Demetrius Gibson

This weeks’ speaker for freshman seminar was Dr. Dana Williams. She opened her power point with Research and Methodology: Inscription as a Liberating Practice. Dr. Williams expressed that one of the goals for freshman seminar was to pursue a lifetime of independent discovery including the appreciation of the importance of research. She mentioned two objectives she should learn from the seminar, primary and related. The primary objective is to identify the principle components of research and to relate these components to the group project. The related objective is to show the relationship of the previous lectures to the group project and to review the previous weeks’ lectures to reaffirm this relationship. Lastly the purpose is to advance knowledge, solve a problem and inquire. Research is a key component in college and in the world around us. We use research to answer the questions we have that can only be answered by physically figuring out why it occurs. In this freshman seminar lecture I began to grasps the issues I have had with research. Towards the end of Dr. Williams lecture she presented an academic excellence and independent discovery cycle of awareness, memory, and vision. Awareness was defined as memory or knowledge that has been institutionalized, memory was defined as historical memory, and vision was defined as imagined or unimagined possibilities.