Welcome to the INF 1240H public course blog! Each week I'll post follow-ups a day or two after each lecture, which will include lecture slides and links to things that come up in class. All of the student blogs for this course will also be linked from this site once their membership is settled. Hopefully everyone is now part of a blogging group, or will be by the end of this evening's class. I recommend posting a quick note to introduce yourself to your blogmates. It's always interesting to see the range of interests and backgrounds that can coverge among people in the same blogging group.
Our first assigned blogging question (response due by next Friday, Jan. 29th) comes straight from the end of chapter 1 of Luker's Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences, where she recommends that students begin their own research diaries with the following exercise:
This exercise is also a great way to get to know your other group members, so don't hesitate to discuss each other's posts in the comments. Even if you don't have a blog group yet, you can start writing offline so that you'll have your post ready once everyone is sorted into blog groups, which should be completed by the end of this Wednesday.
By the way, the Balzac reference in the Luker quotation really needs a proper citation, as do many of Luker's other references to cultural texts like William Blake poems. How would we know if Balzac didn't say this, or meant something different in context? (Remember how no one actually says "play it again, Sam" in Casablanca, despite all the erroneous attributions of that line to the film...) In this context Balzac isn't a secondary research source (or is he?), but even so you should make sure to cite things like this in all your assignments.
Our first assigned blogging question (response due by next Friday, Jan. 29th) comes straight from the end of chapter 1 of Luker's Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences, where she recommends that students begin their own research diaries with the following exercise:
You don't necessarily have to write a perfect, fully articulated research question in this first attempt, but see how close you can get in fifteen minutes. You might start from a research interest that could develop into a research question or two -- the point is to start, and to start by generating some text that will begin a record of your thought process.[from Luker, p. 21] "Someone once asked Balzac, who supported himself by writing reviews of plays, how liked a play he had just seen. 'How should I know?' he is reported to have answered: 'I haven't written the review yet!' Balzac was onto something: I find that when I write things down, I write and think things I've never really thought before. ... Set a kitchen timer for fifteen minutes, and write about what question concerning the ... research world you would like to investigate if you were absolutely guaranteed you would not fail. Be as ambitious and wide-ranging in your thinking as you want."
This exercise is also a great way to get to know your other group members, so don't hesitate to discuss each other's posts in the comments. Even if you don't have a blog group yet, you can start writing offline so that you'll have your post ready once everyone is sorted into blog groups, which should be completed by the end of this Wednesday.
By the way, the Balzac reference in the Luker quotation really needs a proper citation, as do many of Luker's other references to cultural texts like William Blake poems. How would we know if Balzac didn't say this, or meant something different in context? (Remember how no one actually says "play it again, Sam" in Casablanca, despite all the erroneous attributions of that line to the film...) In this context Balzac isn't a secondary research source (or is he?), but even so you should make sure to cite things like this in all your assignments.
