week 7

The annotated bibliography was not as daunting as it could have been .  Since that is what we were some what working towards this whole time.  I was able to find some interesting articles that helped me to broaden what I was looking for.  If I were to actually have to write this paper I think I found enough to have enough evidence for my claim and counter-claim.  I am going to keep all of these items bookmarked for future reference in Capstone Class.

week 6

Using the open access database was a lot easier than I anticipated.  I ended up using one of the suggested sites Open Access Journals Search Engines (OAJSE). It was easy to navigate and I liked how easy it was to narrow down what you were specifically looking for.  To narrow down I typed in effective leadership styles in business which only gave me about 400,000 results.  Which from what I have been looking though lately is not that many.  I noticed that a lot of the articles had to do with either a specific organization or country. Which would work if I wanted to narrow down my research further but I wanted to keep it more applicable to everyday business. I finally found an article about various leadership styles and how they effected each business.  So far for my topic I have found quite a few items that I plan to use in my capstone class which talks about what type of leader I am.

Week 5

This week was a little harder.  I first had to look up exactly what an Empirical article meant.  I was able to narrow down and find some articles on Leadership Styles but there are not a lot of choices.  I than narrowed my search to transformational leadership which actually really helped a lot.  I found quite a few articles on ebsco.  Leatherby Library finally turned up a good search tool.  I guess as they say "try, try again". I apparently picked a good article last week because it kept popping up in all of my searches.  This weeks article that I chose talks about how maybe transformational leadership is not always a good thing and that sometimes you need to have a more steady approach and not constantly changing.  I thought that I would bring this article into the mix as a counter argument for what my research is on.

week 8

Writing a Literature Review is tough business.  I feel like I needed another 8 weeks just to sift through all of the information I have accumulated over the last 8 weeks.  As a researcher I think that I am fairly good at finding reliable credible sources.  However, where I feel like I struggle is sometimes having to much information and going over board with putting it all into my papers. The class has really helped me reign in on finding 1 maybe 2 articles that have all the information I need and not trying to find snippets from 6 or 7 articles.  I feel slightly more confident on writing papers now just because I know how to research a topic better.  Hope everyone has a great winter break and Happy Holidays!

Week 4

Wow was this week a tough assignment.  Finding a Peer-reviewed article can get quite frustrating.  I feel as though this week I was finding good article but unable to get full access or when I did get full access the title had me thinking that it was a completely different article.  However, I kept coming across the article that I did end up using and for a while I could only access the title so after much searching through the Leatherby Library I tried to see if it was available through google scholar.  It is so frustrating trying to break the habit of going to Google for everything but somehow it is made a lot simpler than using the Library.

I thought this article was very well written and brought new insight into my research topic.  So far I have been studying leadership styles and how they correlate with great leaders however this article got me thinking about maybe there are inherent traits in us that automatically make us leaders.  I am looking forward to what next weeks research will bring.

Week 3

During last weeks assignment I came across several books that I thought would work great for this assignment.  After narrowing my research down I found 3 that I really liked. After skimming through the books that I found I decided that none of them were quite what I was looking for.  I went back to Leatherby Library to fin more.  There were a couple of titles that looked promising but none of them were available on-line.  I than tried searching google to see if I had more luck there.  One of the titles that I had found in my second search actually came up and once seeing the cover I realized that I had read the book before and still had in my office.  Since I was quite familiar with the book I decided that this book was a good choice only because I knew how detailed it went into my subject area.

The biggest thing that I learned from this week was that sometimes it really helps when you are more familiar with your topic and not just blindly trying to research something.

Week 2

Hello class,

Since I am going to school to receive my B.A. in Organizational Leadership I decided to conduct my research on leadership styles and what makes a leader and not a manager.  In todays world we are told you want to be a leader not a manager but how do we become a leader and not a manager? While starting my research I found it very interesting how many books, articles and research papers. I now know I will have an over abundance of items to choose from the key will be to finding the good from the bad.

I started my research on Google Scholar.  I typed in leadership strategies to see what it would bring up and I found quite a few items but nothing that really caught my attention. I tried doing a regular google search which helped me find more background information.  I will use Google scholar as a source to narrow down what I am looking for but when looking for just background information "regular" google works better.

Hello!

Hello fellow classmates,

My name is Amanda Willems, I have been attending Brandman University for a year now.  I am currently pursuing a degree in Organizational Leadership and plan on pursuing my Masters in Business Administration.  Last year I ended my 8 year career with the Air Force and I am now a stay at home mom and college student.  I am still undecided on what I want to do with my degree, I do know that I want to go into Business possibly into communications or Marketing.

After attending Brandman for quite sometime I am looking forward to becoming a better researcher. I have always struggled with finding articles that contain accurate and legitimate information.  When I have an assigned research paper I dread the research more than I dread writing the paper.  In this weeks reading "ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education" talks about finding defining literacy and how with technology constantly changing that it is becoming harder to decipher what is reliable information and what is not. I am looking forward to using the "CRAAP" test to understand how to research better.

I am looking forward to becoming a better researcher with all of you!