Resource Review 1: Scholarly Journal Articles

Despite my technological deficiencies in not being able to successfully link retrieved journal articles from UW's academic databases to my Delicious account, I was still able to snag the journal article titles. As such, this entry will focus on the helpfulness of scholarly journal articles in reviewing the digital tool of EPals.com.

Article: Gersh, Sheila Offman. (2009). Global Projects and Digital Tools. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, 16(1), 10-13.

Article synopsis: This article examines the use of digital tool in classroom/learning settings, primarily with those tools that provide learning engagement through project-based methods. The author does an overview of using digital tools, especially Web 2.0 tools, and references EPals.com a few times as a good site to use for collaborative learning. The author highlights some of the challenges that may be associated with implementing digital tools into an educator's curriculum, but also provides a helpful list of resources one can access for different options of digital tools available.

The "Resource Review" verdict: Although the article wasn't helpful in providing extensive information about EPals.com explicitly, I found the article to be - on the whole - useful because it fit the use of digital tools in classrooms into a larger context of meaning and importance. By listing EPals.com among those tools cited by the author as being good digital tools to use in the classroom, EPals.com is getting important academic placement and recognition among a very broad pool of options. With a change in research interests to cause/effect topics (at least the shift I've seen in my years of undergraduate research - less focus on exploring and defining a subject topic and more of a movement toward a sociology-type base of how or why a subject topic brings about certain social influences, responses, etc.), I think it's safe to assume that articles exploring an individual digital tool are on the outs, while research studying their use and effect, and collaborative uses and influences across disciplines, will be expected moreso.

So in closing...: All in all, I found that searching journal articles on UW's E-Resource gateway was very helpful for reviewing my digital tool because the articles provide subject headings either directly correlating to those issued by Library or Congress or some type of subject heading that gives the user more direction in finding information similar or related to the given article. This helped a lot for me in concept mapping for my search query, which has proven beneficial for the topic of EPals.com specifically given that the site itself is relatively new and therefore hasn't been studied much in academic research published in peer-reviewed journals.