Anisha Cornish

Information Literacy

Cornish Anisha
Professor Bartlett
CSIT 101
7 June 2016
Information Literacy
1. The keyword I used was roomba. The name of the database I used is Science Direct.
I chose this database because it contains articles about technology.

Anisha Cornish
Information Literacy

2. The current events article that I read, An $800 Clothes-Folding Robot Actually Makes
Sense, is about a robot that can fold laundry. This robot, the FoldiMate, was invented to do a
boring, repetitive task that is often not very fun. Its only ability is to fold laundry (and only in a
certain way unless additional styles are purchased); it cannot perform any other jobs. The
FoldiMate and its new technology will be available in 2018.
3. The keywords I used to do the search were folding, mate, and robot. I used
Google and Bing as my search engines.
Google

Bing (mostly had better results than Google)

Did not show videos in search results

The FoldiMate website is on the first

results

page of results

Showed videos as part of the search

The FoldiMate website did not appear

until halfway down the first page of

Only 865,000 results

search results

Over eight million results

4. This article was published on June 8, 2016 and has not been updated as of June 11. It
is related to the topic of emerging technology because the technology needed to make a robot
that folds clothes is fairly new and still developing. The article is written by Greg Nichols, who
is qualified to write about this topic because he is a full-time journalist and has written a lot
about technology. The information seems to be trustworthy, even though there is no real
evidence in the article such as statistics or testimonials. Unless the article was written to
promote the FoldiMate, the author has no reason to lie. The purpose is mainly to inform the
readers of this new technology. The material is objective because it does not encourage the
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Information Literacy

readers to buy the robot, it merely makes a point about how much our society relies on
technology.
5. The article from the database is harder to access because you have to pay to subscribe
to the database. It might be possible to find this journal article through a general internet search,
but using the ScienceDirect databases search tools allows you to make very specific searches,
and you have to be a subscriber to do that. The current event article is easier to access because it
is from a website that anyone can go on. It does not appear that ZDNet charges for access to
articles at any point in time, so even if someone has read a lot of articles on there already, they
can still access and read this one.
The current event article is less than a week old, which makes it timely because it is
keeping up with the current technology trend of robots. The journal article was published in
2009, which was about seven years after the Roomba vacuum robot came out, and a few years
after TUG robots started being used in hospitals. It might have been considered fairly timely
when it was first published, but now there are many other, more recent articles on those same
topics.
The author of the journal article, Colin Barras, is a science writer who has written for
many well-known publications. He is very qualified to write about this topic because of his
experience covering technology news. Greg Nichols wrote the current event article. He is a
credible writer because he is a full-time journalist and he has experience writing about
technology.

Citations
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Anisha Cornish
Information Literacy
"An $800 Clothes-folding Robot Actually Makes Sense | ZDNet." ZDNet. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 June
2016.
Bain, Marc. "People Cannot Wait to Pay $800 for a Laundry-folding Robot."Quartz. N.p., 07 June
2016. Web. 13 June 2016.
Barras, Colin. "Useful, Lovable and Unbelievably Annoying." New Scientist204.2738 (2009): 2223. ScienceDirect. Web. 13 June 2016.
Burch, Maggie. "This Robot Will Fold Your Laundry for You-for the Low Price of $850." Glamour.
N.p., n.d. Web. 13 June 2016
Marks, Paul. "Humans Are Viewing Robots as More than Just Dull Machines." New
Scientist 198.2650 (2008): 24-25. ScienceDirect. Web. 13 June 2016.