First class March 2008 - ILR 260

Information Literacy and Report Writing

The goal of this class seems to be to teach me how to write a research paper. I'm good with this as it's been decades (you're going to see me through that word around a lot here) since I last wrote a paper. I last did research in a musty library using the dewy decimal system.

So today I started researching things related to virtual commerce happening in real life in Massive Multiplayer Online Games. Basically when people exchange real money for pixels in a game, and those pixels are really owned by someone else. Yes this happens, and yes it is a silly as it sounds.

My teacher didn't like my research proposal so I'm waiting on his feedback to continue, but while I"m waiting I started looking for sources. It's all online now! Ok most of it is, but still, much less time looking through stacks trying to find that volume that has that specific journal article in it.

I have a list of books to get tomorrow from the NU library, I have three journal articles talking about the economics of MMO's already, I"m sure I'll be able to find more if I try. That is already more sources than this assignment requires, I just now need to hammer out a real thesis.

My big suprise today however was the bibliography organization program I ran across. If I use this thing to cite sources it will build my whole bibliography for me, I am honestly amazed. No more points taken off of a perfectly good paper because I messed up some format with a reference!

Tomorrow consists of reworking the thesis and getting more sources. Hopefully also hammering out a working outline, I'd like to plan this so I've got at least one day on the weekends where I"m not doing school work, especially writing a paper that is important.