Welcome, glad you made it!
I am Julie Morfin and a Master of Arts in Teaching with Preliminary Education Specialist, Mild/Moderate Credential is what I am seeking through Brandman University. This is my second Term with Brandman, I am an online student that reserves the right to utilize the Modesto campus, (which I may need to do for Math, yikes). My Career aspirations will probably sound extremely selfish, I really just want to enjoy my daily interactions with the students, I want to enrich the quality of life that Special needs students experience when they are associated with my classroom or resource center.  I would like to have a degree that will allow myself preference over other teaching candidates in my area.   Long story short, I want to wear flip flops to work. 
The specific aspects of my career path that I plan on researching further has to do with bridging the gap between parents and IEP's Individualized education Plans or 504's. Children with specific learning disabilities, that fall just below the baseline average of academic standard are an area of concern to me. Some teachers confuse this with laziness or lack of parental involvement. I would like to explore this issue so that I can have a positive impact on administrator's, teachers and parents that I may interact with in the future. I am actually quite embarrassed at my current ability to find and correctly cite scholarly literature. I am a cynical by nature and generally don't trust websites, articles or even history books, as I find the lion's share of people have an agenda behind their "carefully researched information," so revising my methodology on evaluation is not something I am really concerned with. I think I may have stumbled upon the most important lesson for me regarding research as William Badke points out in his book Research Strategies, "You may be in fact saying to yourself, I've never been good at this research thing, I don't think I have a good research project in me." Badke responds, "Of course you don't, a good research project is out there, not inside you."(Badke, 2014, p. 22) I have always put too much emphasis on personal experience, which has generally gotten me "by" in the past, but I fear it won't fare well into University level higher learning and beyond. As the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education points out, knowledge practices, are ways in which learners can increase their understanding of these information literacy concepts (ACRL Board, 2016).  I can copy and paste the six conceptual frames that are the authority of the framework, but I honestly had to research definitions and synonyms so that I could get a clearer understanding of these big fancy college words. (Please say that with a draw)

• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual (The information source is put together and depends on the context in which it is being used. But what if I just want to use the part that proves my theory?)
• Information Creation as a Process (series of progressive and interdependent steps by which an end is attained, in this case possibly just the ability to collect scholarly information that has already been collected by others in order to obtain  "metaliteracy, which offers a renewed vision of information literacy as an overarching set of abilities in which students are consumers and creators of information ("Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education | Association of College & Research Libraries [ACRL]," 2016).  Me, a creator of information?  I'll give that the old college try!)
• Information Has Value (agreed, I once read a discussion post where a student responded to a prompt in a main post with "I think you should feed children." My eye started twitching, how was I supposed to reciprocate a response to that?  It did fuel my false sense of superiority though,..just say' n)
• Research as Inquiry (There is a question, that needs to be answered, not one I already think I know the answer to.  Ugh! A blow to my ego!) 
• Scholarship as Conversation (I thought scholarship really meant money given to someone with potential, that's all I ever heard growing up.  Apparently it means "knowledge acquired by study" ...communicated,  hmmmmm, I still have a shot at a scholarship, woot woot! )
• Searching as Strategic Exploration (purposefully and thoroughly exploring the information, purpose and thorough, two things I find myself innately lacking, I'm working on it though)

I guess I will end this post with my newly cultivated goal for this course, (I am really hoping for some kind of an award or medal for this...) I want to become information literate.

References

Badke, W.B. (2014). Taking Charge. In Research Strategies: Finding your way through the information fog (5th ed., p.22). Bloomingdale, IN: iUniverse, Inc.

Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education | Association of College & Research
Libraries (ACRL). (2016, January 11). Retrieved May 6, 2016 from
http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework

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