A6.5: Week 6 Reflection

Aims and Objectives:

My goals for this week were:

• To complete my assignments by Saturday.  I planned to complete all of my work by Saturday in order to receive feedback, but due to life I was unable to do it.  Although, I did complete the one assignment that I really wanted feedback on, my prospectus.
• To outline my multigenre research project.  I wanted to determine exactly what I wanted to do for my project.  Once I had selected all of the genres that interested me I determined from who’s prospective I would write the project in.
• To learn more about wordpress and APA format.  I think learning more about both of these will help me with my projects.

Declarative Knowledge:

This week I learned what a prospectus is.  A project prospectus helps you outline a project and determine the point that you want to make with the project.  I think that this is a very good way to begin any project that you do.  I learned more about searching the databases while doing the second library search.  I figured out that capitalization can cause your search results to change, which I think is very interesting.  I learned more about myself when chatting on tapped-in.  By reviewing the conversation and reflecting, I thought about how I contributed and what I could have done to contribute even more. I also learned how to use the archives, which was very interesting. 

Procedural Knowledge:

I began this week by completing the reading assignments, by going to the class webpage, clicking on week 6 assignments, and then clicking the links to the websites.  I then began my project prospectus by looking at the instructions.  After I did this I determined what point I was trying to make and the genres that I planned to use in order to get my point across.  I then wrote a draft on paper.  After, writing my draft and making some changes I went to my webpage and posted it as a new page and copied the link to an email and sent it to the class.  To complete the library search I went to the library page and clicked on article databases.  I then chose a database and searched within scholarly articles.  I typed out the citations in wordpress and posted them.  After I posted them I copied and pasted to notepad in order to do my indentations.  Once I made my indentations I editted the post and pasted the correct APA format of the citation.  When thinking about the web evaluation, I looked back at previous assignments.  I then gathered my thoughts and posted them.  In order to the reflection on 9/13/06 I went to the class webpage and clicked archives.  I then had to set up a password.   After that I was able to find the previous tapped-in conversation of my group that was sent via the class mailing list.  I read the chat and thought about the questions that were asked.  I then posted my answers to my weblog.

Conditional Knowledge:

Using a prospectus can help you complete assignments efficiently.  It really outlines your plan of action.  I think that this will also be a wonderful tool to use in clinical work.  The research is continuing to help me become a better searcher which will definitely help me as a student and a clinician, especially when it comes to evidence based practice.  Being able to reflect on a previous conversation really helped me as a student.  It helped me understand what I did well and what I could have done to make the conversation better.

Question:

Is there a simpler way to get the citations to indent?

A6.4: Reflection on Discussion of 9/13/06

     The essential question that I brought to the class was, “What types of augmentative devices are used with people who have severe Broca’s Aphasia?”  Since the class discussion I have decided to change my question to, “What if augmentative communication was not available for individual’s with chronic Broca’s aphasia and apraxia?”  Contributions that my groupmates made included: Meredith asking about if I planned to focus on a particular device and Crissa asking about my search strategy.  After this conversation I tried to think of a more specific question that would push the envelope of my thinking and research.  To help my classmates I tried to ask questions that would cause them to come to a more specific question.  I asked Crissa, “What interests you the most about Dementia, the behavioral affects or the physiological aspect?”  I asked the question to try and help her narrow down her research topic.  I asked Meredith, “What types of dysfluencies are you interested in?”  This was asked with the same intention as the question I asked Crissa.  I asked Erica, “Are you thinking about just focusing on a specific piece of the spectrum or the whole thing?”  I wanted to help her think about what she really wanted to research and if she planned to research the autism spectrum.

     In order to be positive and influential in a group discussion online, participants should:

• Pay attention to the conversation.
• Think about the topics and make helpful comments.
• Ask questions about things you are not sure about.
• Have a positive attitude.
• Be constructive in your comments.
• Be open to suggestion.
• Take the suggestions and think about how you could improve on your topic.