Tinkering with Ideas, Questions, and Research: August 30, 2017

Focus: How do we develop writing routines to keep messy learning productive?

1. Warming up with inspiration from the Tinkering School; post on today's class blog one takeaway

"Success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles, and obstacles disappear." -- Gever Tulley

2. Generating questions about your research topic:

• What are curious about? What do you want to know?
• What are you wondering?
• What's confusing?
• What do you need to find out more about?
• What are some connections you're hoping to make?
• What do you hope to learn by the end of this project?

• Level 1: (Who/what/when/where/how many?)
• Level 2: (How...?)
• Level 3: (Why...? What if...?

3. Clustering and coding your questions to focus your research; try organizing your questions under larger, umbrella categories

An example for Y2K:

I. Questions about the origins of fear

• Why were people afraid of the year 2000?
• Did this come from earlier fears of specific years?
• Was this foretold somewhere (Farmer's Almanac, etc)?
• Which fears were legitimate (vs. paranoid)?

II. Questions about what the fear looked like

• What were people buying to prepare themselves for Y2K?
• What were news sources reporting that contributed to the paranoia? What were the headlines?
• What did the big cities look like on New Years Eve?
• Were people picketing? What did their signs say?

III. Questions about the consequences of fear

• Did people alter their jobs or their homes in preparation for Y2K?
• How many people were diagnosed with anxiety as the result of Y2K?
• How were the banks / the stock market affected?

IV. Questions about its effects today

• Are people still scared of specific years?
• Is there still anxiety over the world coming to a specific end?
• Do we have more confidence in our social structures now since nothing actually went wrong?

4. Researching your topic professionally to find answers for your questions

• Where should we look for quality research?
• How do we know if a website is reliable? Are you familiar the C.R.A.P. test?
• Skim websites quickly to see if they will answer your questions (or spark new questions).

5. Starting to develop an annotated bibliography to gather and assess research

• Click here for an overview of the what/why/how of the annotated bibliography
• Click here for a sample annotated bibliography from last year.

HW:
1. Continue working on answering your questions by researching and keeping an annotated bibliography; please finish your annotated bibliography by the end of class on Sep 1.

Topic Sign-Up

2. If it's in your budget or on your bookshelf, please acquire your own copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.