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Sara Thompson

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
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    "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."
Sara Thompson

Cooperative Library Instruction Project - 0 views

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    "CLIP is creating tutorials that specifically address the larger ideas of information literacy. The collection might look something like an interactive, online information literacy "text book" from which librarians or instructors anywhere can select and use pieces as they choose."
Sara Thompson

Invention Mobs by Leeann Hunter on Prezi - 0 views

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    Excellent short Prezi with 3 specific group activity examples that look at creativity, teaching failures, and cross-disciplinary research.  Each activity asks great questions of the group and individuals.  Invention Mobs: recreating creativity and collaboration in the writing classroom -- Leeann Hunter, Georgia Tech -- Roger Whitson, Emory from 2012 Computers and Writing Conference at North Carolina State University ACT 1: Playing with Others Select 2 objects in this room, on your person, or in your bag.  (60 seconds) Form groups and nominate 3 objects that don't belong together (90 seconds) Create a 4-line narrative that presents the objects to a specific audience (120 seconds) Q: How do we define creativity and why is it important?  Q: How do we define mobs and why is collaboration necessary?  ACT 2: Teaching with Others In groups of three, share a failed teaching experiment. (2 minutes) Merge into groups of six, and select three major activities destined for failure.  (3 minutes) Design a large-scale project that revisits and revises these failed teaching experiments. (5 minutes) Q: How do we cultivate creativity in the college writing class?  Q: How do we create effective teamwork structures?  ACT 3: Researching with Others Identify and pair up with your "research opposite." (2 minutes) Share current and recent research projects (3 minutes) Devise a collaborative research project that is also multimodal. (5 minutes) Q: How is interdisciplinary research creative?  Q: What are the possibilities in conducting collaborative and multimodal research?  multimodal:  WOVEN = written, oral, visual, electronic, nonverbal written / visual - document creative process with original art and blog entries oral / nonverbal - analyze and produce professional talks with "ideas worth sharing" a la TED electronic - connect collaborators via social media http://www.leeannhunter.com/invention/
Sara Thompson

UCI Libraries - Begin Your Research Tutorial - 3 views

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    Research tutorial from UC-Irvine; sections include Knowledge Cycle, Searching, Citations
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    This is great, Sara. Thanks for sharing!
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