Research--You mean there's more than just google?

My students have been in the labs researching in a "Tom Romano" fashion; they are doing an iSearch paper. Each of them chose an issue that needs to be addressed in Orem. Then, they were required to get 2 newspaper articles and 1 magazine article; 2 other sources could be anything they liked. Many of them told me "I couldn't find anything..." They had done the "broad sweep" of google-ing their topic.

Once we started to narrow the search, adding key words like Utah, Orem, Utah Valley, 2008, etc. to their topics, they watched the millions of sites dwindle. We would try to get the most relevent sources--where we had only 100-200 articles to search. It was very eye-opening for the students to watch the Internet, which seems so large, become microscopic and detailed. In a very real way, it's like the google maps zoom feature.

By and large, I had to work with every student to narrow the field. Most of them were exultant when they found their sources, and they played with their own searches to see "what else [they] could find."

Good research is a good reward, it turns out!