I was getting frustrated with this assignment at first because I was trying very hard to use some of the boolean techniques that we learned about in class on monday.   I started by using google and searching some phrases with key words.  My first search was “op-ed public school teachers” and I was able to find a few hits, but nothing prior to 1970.  I tried to use the date function, but unfortunately once I narrowed it down to before 1970 there was not any hits.  I then moved over to Jstor and tried some key words there, and sorting it by oldest to newest.  There were some hits prior to 1970, but I was having trouble find an op-ed.  There were a lot of great articles, but they were all scholarly sources.

After spending a good 30 minutes on this process I decided to try to find a specific incident first and then try to find the op-ed from there.  On wikipedia I found a page about a New York City teachers strike back in 1968.  FINALLY, after finding this incident I began to search for Op-eds.  I went to the bottom of the page at wikipedia and began searching for articles on the topic.  I found one of them and then logged on using the ProQuest access from the Mason Library.  TASK 1 COMPLETE

I then started working on Task #2.

Since this task was more ambiguous, I decided to go directly into research.  Since using wikipedia had been really successful before, I returned to that website and looked up Solar Power. I found out the first documented case was in the 1860’s.  What I did next was google search “solar power 1860”  and a lot of the hits were about the development of a solar reflector in the 1860’s by french mathematician August Mouchet.  The link to this document is right here! 

Finally, I embarked on the final task in the scavenger hunt! On cloud nine after a successful 2nd task I had high hopes for task number 3.  That was until I read the question.  This one was much more subjective.  In all honesty the first thing that I did was to call my mom, who is a resident of California and ask her if she knew about anything.  Unfortunately, she is not well versed in the history of California voting.  My first plan was to pull out all of the un-needed words from the prompt.  Since voting data was a necessity I used the “+” boolean operation on it to make sure that was included.  That left me with a search of “resource history of California ballot initiatives +voting data”.  From here, I was really confused because this search is much more ambiguous than the previous two searches.  It allows for the readers opinion.  I spent about 15 minutes searching through results and evaluating different outcomes.  I ended up settling on a resource that I found through the University of California Berkeley’s Law School.

Overall I found this project to be interesting and a little frustrating.  Im sure that it wasn’t meant to be easy, but I was thrown off because of the ambiguity of the 3rd topic.  I enjoy that all three required us to use different search tactics and rules that we had learned about in class on Monday.