Unit Six - Academic Research

Technology Development Environment

      Analysis of Technology Development Environment

            Within this unit, we focused on search engines that support academic research efforts. We were provided with several websites to explore and select search engine(s) that support and promote our own personal research style for use within our academic and professional career.

A few of my favorites are:

SEEK Education: (education.iseek.com):  I liked this search engine because it is dedicated to educators.  This site caught my attention because of the safe search feature as well as the ability to save your searches within their registry. 

      Google Correlate:   I feel that this site could have been useful for some of the projects that I have done within this program, so I am bookmarking it for possible future use.

Virtual LRC: o I feel this site would be beneficial to me as a graduate student (potentially a doctoral student? I am still thinking about that), because it is developed and maintained by educators and professionals in an effort to provide quality resources to academic learners.

Meta Search:  I actually bookmarked all three of the search engines within this section because each search engine gathers results and resources from multiple sites all at once.

    The search engines reminded me of this commercial for Kayak.com:

 

Reference:

Kayak. (2015, April 6). 5 Man Search. Retrieved August 6, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwc9YqtJV1A

Library of Congress Online Database

This is the Library of Congress Online Database.  This is the largest library in the country and it holds copious amounts of information about pretty much everything. 

12 FabulousAcademic Search Engines: The search engines in this website were pretty interesting, there were several databases, ERIC being one of them.  I am familiar with ERIC since that is what we have access to at UHCL.  I really like the fact that as much as everyone is familiar with Google search, which is very generic, Google also provides search engines that are geared specifically for academia:  Google Scholar and Infotopia.  

Academic Index:  This search engine could be a great resource for peer-reviewed, academic journals and articles. It would have been useful last semester when I took Research Design.  Prior to that class, I did not even know what peer-reviewed academic journals or articles meant.

  

                    In today’s society, the term “Google” has become synonymous with looking something up, it is good to have options and variety when doing research and/or studying.  I have already saved the list of websites for future reference in my academic, professional and even my personal life.    

Thank you for reading about my thoughts, 

Alice 

 

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