Class just started yesterday, and I'm already learning about research in regards to libraries and youth. This journal's purpose is to assist us in fleshing out and understanding the material thoroughly and completely, as well as give us a place to cohesively combine our reflections and thoughts on the overall topic. According to the assignment sheet, this journal will be including "reflection on your practice, reflections on your readings/reading notes, developing interests and questions - perhaps in list form, lists of keywords/search terms for literature reviews, and lists of potential readings". Essentially, we are considering our assignments, our research, our novel reflections, our thought process, and our surrounding world in relation to the research. I find this fascinating. In high school, I had a math teacher that had us write out every detail of how we came to the final answer of each math problem. At times, though the final answer may have been incorrect, she would award us partial credit based on our mathematical thought process. I have found that thinking things through in this way has helped me tremendously in life as a whole.
One of our upcoming assignments is to research a broad topic, and write corresponding abstracts relevant to articles on the topic chosen. The broad topics given to us are Youth and... Reading, Technology, Information Behaviors, Libraries, and Information Literacy Instruction. Personally speaking, I considered the Youth and Libraries topic to be the most interesting and relevant for me, as it deals with programming, space, and users. I'm hoping to become a youth librarian, thus this topic would assist me well on that endeavor. The Youth and Reading topic seemed to relevant as well, so I noted both concepts as ones of interest in my introduction post.
There was one topic that I was unfamiliar with and requested further explanation of classmates or my professor; the topic of Youth Information Behaviors. Joanne clearly defined this by noting that this topic "would have to do with how young people seek out and use information of all kinds". Very interesting. Although I've come across this topic at a surface level in my 202 class with Dr. MacKay, I believe that I never regarded it in depth in relation to youth. However, observing my nine-year-old daughter and further reading Joanne's clarification of the topic has led me to realize that this is an extremely relevant and interesting topic. Joanne includes a quote that discusses this concept in detail from an article that we should be reading sometime in the future of the class. I have noted it here: http://informationr.net/ir/16-1/paper472.html . She also mentions the author Eliza Dresang who has co-authored one of the texts we will be reading this semester, who has written extensively on the topic. One article, Joanne mentions, was published in Library Trends (vol. 58, issue 1, 2009).
