Searching and Researching Blog Post

Writing has always been my weak point as a student even since grade school.  I believe that it has improved drastically over the years: however, that was due to both time and effort.  I have also struggled finding reliable sources because I am used to information being given to us.  In most of my classes everything I need to know is given to me in a textbook or through lecture notes.  I personally find it challenging when I am forced to find reputable academic sources on my own.  I found this module in particular to be very useful because it showed three ways to evaluate sources: reliability, quality, and utility.  I think that this module is very relevant for the college student because many of us are still using Wikipedia and other similar sources to write research papers.  In all reality this is a horrible source for us to be using because it can be edited so easily. 

The module also shows alternative sources that can be used for academic research such as Google Scholar and the University Libraries.  These are excellent free alternatives for scholarly research.  I have used both of these when writing research papers and find them easy to use because you can search a much narrower topic and know that they are coming from reputable sources.  Furthermore, the module breaks down how search engines work and explains Boolean logic.  This is very important because one can drastically alter their search with these formulas.  I am very familiar with Boolean Logic because I use it all the time in excel.  Lastly, the module shows different sources that we can use to cite sources which are always useful because there are plenty of websites that will create the citation for you.  This saves a lot of time because doing citations from scratch can be very timely.