Initial Research

Today you need to complete some basic research based on your project idea. Your goal is start exploring your topic and discovering examples of your project idea, information about your topic, and resources to help you develop your thesis question. Your thesis question will become the guiding question for your entire project.

For most of you, your projects are too vague and open ended, so today you should start to search for information about your ideas to help you start to narrow down your topic into a specific area. For example, both Joseph and Jasmine are interested in raising awareness about diseases that affect the community. They might conduct a Google search about the following key words; disease, Brookyln

To start your research today, post a comment reply to this post listing 5 keywords that relate to your independent project idea. Based on your keywords, use different combinations of the key words and start seeing what information comes up.

At the end of the period, you need to post a new Blog entry titled "Initial Research" and post a brief summary (2-3 sentences) of what you learned or didn't learn about each key word that you started with today. You can list specific, important information that you learn, website URLs (addresses), and/or what you roadblocks you encountered searching for the term.

Your post should use the Bulleted List feature in the formatting options in the posting menu bar
so that it looks like this:

• Keyword 1 - information that you found out.
• Keyword 2 - www.keyword2.com - I found a website all about my keyword. It has alot of useful links about my keyword.
• Keyword 3 - I didn't find out much information about this key word. It wasn't really helpful in searching for information. I don't think I'll use this again.
• Keyword 4 - Based on this keyword, I found out a list of keywords that I am going to research tomorrow including x, y, and z.
• Keyword 5 - I found out that....and...it's really important because....

You research will be useful in formulating a specific thesis question. By the end of next week we will be presenting detailed project proposals and discussing them in our Socratic Circle. Your project proposal will attempt to provide a way for you to answer your thesis question in the form of an independent project based on research and/or creative experimentation. Post the results of your preliminary research on your blog at the end of class.