ILP: Day Two

Today we worked on ILP 2 and 3. My morning class attendance was surprisingly sparse, but their involvement in the activity was good. I had them quick write a question or two that they still had about their topic, something that might be a good opening research question. My example was "How does hip-hop promote or negate misogyny?"  They were then instructed, as they are in ILP 2, to come up with some good search keywords from their question. For example "Hip-hop", "misogyny" and perhaps "promote" or "negate". 

When they were done with this I had them get into small groups of 2-4 people and share their questions and keywords with one another. They were supposed to offer any additional or alternative keywords to their partners. Then each group selected one person, preferentially the person having the most difficulty coming up with keywords, to come to the front of the class and share their info. During this part of the exercise the whole class and I offered new keyword possibilities. 

We then talked about how with a list of 5 or more keywords a person might want to use different combos of 2 or 3 words when searching. They seemed to understand what I was getting at, and many seemed interested in the journal databases which is cool.

After all of this activity we talked about formulating multiple research questions and why questions are better than claims of policy. I am not sure that this really got through, but I am strongly hoping that it did. Papers that start out as questions are always more interesting and exciting than those that are born from trying to prove an already held belief. 

Finally we looked at the library catalog and talked about keyword and subject searches. They will be done with the ILP by Wed, and by then we should be well into the research for paper 2.

Yeee Hawww... it's the weekend...