"A Ha" Moments in the Digital Age

These moments of clarity have come at funny and unexpected times for me.

I'm always telling my students to give themselves chances to see with an open mind and be receptive to new possibilities. I didn't take my own advice when I came across the Soccer Challenges and almost perceived them to be childish. Boy, was I wrong! And I did have to try and try again to get at least to the 50% mark. But what a feeling of accomplishment as opposed to having to sneak a peek at the answers to beat the system or game. I wasn't even tempted to see the answers. That short lesson on key words will stay in my mind , hopefully! You have to know what you're looking for and this comes from a person who is overwhelmed by all the yellow at Superstore so she never goes in there and or Wal-Mart with all of the choices and can't seem to remember why she even went into the store when all the stuff comes into view !!!

Recently, I remembered back to our first Master's class when Cara Bradley came to La Ronge and talked about Boolean terms which "refers to a system of logical thought developed by the English mathematician and computer pioneer, George Boole (1815-64)." " Boolean logic is a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE. Boolean logic is especially important for computer science because it fits nicely with the binary numbering system, in which each bit has a value of either 1 or 0. Another way of looking at it is that each bit has a value of either TRUE or FALSE."
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/Boolean_logic.html. I've posted this URL and now I am having a bit of doubt about it's authenticity and reliability. Looks like I need more practice.Yikes!
I was sure I was hearing Cara incorrectly and was amazed I had never heard that word before. I have since learned other interesting words like hyponyms ( words with special meaning ), Hypernyms ( words with more generalized meaning), and then finally a familiar word- synonyms when trying to decide what words to choose when creating an effective search word.
I read somewhere that Shakespeare had about 10 thousand words to use in his day while Eminem had approximately a million. I see why now!!!!


I've had to laugh at myself many times since Cara's first computer library search techniques when I think back to the difficulties I had coming up with no results in my cybrary search for a topic and ended up with NO RESULTS found! At first I was in total disbelief that the system couldn't find one darn book or article I wanted and now I know I wasn't giving it specific information that it needed to do its search...And I couldn't get over what effect the little quotation marks had on the whole search!!
There are 'keywords- effective 'as is', intermediate words- reflect the most important ideas', words with little effect, and stop words'. I guess my first year of search words most likely fell into the stop words category-ignored by the search engine! At this point, I can't say that I am an 'expert searcher' nor do I have a long list of 'professional technology vocabulary' but I do have a dictionary and thesaurus to help me get to those 'nym' words and 'as is' words.