Learning Outcome: Generating Inquiry

Artifacts

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One of the first things I learned when I started this class was the meaning of exigence. It was a word I had not heard before, but the definition is fairly simple. It is essentially why you are writing something. Humans never write just for the sake of it; they are always responding to something.  Obviously, given the countless topics people can write about, people care about and thus respond to different things. I think this ties into what I did with my research project, especially in the research proposal part. When I was introduced to it, I was given literally no guidelines on what to write about. So long as it could be answered through the analysis of online comments, I could write about it. As a result, I came up with a research question practically no one had asked before. I wanted to know the interior thinking and mental processes of NFL fans in regard to how they evaluated draft prospects. I think an important thing to note is that this is entirely different than the ideas that others in my class came up with for the other assignment. There were questions about video games, politics, AI, philosophy, etc, as you can see. The reason for this disparity is that all these different people had different exigences. They cared about and were responding to different things. For me, I was putting forth questions I knew and cared about, and they were likely doing a very similar thing. Whether or not those topics where important or not is irrelevant right now, they are still very good examples of generating inquiry. As I did in my research proposal, and as we did in that question assignment, we were able to take what we cared about, our exigence, and turn them into questions we can answer and goals we can get to. In all honesty, this was the easiest part of the research proposal for me, and I suspect it was for others to. It was pretty easy for me to come up with a question I wanted to answer, having to write, format, and edit a proposal for that question in a way others could understand was far more tedious. I think this is because I wasn't learning anything crazy new. This is because I think generating questions is something natural to humans, so I think even before coming into this course, generating inquiry was something I already knew how to do, at least at a fundamental level. However, I had never done it to this degree before. I have been asked to write papers previously in school. Often, I was asked to analyze a work. In doing so I was often not trying to make sense of my own thoughts but those of others. However, in this course, and with some of these assignments, I am doing exactly that. I am building up something from the ground up. I am asked more to be a philosopher than I am a pure analyst. Whether or not I will have to do that later down the line in life, I don't know. However, I think I can say I have experience, and if I that I will have to do is anything like what I did in this course, then I should be able to do it.