Research Analysis

Research Analysis

Technology is a very large topic. There are so many different things that have something to with the technological resources we have. So one would think coming up with one research topic may be hard. However, for me I had a general idea of what I wanted to research about, or at least I thought. I knew I wanted to have my research be on something to do with cell phones since they are so common and that is the one technology that I use all the time. I wanted to know more about them and how dependant we have become of them. I thought of this idea when I really started noticing how many people constanly are using them. They are used everywhere, walking form classes, in stores, and in cars. This concept was proven when I read “The Human Factor” by Kim Vicente. He uses the term “electronic leashes” to describe these everyday electronic devices we attend to.
Once I went to the library to start my researching process I found myself indulged in interesting books that didn’t necessarily flow with my topic. This is where I started to question what I really wanted to research. While I was searching for sources I thought of many different topics I was interested in all across the board. The new topics included: Do technologies make people less stressed, how has the internet changed work areas, and how we have moved from wired to wireless. I soon became swamped with different ideas for every topic and became far from any research on what I originally thought. I found myself stuck in a rut and being very indecisive about my final topic. I decided the best thing for me to do was clear my slate and just concentrate on something that I am really interested. Being a first year college student I have noticed that communicating with my teachers and my peers is very important. In high school communicating with teachers and peers was very different to how it has become for me. During high school it was very easy to talk to a teacher or another student because you were in a building with them for the majority of the day, every day of the week. In college, you go in to a building for an hour every other day with hundreds of students, making communication abilities harder and much more important. I thought it would be interesting to research how college students communicate by means of technology. I found this topic extremely fascinating because it is just so crazy that we are able to communicate with someone who is far away so easily. It boggles my mind that through a computer you are able to send messages at the click of a button to someone who then will receive it in an instant. I think this stuff is incredible and it is insane to think of humans communicating years ago. Technology has come so far and it is amazing to see how it has all changed so much.
Most of the sources I pulled information from came out of our school library. During my entire source searching, there were good times and there were bad. I found the library really helpful because it gives you access to an abundance of text that I would otherwise have to pay for. However, some of my days in the library I became very frustrated and annoyed. Sometimes I wasn’t able to access what sounded like a perfect book because it was already checked out and other times I just couldn’t find anything that resembled what I was looking for. With our classes theme being technology, I had to be careful what types of sources I was using. Technology is always very current and up-to-date, so I had to make sure the sources weren’t too old. I found it easier to search for articles and websites rather than books. I also took advantage of the course texts and tried to pull as much information from them to incorporate in my paper. I thought pulling ideas from previous papers I had written was difficult because most of the time they didn’t correspond with the ideas in my research. After revising my paper a few times I found information from old assignments that I could twist around to fit better into my research paper.
For our class, revising papers was occasionally done in a different manor than I am use to. We used online blogging to communicate with class mates and to comment on papers. This was the first time I have ever done something like that. I had never even “blogged” before this and to be honest at first I wasn’t too crazy about it. On the first day of English 102, when my teacher said you must complete a blog every week by Tuesday at 9:00am I was thinking what is the point of that? It wasn’t until I started getting feedback on my papers that I began liking this new technology. We posted many different types of blogs. Some weeks we would post our assignments for others to comment on and other times we would just blog about a topic and write about how we feel. It was as if it was my own little journal to share my thoughts with classmates and my teacher. Peer editing online is new to me but I think it is very interesting. I think it makes the editor really focus on the context of the writer’s paper instead of the grammar. At least for me, when reading a paper that I can write on, I generally look at grammar. I think it has just always been something I have been “trained” to do in previous English classes. However, online, where you have to type your comments back you are really getting and giving feedback on the context of your paper. I eventually found myself liking blog editing more and more because it allows people to write freely and take time reading a paper. I especially started liking blogging right now. Since I have reflected my thoughts through blogging the whole semester, it has helped me in my research paper and even writing this paper. It is an easy way to go back and look at what we did and how I was feeling about it in the moment. Although I have really enjoyed revision though “blogging”, I still feel it is necessary to have face-to-face interaction with my classmates and teacher. We accomplished this through conferences. I found myself liking face-to-face editing more after doing it because it really allowed me to ask any questions and really understand what my readers had to say. During conferences I was able to ask questions and completely understand what I needed to work on from comments my peers and teacher were making.
I tried to focus the audience of my paper to a general category, that being college students. But looking at it now I feel many people would be interested to see how technology has really creates a bridge in communication for college students as well as the entire population. It has taken everything to the next level making the means of communication more accessible.