuckGo website.

2.      You can choose to search by date from the before you do a search, so your results will come already sorted.

3.      They also are a non-tracking website. They do not send user’s information to the websites that they use. It is a much more secure way to search online. I will very likely use this search tool in the future.

4.      They are also a non-bubble website. Other sites return results to your search based upon your search history. The more your results match the more often you will get the same type of results. You get stuck in a bubble of the same type of information that is different from the bubble of information that each other person has. You could be missing out on important information because it isn’t something you normally look for.

5.      They also have a translation forum, where users can help to translate pages. It seems like a very slow and time consuming process. I’m sure that translations have to be checked and double check, but I feel like because users choose to translate sites to improve DuckDuckGo’s access to translations that they are doing to make the site better instead of doing it because they are getting paid for it.

Metasearch Tools: Dogpile

Search Features:

1.      Dogpile has a search filter that filters out none, a moderate level, and a heavy level of explicit content from your searches. Under preferences you can select what level of filter you want applied to your searches. This could be especially helpful if you are researching something that is similar to an explicit topic. The search could be set up to exclude possible explicit material related to your topic.

2.      You can turn on “bold search terms.” If you do that than your search term would be bolded on the results page. This would allow you to see the relationship between the results the website returns and the search terms that you used.

3.      You can choose to automatically sort your results by a variety of options including: relevance, alphabetical, highest rating, most reviewed, and has offers. You can choose to sort it in a way that would find you the best information for your search topic.

4.      You can also choose a preferred location for local search. If you are looking for information related to a specific area, then being able to narrow it within your search from the beginning could save you a lot of time.

5.      Dogpile has all of the advanced search options that we looked at in the deep web data bases such as ProQuest and EBSCOHost. You can include all of your search words as a phrase or in any order, you can search any of your search terms, you can choose words you don’t want to use and you can include or exclude specific domains in your search.

Subject Directories: Complete Planet: The Deep Web Academic Info

Search Features:

1.      Right away I noticed that Complete Planet is described as an, “in-depth directory (that) is a roundup of the best and most useful links and resources within a specific subject area.” They could just be saying that, however it seems like a good start.

2.      They think about accessibility, authoritative sources, and ease of use and aim to be unbiased in regards to their subject guides.  It seems like someone or many someone’s are putting a lot of time into ensuring that these are a good, accurate representation of the subjects that they do cover. There are however limited on the number of subject that they cover. This would be a great place to start from if they have the subject you are looking for.

3.      They give you the ability to browse by subject. This would be a really great way to topic search something if you don’t know what you want to research.

4.      You can also browse by high school and college degree levels. This would be extremely helpful because if you are going for your Doctorate or PhD then you would probably have no interest in information for high school students and vice versa.

5.      I did a search for Patriot Act on their page because it was not listed as a subject and it returned four possible articles. Of the four I could immediately tell from the short description that one was not relevant because it referred to the Patriot League a student-athlete program. The other three seemed relevant however, below each site name and description it said Anonymous (not verified.) I explored each of those sources and realized that even though those subject guides were not considered verified, they contained links to websites whose information I would trust to use as a source; including government and academic websites.