True or False

How do I know if someone is telling the truth or not?

This might prove a bad blog subject for me as I am the most gullible person I know. Tell me anything, and I will outright believe you, I promise. I feel like only in the last year have I been developing critical thinking skills and skepticism. Anyway, to know if someone is telling me the truth, I would counsel with my gut feeling. It has always tingled when something is amiss (that or I'm just hungry). Intuition. Cross-checking someone's testimony is a way to prove the truth. I go about doing that by asking someone else that is involved or that would know. Do the stories match? That is one way to catch a lie. As always, researching or consulting information resources like the internet, or books, or a third party sustain another person's truth or lie.

Hey, there is always knowing the answer before asking the question--you know for sure that way if someone speaks the truth or not.

Woops. Re-post of an Old Post

I decided that I want to do a research project about foreign students at SLU: a visual ethnography through photographs.

Just last semester I was a foreign student studying abroad, although when we get down to it, SLU Madrid is an 'American' university where 400 of the 600 students are visiting, 'study-abroad' students from all over the U.S. And about half of the permanent students are U.S. citizens that are enrolled in SLU Madrid but 'live in' and are from the United States. So, studying abroad in Madrid is not a true and total culture shock and as 'foreign exchange' as it can get.

I also lived for a year in Ecuador as an exchange student (in 2004) so I for one consider that type of immersion, where I am clearly out of my 'American' element and fellowship much more 'foreign exchange' than attending SLU Madrid. I have in my mind an idea of what it should/could be like to be a foreign student at Madrid, and who might qualify as a foreign student: a semester-only or year-only visiting student that is permanently enrolled in another university in another country, and who speaks English as a second language.

I really like all things international--people, language, and culture, so I should have found this project exciting and expected it to be an immediate huge success. Boy was my assumption inaccurate. It has been a slow start. All over campus I see so many east Asian students walking around with one another and speaking in their native language. Seeing so many foreigners would have made for easy access to subjects for this project.

So far, I have completed an interview and photograph collection from one foreign student studying here at SLU, and she was initially a student at the Madrid campus now completing her degree here. She is originally from the Philippines, and she at first served as my interview pilot tester. She has also proven a good connection as she knows a couple other foreign students on this campus.

I have recently learned that on Tuesday evenings there is an "intercambio" session in the BSC where foreign students can sit with native speaker volunteers for an hour just to practice their English skills. To gain access to this group, as an intercambio volunteer is a possible way to gain access to some more research subjects.

April 1, 2009 9:35 PM

How do I solve a problem I've never had to solve before?

For example, I did not know until just now how to make a new post on my blog. I read on Katilyn's blog that the first step she would take is to admit that there is a problem. I liked that. Before I saw that, my first step would have been to: ask for help. See what someone else might know about the problem. That would usually mean for me calling my mom. Asking someone else that I consider knowledgeable. Nowadays there is this handy dandy little tool called the internet. The world at my fingertips. Doing research to see if there is any literature or documentation out there on the problem is a route to take when solving a never-before-solved problem. That is how I would get started on solving such a problem.

For me, I _was_ going to wait until class tomorrow and ask a classmate how to go about posting a new topic on my blog. I looked through other peoples' blogs to see how they might be loading their posts and comments. Then I just sat and stared at my computer screen until I saw the top menu bar, and then the button "new post". Problem solved.

Another such problem I solved with this method was babysitting a little boy with gum stuck in his hair. I had never faced such a problem before. So before I went to phone my mom, I first had to soothe the little boy, and get him to sit still and stop crying. By that time I had thought better about phoning other people, and decided to do research on the internet for home remedies to get gum out of hair. I found that dousing the besieged hair in olive oil, and leaving it in for several minutes was a successful solution--luckily his hair was very short, so I picked out the now slippery, sticky-less gum with a comb with very little fuss. Voila. Problem solved.

In conclusion, I support researching a problem on the internet to find a solution.