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Sara Thompson

"I need three peer reviewed articles" or the Freshman research paper | Information Want... - 0 views

meredith.wolfwater.com/...or-the-freshman-research-paper

instruction info-literacy libraries writing education

shared by Sara Thompson on 08 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • And every year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.
  • Expecting a first-year student to be able to grasp literary criticism and science articles written for other PhD’s seems crazy to me.
  • It becomes more about finding an article that is at least somewhat related to their topic than finding good evidence for their argument.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet: 1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy 2. The ability to search in library databases 3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill) 4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic 5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it 6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper 7. The ability to write effectively
  • Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy.
  • But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world.
  • I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines.
Sara Thompson

Can You Put that in the Form of a Question? | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...can-you-put-form-question

libraries info-literacy instruction teaching assignments research education

shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • One of their assignments is to interview a researcher in their field. This year, since the students had a nice mix of majors from across the curriculum, we used reports from the interviews as an opportunity to analyze on how research traditions vary from one discipline to another and how these experts’ processes differ from those of non-experts.
  • One thing that many students remarked on as they reported on their interviews: the activities that define research are enormously varied from one discipline to another. The process a researcher goes through to examine the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote one of his history plays is a world apart from what a researcher does to develop a new vaccine or what an ethnographer does when studying an isolated culture in Brazil.
  • The scientists all had co-authors; the social scientists were a mix of solo and collaborative projects, and the humanists all performed solo acts. And yet, it became clear that all of them were working within an ongoing conversation. None of them was doing work that didn’t draw on and respond to the work of others.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Every interview subject conducted some sort of a literature review as part of any research project
  • Every researcher described some strategies for keeping up with new developments in their area of expertise, all of which involved some scanning of new publications and some personal contact with individuals exploring the same territory.
  • For most, presenting research at conferences was a common part of bringing their research to completion. For all, writing up results for publication was an important final step, and they seemed acutely aware of the pecking order for publication venues in their field.
  • (In contrast, undergraduates mostly encounter articles within databases, called up by key words, not as artifacts within a particular journal which carries clout.)
  • One thing the students all gained through these interviews was an appreciation that research is not a matter of finding answers in other people’s publications. Every scholar interviewed described how they had asked a question that nobody had asked before, a question they couldn’t answer themselves until they had completed the research. It struck me that so much of what undergraduates experience as “research” is very nearly the opposite, a process of uncovering answers others have already arrived at.
  • I’m also thinking about what these interviews said collectively about how real research is conducted. It makes me a little crazy when students abandon a truly interesting question because they can’t find sources to quote that provide the answer, or when they change their topic based on what they can find easily. Or (shudder) when they say they've written their paper, but need help finding five sources to cite. Clearly, they are not learning how to do research; they aren't even learning what research is.  What I would really, really like is to figure out how to give every student the experience of not worrying so much about getting the right answers, but learning how to ask a really good question. The kind they won't find answered in the library.
  • Sara Thompson on 02 Jun 12
     
    "I teach a course in the spring called Information Fluency... It's an upper division undergraduate course pitched to students who are planning to go to graduate school, giving them a chance to learn more about the way the literature of their field works as well as generally how to use library and internet tools for research."
Deb Robertson

Is There a Difference Between Critical Thinking and Information Literacy? | Weiner | Jo... - 1 views

ojs.lboro.ac.uk/...1575

critical thinking information literacy thinking

shared by Deb Robertson on 09 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Deb Robertson on 09 Feb 12
     
    This paper investigates the similarities and differences between two important ideas in information processing and knowledge utilisation. Those ideas are [critical thinking] and [information literacy]. This suggests that [information literacy] and its associated procedures could significantly augment current instruction in [critical thinking] and indeed, the possibility has been explored by some authors in the current literature. A merging of the two ideas would involve [information literacy] providing tools and techniques in the processing and utilisation of knowledge and [critical thinking] supplying the particulars and interpretations associated with a specific discipline. This type of integration could lead to instructional programs similar in concept and application to those in research methodology where methods from statistics are integrated with the techniques and skills associated with a specific discipline. The development of a curriculum of this type would change functions and perceptions from private, individualised mentation, now associated with [critical thinking], to a more easily learned and practiced process suitable across the breadth of disciplines.
Mark Lindner

A New Version of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL 2.0) « INFOdocket - 0 views

infodocket.com/...e-encyclopedia-of-life-eol-2-0

science

shared by Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11
     
    "Providing nearly 700,000 species, 35 million pages of scanned literature and over 600,000 photos of living creatures, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has recently launched a new version of its free online system in response to requests from the general public, citizen scientists, educators and professional biologists around the world for a site that was more engaging, accessible and personal."
  • Mark Lindner on 04 Oct 11
     
    May be a great resource for general biological information on species.
Sara Thompson

Wolfram|Alpha Analyzes Shakespeare's Plays - 0 views

blog.wolframalpha.com/...ha-analyzes-shakespeares-plays

dighum literature data statistics reading language search

shared by Sara Thompson on 11 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 11 Apr 12
     
    "We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare's plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard's plays in an entirely new way."
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