You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2008.
Have you been assigned a 20th c. research paper in Global Studies 10? Sometimes it can be a challenge to break out of the comfort zone of World War I and II topics, so here’s a presentation that might help. Shared in a workshop with Mr. Smith’s classes, the presentation (linked below) has two purposes:
- Generate ideas for potential topics
- Model how to find print and primary sources
Since the current version does not have an audio track, feel free to stop by the library if you have any questions.
Read up on the candidates and parties in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election by consulting the President 2008 project guide in the library’s bookmark account. This guide contains links to the 2008 platforms for the Democratic, Green, Libertarian, and Republican parties, the official candidate web sites for Barr-Root (Libertarian Party), McCain-Palin (Republican Party) McKinney-Clemente (Green Party), Nader-Gonzalez (Independent), and Obama-Biden (Democratic Party), and resource sites about the issues, campaign finances, and how the electoral college system works.
This post is for Mrs. Boswell’s students who are preparing persuasive speeches.
To get a sense of various viewpoints about your topic, consider searching for your topic and comparing its coverage in polemic publications written from different perspectives. Most of the titles on this PDF list directly link to the publication’s page in Gale PowerSearch. You may use the search box on the left of the Gale PowerSearch screen to search for your topic within that specific publication. To search several polemic publications at once, you may use Advanced Search and limit your results to a group of publications by clicking Browse Publication Title and selecting each title you’d like in your search group.
For a few titles, you will note that the full-text is only available in LexisNexis Scholastic, not Gale PowerSearch. For those you will need to open LexisNexis Scholastic and search for the article by title.
Feeling like you have mud on your face from being stuck in the middle of the political mudslinging that comes with living in a battleground state? Wipe off the spatter and spend a few minutes at Fact Check.org from the Annenburg Public Policy Center. Nonprofit and nonpartisan, this site unravels the rhetoric. Today there’s a special vidcast feature about the second presidential debate.
Public Agenda is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to helping the American people and their leaders to understand public policy issues without interference from media and political spin. In that spirit, they have developed the Voter’s Survival Kit: The Smart Citizen’s Guide to What the Politicians Won’t Tell You. Explore issues like the economy, health care, taxes, immigration, health care, and climate change. Don’t miss the links along the right side of the page to other valuable election resources. For additional coverage of public policy issues, see their other issue guides. Here’s a list of the ones currently in use by Mrs. Boswell’s FIRC class.
In collaboration with other leading nonprofit research institutions on both sides of the aisle, Public Agenda has participated in developing another timely resource: a web site called Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances, an online project designed to engage students and faculty in exploring the options for our nation’s future and participating in the change process. The public engagement phase is tapering off as 2008 comes to a close, but one of the remaining activities beckons the inventive students at MLWGS: a student essay contest with a submission window of Oct. 1 – Dec. 1, 2008.
The Challenge: Be the policymaker, the advisor, or the opinion columnist. What do you think about America’s looming fiscal crisis, and what do you think should be done?
