Information Literacy Activity
Information Literacy Activity
Points: 15
Given the following sample research question, plan and execute a search for relevant information resources.
Research statement: I want to investigate how the practice of blogging has influenced high school education.
- Identify the main concepts in your search statement or research question. List the concepts here; these will become keywords that you will use when you search for information in a database.
Concepts that make up my search statement:
First concept would be blogging, second would be high school, and the last
one would be education.
- Think of synonyms for each of your concepts. What other words might you use to search for relevant information?
Concept 1: Blogging
Concept 1 Synonyms: on-line journal, weblog, website,
Concept 2: High school
Concept 2 Synonyms: Gymnasium, secondary school
Concept 3: Education
Concept 3 Synonyms: Learning, knowledge, enlightenment, teaching
- Using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, construct a search statement that includes the various concepts and synonyms.
- High school and Education or learning and Blogging or weblog not scholarly journal
- For this exercise, use the database called ProQuest Research Library. This database covers a wide variety of topics from many different fields.
Where do you go to get access to ProQuest? List the steps you took or Web pages you visited to find ProQuest.
- Step 1 – Go to http://library.gmu.edu/
- Step 2 – Click on the option that says, “Articles & More”
- Step 3 – This option will give you a direct link to ProQuest
- Step 4 – Log in to ProQuest by using your G number and password
- Using truncation allows you to find all forms of a word, when the beginning letters are the same, as in the words “blogs”, “bloggers”, “blogging”, and “blogosphere”.
5a. What is the truncation symbol in ProQuest? Check the Search Tips if you’re not sure.
- The truncation symbol in ProQuest is the asterisk “*” character.
5b. Using the truncation symbol, what could you search for in ProQuest that would find results containing any of the following terms: “blogs”, “bloggers”, “blogging”, and “blogosphere”?
- Do not overthink it and perhaps maybe just use: “blog*”
- There might be articles in the database that use the term “blog” and others that use the term “weblog.” How can we use Boolean operators in a search to find articles that include either term (but not necessarily both terms in the same article)?
- You could use the Boolean operator OR: “blog OR weblog”
- Perform a search in ProQuest that will return articles related to blogging. What search term(s) did you use?
- “Blogging or weblogging”
- How many results were returned?
- I got 4,377 returned results
- Since we are looking for articles related to blogging in the field of education, refine your search by adding “AND education” to your search. How many results were returned with “AND education” added to your previous search?
- That gave me 4,358 results
- If you search for “weblogs and education” you will get several hundred results. ProQuest allows you to narrow your search even further to show only articles that come from scholarly journals. Click the Scholarly Journals tab to limit the results in this way. How many results are now displayed?
- I got 1,396 results
- Once you have narrowed the list of results down to a manageable number (say, less than 50), you should start scanning the results to find potential articles for your research. Examine the list of results and provide complete citations for two of the articles in your results list that might be useful for this example topic.
Gunter, B. (2009). Blogging – private becomes public and public becomes
personalized. Aslib Proceedings, 61(2), 120-126. Retrieved January 28, 2018,
Rogers-Estable, M. (2009). Web 2.0 and Distance Education: Tools and Techniques.
Distance Learning, 6(4), 55-60. Retrieved January 28, 2018, from https://search-proquest-com.mutex.gmu.edu/computing/docview/230699157/71B728B1168D4A27PQ/1?accountid=14541
- One of the articles on the results list is an article called “Web 2.0: New Tools for Distance Learning” by Christopher Essex. View this article. In the References section of Essex’s article, there is a citation for an article called “Scholars Who Blog” by D. Glenn. Is the article by Glenn available through ProQuest?
- Yes, the article by Glenn is available through ProQuest.
- Describe the steps you took to determine whether the Glenn article is available through ProQuest.
- Step 1 – Click on the “Basic” option
- Step 2 – Use the name from the article which we already know, “Scholars who Blog”
- Step 3 – Then click on the option “More Search options”
- Step 4 - One of the field should be “authors”, write Glenn
- Step 5 – Then click search and this should lead you to the article om ProQuest
