MLO 4: Research & Technology
Outcomes
4.1. Students gain knowledge of appropriate research methodologies and are able to apply them in their studies.
4.2. Students use appropriate technologies in research and studies relative to Japanese language and culture. 4.3. Students collect, manage and analyze current and emerging technology-based resources to develop and produce their scholarly work. Courses Taken
Selected Course Work
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Reflective Narrative
4.1 In both Major ProSeminar (JAPN 300) and PreCapstone (JAPN 403) we learned about research methodologies from the librarian who specializes in language and culture. First, she showed us Coggle, which is a website that helped organize and plan what topics and keywords to research. Then, ehe showed us a variety of ways to utilize the university’s online database search system for both digital and physical materials, both on campus and external locations. She also gave us APA resources to reference for style and citations—the result of which can be seen in our completed bibliography (available on the Capstone Project page in either the presentation or paper).
The research portion of capstone also included maintaining a list of sources, which my partner and I did through Google Docs and Google Slides. For example, we had a document with all of the potential papers we found linked on it, which made it easy to take notes on significant information and later make the citation. We also used the notes section in Google Slides for keeping track of all the images we were using, which was very useful because the images ended up changing quite a bit throughout the presentation revision process. 4.2 In the PreCapstone and Advanced Japanese for Presentations (JAPN 404) courses, we also utilized Google Forms to make and distribute our surveys (also available on the Capstone Project page). Later in Senior Capstone (WLC 400), we also used the automatically generated charts from the collected information to start the data analysis. When we needed more exact information, we used the Google Sheets generated from the Google Form to look at the individual data. This easy compatibility between Google Forms and Google Sheets ended up being very useful because we found errors in the automatically generated charts on Google Forms, so we used the Google Sheets to make our own charts. This is when the use of Microsoft Excel comes in, which was quite a learning experience for me (I actually found it quite frustrating). The most difficult part was making charts that were unable to be automatically generated in Excel—luckily I found a tutorial online that helped solve my issue. I also used another site, Venngage, that specializes in infographics, which was another fun way to display data. 4.3 Overall, the combination of Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Forms was most helpful for the collaborative aspect of this project because my partner and I couldn’t always meet up in person, so sharing the documents online and being able to work on them simultaneously was a great benefit. In addition, the entire class also used this service to keep track of our progress, which was most important for the communication between the two advisors on who was at what stage of the process. |