Reflections (Week 3)
Have you noticed that in recent years, there are more and more foreign talents in Singapore?
Indeed, with the government's efforts to attract foreign talents to Singapore, an increasing number of foreign talents have been coming to Singapore, and this issue is one of the most popular topics in Singapore. The views and opinions that different people has pertaining to this issue is never-ending.
Perhaps some of us dislike the idea of having foreign talents in Singapore, as we prefer to have more local talents, while some of us feels that having foreign talents in Singapore is beneficial to the society, as they can exchange ideas with us and that's where we can learn.
Hence, i have chosen this topic for my research: -
Discuss the impact of the influx of foreign talents into Singapore.
During EIR lesson in week 2, my learning journey began as i did practical activity 1 of EIR, in which i have to classify the resources that i have found pertaining to my topic into categories such as discussion forum, blog, WWW site and electronic journal/magazine/news. At the same time, i had to identify the purposes of the resources. The purposes of websites are as mentioned in my previous blog post, such as personal, information, advocacy, business/marketing, news and entertainment.
Then, for EIR lesson during week 3, i have learnt how to create a suitable search strategy for researching the internet.
Researching might seem easy, but it is definitely not easy when you type in the wrong search terms. When you use the wrong search terms, the end result will be a huge list of useless results. Thus, it is extremely important to plan a search strategy and find the right keywords before conducting the search.
In order to translate my research into an effective search query, i had to identify keywords and its variations that are relevant to my topic. This was something new as i usually do not use variation of keywords - perhaps that's the reason why i don't always get my desired results all the time.
Then, after identifying the keywords and its variations, boolean operators are used so as to narrow down my search and this indeed helps in getting more specific and relevant search results. Boolean operators include AND, which means that all the words have to be included in the search. It also includes OR, which can be used to link keywords and its variations, such that if the results do not have the actual keyword, then the variation can take its place. Another boolean operator include AND NOT, which is to exclude undesirable words and make the search more specific.
As such, my search query are as follows:
(impact OR effect) AND (influx OR inflow) AND (foreign talent* OR foreign expat* OR foreign worker*) AND (singapore)
With that, my evaluation of the two search engines (Google and Google Scholar) began.
And indeed, i was impressed by Google's search functions and features, as i realised that Google actually offers so many different search functions, such as offering users the flexibility of choosing results from “the web” or just “Pages from Singapore” alone. Besides that, there is also the advanced search, which can be used so as to define my search even more precisely to get desired results. The advanced search also offers a series of features, such as letting users specifying the language, the type of file format of results, the region to retrieve the resources, and much much more!
After evaluating Google's search facility, the next activity was to participate in a forum by posting a new discussion topic/question relating to my research topic, and i posted it in the Young NTUC forum.
http://www.youngntuc.com.sg/youngntuc/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2498&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
I felt that posting this was a brand new experience as i have never posted topics like this in forums before. Everytime i post in the forums, the topics are usually random, and for the purpose of casual conversation. As such, i was pretty anxious as i posted this topic, especially since i do not knowing how others will react or respond to my question.
However, i feel that participating in the forum for the purpose of my research is indeed helpful, because only in the forums, i can then get a diversity of views towards the issue on the influx of foreign talent. For example, if i were to research just from blogs itself, the blogs usually expresses the views of the blog owner towards the issue, and that is only from one person's perspective. A forum, on the other hand, provides the perspectives of many different people. To research on this topic effectively, it is definitely best to get varied views so as to reflect the viewpoints of different people.
Next, a citation must definitely be done so as to give proper acknowledgement to the owners for the resources used. If citations are not used, it would then be plagiarism, which is the act of taking or using another person's work and not acknowledging it. This also brings us to the part on integrity. As such, citation is an important feature in a research work.
Then, a bibliography refers to a list of citation. Apart from acknowledging the source of information, a bibliography also serves to offer readers more options for further reading as they might be interested in my topic and would like to find out more about it. They can then do so by going to the links that are included in my bibliography. Not only that, a bibliography can also be a representation of the research that i have done.
As such, i have learnt alot from Week 3's EIR lesson, such as evaluating search facilities, constructing effective search queries, posting useful questions in discussion forums, as well as creating citations and bibliography and i definitely look forward to the next EIR lesson.
