Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Blog Post #4: Response to Anderson and Kanuka

Anderson and Kanuka give very practical reasons for doing a literature review. The do a good job of explaining its uses and effectively lay out the elements of a good literature review. In Korea, it is difficult to find books for a literature review. Using resources from the internet will certainly make it for others to track them down. I worked in the periodical reading room my first year in university. Microfilm, magazines, and journals can all be found online now. Anderson and Kanuka do a good job of explaining the efficiency of internet research. They explain that Readability is an important factor. Researchers can adjust the settings on digital resources to make the more readable. Nowadays, gadgets like the Ipad and Kindle make it easy for researchers to take all of their periodicals with them wherever they go.
Anderson and Kanuka describe they ambiguity involved in research. It is important that the materials we use in our literature reviews come from good sources. I had a problem with this when I was doing my BA. I found a few sources that made Pancho Villa out to be a hero. After the first article my judgment was clouded and I wrote a paper depicting Pancho Villa to be a hero. This disgusted my Latin American studies teacher, who always thought of Pancho Villa as a tyrant. I received a poor grade on my report. In hindsight, the internet didn’t have a lot of information back then, if I could have easily found an internet resources depicting Pancho Villa as a villain, I would have probably gotten an A.
Anderson and Kanuka do a great job of giving examples of types of electronic research. I would have never thought e-mail or virtual conferences as references. I intend to clutter all of the authorities on my literature review topic in-boxes with a plethora of questions. This will authenticate my research to a high degree. Instead of saying this article said Chomsky said, I can just say in an e-mail to me Chomsky told me. This article was very useful. Especially since I am doing a literature review on blogging, and I will do extensive of e-research.

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