Learning Outcome: Information Literacy

 To start out, I first say that I think this outcome is somewhat self-explanatory. Humans are naturally bombarded with all sorts of information in their day to day lives, with that information coming in countless different forms. The idea is can you take that information and not only understand it but evaluate it. To give a comparison you don't just understand the words others are saying if your fluent in a language, you understand them, use them, critique them, and even give a response of your own. That is what I feel I did for these two assignments. To give context, I choose them specifically because they dealt with two very different types of writing, online comments and academic papers. The first artifact isn't actually an assignment at all. I made it when I was doing my research paper. Any comment or thread that I thought might be useful I documented so I could use and go back to it if needed. I am putting it here, because on my research paper I obviously did not and could not include every comment. I only used those which worked best for my paper. This meant I had to make sense of the comments. As you can see, I encountered all sorts of different types of styles of writing, writing subjects, and especially ideas. Yet in encountering this, I had to not only still understand them but determine which of the comments were good. For example, some comments where outliers which did not represent the larger conversation, some represented an idea well but did not communicate it well, some comments where good but became irrelevant because they were on a different topic or one, I just did not have time to dive into. All of that is without having to deal with and analyze the ideas I found in the comments. When I say I had to understand the comments, this is what I mean. When I wrote my paper, I was looking at patterns, reasoning, attitudes, dispositions, etc. This meant there was a lot of work done behind the scenes, I first had to know what I was looking at before I ever put anything on paper. I think I kind of allude to this in the paper itself. As for the other artifact, it was honestly kind of hard for me to make. That is because, prior to going into this course, I had almost no experience with academic articles. It ended up taking several reads of some of the articles to fully understand what them were saying, and even then, I did not understand absolutely everything. I mean some of the articles were putting forth complex mathematical equations in their methods sections. Even being an engineering major, I had no Idea how to make sense of any of those. Fortunately, I didn't need to. A part of this outcome is that I evaluate different texts for relevance, meaning I was only looking for how I could use the articles I found. Even without understanding everything I had an idea of how they would fit into my paper, and now that I have written my paper I can say I did up using them. They were very helpful even, as without the proof they provided many of my arguments would not have worked. It was difficult to do at times, but I was able to do it regardless. Now for some of the outcomes in this course I don't think I will use them all that much in the future, but I do not that is that is the case for this one. Almost undoubtedly, I am going to have to deal with different types of writing and information, and the future. It may not be academic articles related to the NFL, but still I will likely have to do very similar things to what I did in this course.