MistyK,
"The shank sounds like the thing that holds the needle tho. Is that correct?" No. The shank type indicates how the feet attach to the machine. The slant shank is only for certain Singer machines. Most feet will be low shank, high shank or slant shank. There are also other type of attachment.
"After reading around some on the board it sounds like a walking foot is something that you need to actually quilt with." A walking foot that fits the machine properly is nice to have for the quilting, but not absolutely necessary in most cases, and usually never needed for the piecing part of quilting.
"Do you know why the feed dogs on the 301 are narrow. Is that supposed to help the material move better somehow." No. It's a design thing. Older straight stitch machines (301, 221, 201, 15, etc) had no need for widely spaced feetdogs, as the neeedle only goes up and down in a straight plane. When the zigzag models came out the needle moved side to side and would hit the feeddogs if they had not been moved farther apart. The new electronic machine with the very wide zigzag have dogs even farther apart.
Jenny at sew-classic has a lot of info the you need to read try these two blogs of hers.
http://shop.sew-classic.com/What-sha...hank-Style.htm (good drawings)
http://www.sew-classic.com/uploads/W...structions.pdf (good description of what the WF does)
Cathy