ENG 103 Discussion Board 1

ENG 103 Discussion Board 1

We need information in our daily life to for numerous tasks, which range from simple to complex. Simple tasks include gathering information about today’s traffic and weather to get to work on time and dress appropriately, to complex tasks such as understanding the brain function and behavior of children to properly care and teach them. The sources I use for the aforementioned basic tasks are google, Facebook, and National Public Radio. For complex tasks, I rely on the textbooks and scholarly journal sources. Accordingly, the sources I use for the simple tasks may not be as credible then those I use for complex tasks. Nonetheless, both provide me with adequate information to assist me in my daily life.

ENG 103 Discussion Board 2

The information I have at my disposal is far more than I anticipated. It will help me pursue my college degree, by allowing me to access all sorts of information and thus gather a lot of information on a plethora of topics. Access to such scholarly academic sources will drive my knowledge forward and let me learn about something in great detail. The quantity of the information is a bit shocking, but I think the search criteria I can use will help me find resources that are really tailored to my needs. The resources I learned about are far better than what my local library offers and I am eager to start using these sources!

ENG 103 Discussion Board 3

The topic I chose to search on each of the search engines was the same and it was toddler milestones. The information I found on Bing, iSEEK, and Dogpile was related mainly to guides for baby development, activities for toddler brain development, and advertisements for babies, respectively. I liked that Bing’s top hits were based on government and well-known institutions websites, but I did not like that there was little way to organize their results. I liked that iSEEK was very organized and had the left sidebar, which grouped websites by more detailed subtopics, but I did not like how small the displays were. Overall, I did not find anything to like about Dogpile. Most of its search hits were advertisements, and the page felt very cluttered and disorganized. For my next academic searches, I would choose to use Bing and iSEEK, but not Dogpile.

ENG 103 Discussion Board 4

The Expanded Academic ASAP database offered so many scholarly articles and texts for my topic. At first, it was quite overwhelming, but the ability to narrow down my search helped a lot. I thought some of the most useful search criteria were including dates of publications or their years. I also thought being able to select specific journals by keywords was an excellent and useful feature. It was surprising that even after selecting a certain period of time, keywords, and journals, there were still over 100 articles for me to examine related to toddler milestones. I think if I were to truly perform a literature review, I would have narrowed down my search results further with more specific keywords.

ENG 103 Discussion Board 5

I read the Academic Integrity: Student Code of Conduct section in Penn Foster's Undergraduate Catalog and Student Handbook carefully. This policy means to me that I must act in an honest way in order to complete my Penn Foster classes successfully. To act honestly, I must complete my assignments on my own. I must also not plagiarize. I can avoid academic dishonesty and plagiarism, by doing all my own work. Moreover, I have to quote other people’s work correctly, and use in-text citations and a reference list for the resources I used to show those ideas were not my own.

ENG 103 Discussion Board 6

The appropriate citation method for my course of study is APA. I have learned that this citation method is widely used in many disciplines and that it is rather easy to follow. I believe I can use this citation method effectively to avoid plagiarism as Penn Foster provides me with a guide on how to use APA format. Moreover, with a simple search on Bing.com, I found that there are many websites which will even help you to put your resources into APA format for free! This will help me double-check that I have formatted my references correctly. So, there should be no issue with citing sources according to APA format.