This blog post is co-arthured by Abby Robenalt, Jenna Kleinmann and I. We chose one of our sources we used during our research for our collaboration project on decoding dog food ingredients.

The website is called Dog Food Chat and it discusses the worst dog food brands. It gives the readers an idea of what ingredients that are not safe for our dogs. The ingredients to look out for are:

By Products
Non Specific animal source
Contains BHA, BHT and Ethoxyquin
No Meats in the first five ingredients
Contains artifical colorants
Contains ground corns or whole grain corn
The website then continues to identify popular dog food brands that contain these ingredients

The brands are:
Beneful
Eukanbua
Hills Science Diet
Iams
Kibble N' Bits
Opitmum
Pedigree
Pro Plan
Purina One
Royal Canin

The website listed a discussion board to discuss their opinions and experiences with these types of dog food.

http://dogfoodchat.com/worst-dog-food-brands/

This week in class, we picked group members and began talking about our collaborative projects. My group members are Abby Robenalt and Jenna Kleinman and this is a co-authored blog. We will be talking about our plans and ideas for our project.

Choosing a topic for our collaborative research project was very easy for us, all being animal lovers, especially dogs! We chose the topic of what ingredients are in the food that we are feeding our animals. All being pet lovers, and Andrea working at Pets Smart this is project that will really be important to all of us. After watching Food Inc. in class and see what was placed in our foods we thought to our self’s we can only imagine what is place in our pets food. We are all curious as to what is good for our dogs to eat and what isn’t. There are many pet foods out there that all filled with fillers and ingredients that are not good for our animals at all. After all talking, we realized we all feed our dogs different brands of dog food. For our project we plan on interviewing various people in Pets Mart that are buying pet food. We also want to interview a local vet to see what he/she has to say about the food we are feeding our animals. We are also going to look on Pet food websites to see testimonials from buyers and if there are any informational videos on specific brand dog foods. 

The questions we would like to find out are: Is this harming our pet? Is my pet getting their full nutritional value from their food? What are the long term affects it has on our animals? Our audience for our project will be pet owners and it will be an informative piece. We want to find answers to our questions to be able to inform pet owners of what their animals are really eating.

For this blog post I will discuss the article “Collaborative Writing in Composition Studies,” by Sheryl Fontaine and Susan M. Hunter.

What are the different types of collaboration? What types of collaboration have you done before (for school, work, etc?)

There are many different types of collaboration such as dialogic, scaffolding, and hierarchical. Scaffolding is a project that is done with two partners. They work together and share ideas. I have done this all through out my schooling from elementary, high school and college. Dialogical is group work where each person is responsible for his or her own part. This can be successful with communication. I am currently taking writing for the workplace and the project we are currently one is dialogical. Our topic is Work Life Balance and there are 8 of us and we are all working on different aspects of this topic. This is definitely a collaboration project that I enjoy the least but if the communication is not there, the project can get confusing. Hierarchical collaboration is a type of group work where there is someone in charge and each member has a certain role for the group project. You can see this a lot in education in the older grade levels in high school and college.

All three types of these collaborations are important to do group projects. It is something that I can use in a classroom when I am a teacher and I am using it now in college. 

For this blog post, I read the article “Turns of Thought” by Donna Qualley.

What is your understanding of being a reflective and reflexive researcher?

After reading this article, it states the definition of reflection is about interpreting own suppositions (and practices), by looking at own perspectives from those of others, and by subjecting own assumptions to critical review. When we reflect our thoughts, we think about it and think about how we feel about it. We can apply it not just into our writing but our teaching as well. “Reflexivity on the other hand, does not originate in the self but always occurs in response to a person’s critical engagement with an other.” Reflexive research is a response of the research that the writer can go back to examine and discover the critique’s questions and ideas.

It seems to me that you need both reflective and reflexive in your research for it to be successful. They seem to go hand in hand. 

After reading the article "An Introduction to Qualitative Research" I realize that this is something i've practiced and done before I just never really know it was called this. I learned the proper definitions and I was able to easily understand the list provided. The Qualitative questions answer why? how? and what way? Quantitative research answers how much? how many? how often? to what extent? I was introduced to these questions back in late elementary school. I am very familiar with this type of research. qualitative interviews are informal. It would be an interview that you know the person and feel comfortable with them and it's more like a normal conversation. Whereas qualitative interviews for very formal and professional. Examples would be for researching a new product or discovery or interviewing for a career.


In the article "Situating Narrative Inquiry," I learned that narrative inquiry there are four components to make a narrative. 
1. a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject.
2. a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data.
3. a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific
4. a widening in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing 


I have used this research in the past for other classes and I think this can be used for our upcoming projects in the class such as our oral history.

In class we watched the movie Food Inc. This was the first time I have ever seen the truth about what is in our food and how they are processed. I wasn't surprised to know that the intentions of the industry are money hungry and get away with cheap labor by providing us with harmful chemical altered food. It was disturbing to see some of the footage in the movie and I've learned a lot of food that I was ignorant of before. Below I am going to answer three questions from the worksheet that was provided.

I love the time era that I am growing up in. I've seen large big box TVs transform into slim flat TVs. I've witnessed huge grey computers with large monitors to small screens turn into petite thin laptops. Everything around me is evolving. I love that I am growing with this technology and I am learning it as everyone else is learning it. I would be able to write this blog right now if there were no internet. I'd be writing it in a composition notebook and only my professor would be reading it. Technology changes the way I think and the way most people think. My brain is growing in a way that a girl my age 30 years ago never use to think. It is all because of technology. I think it can only get better, more exciting and I have the opportunity to experience that and incorporate the technology that I can use in my classroom.
This is a wonderful thing to experience because I will have no issues adapting or keeping up in today's society. 

In this blog post, I will talk about the feedback I received for my twitterive.

I was very excited to share my doggy twitterive with my classmates. I had this in my head and I was happy to put it all on the website. I did state that I wanted it from the dog's view but somewhere along that process, it turned into I was telling the story. That was pointed out to me and I didn't even realize it until I presented it.
As suggested, I am going to write this completely from Chasey's point of view and maybe I will add a few highlights of my own words as well and write a complete story. I will go in depth with Chasey's thoughts and actions. I will add a lot more narrative.
I will also personalize it with pictures of me and Chasey together. That was a great suggestion!
Thank you for all of your feedback, I can't wait to start Chasey's story.