Short Description
This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.
Learning Outcomes
Describe different sources of information
Articulate benefits/drawbacks of information sources
Consider information as influence
Investigate role of various media in different forms of "conversation" (scholarly, popular, etc)
Define library spaces/terminology/sources
Participation Type
Ability Level
Potential Pitfalls and Teaching Tips
This activity requires space!
Course Context (e.g. how it was implemented or integrated):
The Sphere of Discourse works well in courses that may traditionally get an orientation to the library. It can be modified to work for specific disciplines or contexts.
Suggested Citation
Hoppe, Beth. "Sphere of Discourse." CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments). 2019. https://projectcora.org/lesson/sphere-discourse
Attachments
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