Week 4 in CD 315 land has really opened my eyes to a lot of wonderful things that our field is doing on the internet. There is an abundance of resources from which to pool from in our research. When I first started researching my topic, I was not finding what I thought was concrete research material. For instance, I would put in a topic like speech and language advocacy, and all the returns I received were links to just the main topic of speech and language pathology. Therefore, I retired from the research end of things and relaxed for a couple of days this week. Upon returning to my research endeavors today, I immediately found an article on the ASHA home page that directly talked about my topic and gave an email address to request more information on legislation. So, me being the inquisitive person I am, I emailed and requested any information available on this topic as well as ways to get involved after graduation in advocacy work.

Of course, with every good thing comes the bad. While searching the net for other sources of information on my topic, I ran across an piece of legislation in Michigan that dealt with the current state administration and their rejection for regulation on Audiology and Speech/Language Pathology. Maybe Mrs. McComas, being from Michigan, can enlighten us on this topic and its impact on our field.

Upon finding this article, my fury was again enraged against political systems, because they dont think that our profession is important enough, and their ignorance in areas of our field. So I added that page to my favorites as evidence of for my topic. You may be wondering how that ties in with my topic of Advocacy. That decision in Michigan is leaving hundreds and hundreds people without intervention because of a handful of people in a high office that think they know the answers to all the world's problems. If we could get this type of information out to the people along with information about success rates and severity that comes with lack of intervention, then maybe our field would be elevated to a level like other therapy fields, such as Physical Therapy. Its funny to me, but more people in this country think it is more important to walk than to talk!

However, overall this has been a good week. Work is excellent. We are having great weather and I shot 3 under par today golfing...BIG PLUS! I have learned a lot this week about researching further and deeper until I finally find something dealing with my topic. Everything that is on the internet is not as credible as they would lead you to believe. You can almost bet on an .org or .gov or .edu but most of the .coms I visit anymore are being hosted by any backyard Joe. So, I guess thats a learning experience! Do not trust all websites!

One question: I would like to have a f2f meeting to get concrete info on our MRP and the various Genres. If this is possible, either individually or group, please let me know! Until next week..tata