The purpose of this activity is to inspire students to adopt structured methods when they explore and retrieve information. It is based on lab notebooking methods and on managing and documenting the flow of references in Zotero, a reference management software.

This session was part of an undergraduate, critical thinking and global perspectives course. The course is offered by various disciplines on campus. This instance focused on global challenges (The Seven Revolutions developed by csis.org). For the session the students applied two frameworks to data: authority is constructed and contextual and scholarship as conversation. Students learned about a data life cycle concept with emphasis on evaluation.

A general sample of how to set up the information literacy workshop in an escape room model.

Created by M. Brown-Salazar Saint Mary's College of CA This lesson was developed to have graduate level students explore social justice issues in information found on the internet. It is based on Dr. Safiya Noble's work: Algorithms of Oppression. Simplified, we asked students to consider that when we seek information, we need to examine the perspective/privilege of the voices/sources of information and identify/understand whose voices are represented and whose voices are missing and how that impacts/influences our understanding.

In small groups students give a presentation examining how the popular media reports scientific findings.

As people rely more and more on social media to get their news, the filter bubble becomes increasingly problematic. In this workshop, students learn how to evaluate whether a news site is reliable. This group activity takes about 30 minutes and can be used for many different audiences by adjusting the examples used.

Students write to communicate and their writing, when citing sources, must communicate what they understand of others’ writings. By asking students to write with the purpose of summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting a selected article to their classmate, they will experience what you experience when you read their writing. They will understand the purpose and mechanics of using sources in their writing. Activity is highly adaptable and suitable for independent readers high school and above. Activity can be modified for lower level learners.

A brief two page handout on how to read abstracts for scholarly journals for lower division undergraduates in particular. Examples include one from social sciences and one from humanities.