Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Google

I am a big time google user so learning a few tricks was exciting for me. I knew a lot of the ones we covered but the one I was most impressed with was the scholarly search. I didn't even know this existed and I found it very helpful in finding more regulated information that can actually help instead of wikipedia and advertisements. Another thing I learned this past week outside of class was googles blackle site which I thought was pretty cool of them, they help save energy by putting all of your searches in black.

Foster Children Article

I did my article research on the Foster Children article. It's source is:
Orne, John G. and Beuhler, Cheryl. "Foster Family Characteristics and Behavioral and Emotional Problems of Foster Children: A Narrative Review." Family Relations, Volume 50, No.1(Jan., 2001), pp3-15. 
I thought this was an extremely interesting article, the basics of it were that children have been taken out of their own homes for some reason or another and are being put into foster care and that this number is increasing more and more. It then goes on to talk about the effect that this has on the child's emotional, behavioral, and mental health and progression. The article explains how researchers want to figure out the best ways in which to get these children do be able to cope with being foster cared and try to decrease the behavior and emotional issues.
In my opinion I thought that Orne and Beuhler did a nice job of putting this paper together, it has an introduction which gives a decent background and then it divides the article into topics to make it fairly easy to follow and ties it in with a slight conclusion. They also incorporated a graph to further explain their topic.
The main point of the article was to inform on what is happening to the children in foster care and also to use old statistics to try to figure out new solutions on which to try to help these children. This is sort of what we are doing, finding previous information to use with our own multicultural problems.
As far as critical thinking violations, I would say the article did a nice job to stay away from them. In was purely informative and I was actually very surprised to find that they did not bring emotion or picking sides into the article because with children topics a lot of emotion can be put into an article such as blaming parents or houses so good job to these authors.