Before you look ahead to Week 5, I hope you’ll take a moment to review my class feedback related to the 1st blog post. I’ve reviewed enough to know this information can help most of you, and if this ensures you each review the feedback, I can wrap up that grading a lot faster, without cutting and pasting this information into your Bb evaluation.
First, I wanted to discuss your topics. There are a lot of great topics and all looked interesting. Do keep in mind, the assignment, along with the first chapter of Patten and Newhart (2017), is intended to get you started thinking about an empirical research proposal related to Informatics that will interest you. As you move forward and find out more about your topic, you may find it doesn’t work well, that’s fine. (TIP) You are welcome to change the topic on a whim and use the new topic for related assignments without redoing old assignments related to your old topic.
Your proposal, at the end of the semester, will outline a primary research project you could do to find new knowledge for the world related to Informatics. This means that topic should be something no one else has discovered or confirmed in the past. You’ll use secondary research, research others conducted and wrote about, to decide on the best study and methods for you to use. Since this is research methods in Informatics, your study should also relate to your major — the use of technology in the flow of information.
And, as a proposal for empirical research that, as your text discusses, is based upon you being able to directly or indirectly observe a phenomenon to support or discredit a hypothesis or potential hypothesis, making guesses about what will happen in the future is a little harder to do. There are academic studies that make predictions based upon current data or surveys, so it can be done, but I do think that is a little more difficult than simply examining the here and now. You are welcome to look into it and integrate those ideas into a study that could reasonably predict what is likely to happen, but you also may be setting yourself up for something more difficult than it needs to be.
Of course, since you have the whole semester to develop your proposal and can change your topic at any time, even as you finalize that proposal, you don’t need to worry too much about exactly what your proposal will be yet. In fact, this week’s assignment to find academic research provides a great opportunity for you to see if there is previous research you could easily expand upon that is in line with your current idea. If there isn’t, that’s a good sign that adjusting that topic will save you some headaches as we continue.
Post formatting was a bigger issue with many Week 1 posts, but I’ve provided feedback on that in the Feedback for the Semester post.