Blog for July 11:

"It's not Harry Potter" and "How to read a scholarly article": I found both of these articles helpful in that they gave some practical suggestions for successfully navigating a scholarly article. One piece of advice I will definitely take is to pay more attention to the abstract and the introduction and see what I can glean from that before jumping into the full text of the article.

"Writing an annotated bibliography": this article had some good suggestions that will help me as I start to put together my annotated bibliography. One of the main questions that has come up as I've started to collect resources has been "how can I tell if this article is necessary?" and this article had a number of ideas for how to answer that question.

About my annotated bibliography:

—My topic is jazz pedagogy for beginning-level instrumentalists as well as players who are coming from a classical background. I'm hoping this will be broad enough... if not, I will widen it more.
—Not exactly sure how to judge when a topic becomes "timely" so I will have to ask this question tomorrow in class.
—Jazz pedagogy has changed in the methodology used: completely aural/oral, using charts, using transcription, using recordings, etc. I'm looking forward to finding out more about how the methodology has changed over time.
—At this point, the main author I saw coming up on the IC database was David Baker. In terms of other authors, I don't have the expertise yet in this subject to know who are the heavy hitters.
— I already know that the methodology of jazz pedagogy can differ depending on the age of the student and prior background (classical training, etc). Does the student know how to read notation yet? Does she have any experience improvising? These are all considerations that go into figuring out the best methodology for the student.
— The main research question that will guide me is "is my topic to wide or narrow, and how can I make it better?"