LAT1 - The Long Road

It has been awhile since I've blogged on here, and that has been due to being tied up with LAT1, a 10-15 page research paper. I did pass SSC1, Social Sciences by the way, and spent around a month just getting started on LAT1. We choose our own topics for LAT1, and the greatest challenge is finding enough sources for that topic as you're going to need at least 10 of them.

Anyone remember "choose your own adventure" books where you turn the page only to find out you just got eaten by an alligator or fell into a ravine? Well, LAT1 can be like this:

- Choose your topic only to find out there are hardly any sources for it. The end.

- Choose your topic, it has plenty of sources, but the sources aren't reputable enough. The end.

- Choose your topic only to find out it isn't researchable. The end.

And then there are delays. You must select a paragraph and highlight it for a paraphrasing assignment but you need Adobe Acrobat or some other software you don't have to be able to highlight sections of a pdf file. Fortunately, the wise people on the message boards have all kinds of workarounds.

LAT1 is slow going if you haven't done a research paper before. Learning APA formatting, how to cite correctly, thesis statements, main points, and evidence, etc. But this course has given me a great chance to truly assess the value of WGU support and I must say everything has been impressive.

I am using the message boards all the time asking questions, e-mailing instructors, chatting with instructors, and I always get a response in at least a couple hours if there are no instructors available to chat.

To chat - you look at the mentor contact button and it will say "available" and you simply click and enter your info. You wait about 10 seconds and an instructor will say "Hi" and you can ask your questions live. Easy.

If no one is available in chat it will say "click to e-mail" and someone will respond after a short while. If it's the middle of the night you'll have to wait until the next day. Or you can ask a question in the message board and a student may answer.

Taskstream is where you submit your work and while there were some criticisms when I began my enrollment they have been great for me. Grading is fast and I even had something graded on Halloween which would never happen at a brick and mortar school.

I am not done with LAT1 and still need to finish LUT1 within a couple weeks before the term ends but am confident I can do it.

With that being said, The Annotated Bibliography be damned. What a pain.