I always thought I knew the easiest way to find information
on a topic, turns out I was wrong. I usually just type in the topic in question
into google and use what comes upon the first page, and occasionally venture
out onto the second page. However I have learnt that there are much easier,
accurate and reliable ways of finding information.
The most useful way of finding information that I have found,
is through using the Massey online library. For assignment one, I have chosen
the topic, “Possum and/or stoat control programmes are ethically justifiable”. I
found it easiest to break down the topic into two parts and then research each
part separately. This helped me form an opinion on the topic as I had no idea
to which way I was leaning towards before I started this assignment. The two
parts which I broke the topic into were:
1. 1.
Researching the possum and stoat control programmes
that we have in New Zealand and the consequences they have.
2. Researching what it means to
be “ethically justifiable.”
I used a few general rules to expand my search results while
keeping the search precise and relevant to the topic. These rules included
adding an * to the end of the word, allowing other versions of the word to be
included in the search, for example control* would also allow controlled to
come up in the results. Another rule which I used quite often was adding
quotation marks around words which I wanted to stay together as a phrase when
been searched. To quickly find information on the webpage I often held down
Ctrl and F, typed in a keyword and was able to find the words without having to
go through the entire webpage. This was especially useful when reading large
reports, where large parts of it were not relevant.
2 comments:
I feel like a general consensus has been established in that we all felt that research was easy because we could just punch in our question into google and be handed resources that would give us the answer. We were all very wrong. I definitely agree that searching the topic as a whole is not the best way to gather information and that breaking down the research into 2 parts made it a lot more simple. Stating how you researched your topic was very helpful as I would not have thought to research it like that. You seemed to be very prepared on how to tackle this assignment and I am looking forwards to working with you on assignment 2 and see how you will tackle researching for this assignment.
This was a short and sharp post which held my attention on potentially unstimulating topic. I like how you had the forethought to research the definition of ethics as this shows you have been thinking about our next assignment. Setting your research plan out into steps helped me understand your topic more and allowed me to grasp the issue we are facing in New Zealand. The little tips you included on how you went about your researching were very helpful and showed me how knowledgeable you are on the proper and most effective techniques for searching.
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