Community of Online Research Assignments

Data Literacy

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.

The Information Spectrum

This concept map and activity explores how various sources of information are created, accessed, and shared. Students collaboratively define what makes a source traditional, emerging, public, or exclusive. Students are given a type of information source to map on the grid according to each axis, and provide a rationale for their placement.

Visual Aids and Descriptors in Primary Source Evaluation & Curation

This lesson was developed for HIS484 (Topics in the History of Gender and Sexuality/Pride in the time of HIV/AIDS) in the Spring of 2018. The students’ final assignment culminated in a multimedia or digital research project on a topic of their choosing and heavily relied on primary source and visual materials. This lesson focuses on how students, as content curators and analysts, can engage in deeper analysis and contextualization of the sources they present through their projects.

Synthesis

As part of the research process, students need to learn how to organize and synthesize their sources. This short lecture, followed by a matrix outline given to every student, gives students the opportunity to focus their research question even more and to add their own ideas to the conversation of research within their chosen topic.

Narrowing a Topic

This lesson, created for English 2010, or Argumentative Writing, teaches students how to use library databases and keywords in order to focus their research topics. Most students come prepared with a general or broad topic in mind, but they need to narrow their focus in order to get more relevant search results. Here they simultaneously learn to search in and use the library databases and to focus their research topics.

Access, Power, & Privilege

This activity is designed to support teaching at the intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. The choose-your-own scenario activity, designed in LibWizard, can be used in a flipped classroom setting or in a traditional classroom. The choose-your-own scenario activity is inspired by and adapts questions from: Hare, S. & Evanson, C. (2018). Information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. College and Research Libraries.

Occupy APA: A Citation Sit-in

This lesson was co-developed by Daniel Ransom and Nicole Branch. This is an intensive APA workshop that could be broken into parts. It covers both APA citation and formatting, with a protest theme. The workshop was conducted as a stand-alone, outside of class workshop at Holy Names University in 2014 and 2015. Though Occupy is now dated, the theme of protest could be adapted to something more current. We didn't think it would be possible to make APA citation engaging, but this lesson did just that. It was especially popular with nursing and education students.

Richard Prince, Aesthetics, and the Value of Information

This lesson was developed for a Photography course on the theory and psychology of photography (non-majors and majors both take this course). This lesson is typically presented at the beginning of a course section on the aesthetics of photography. It was meant to challenge their assumptions about art, information (online) as a commodity, and copyright practices of artists. Students may be asked to look up Richard Prince before class or during, as the lesson suggests.

Database "Speed Dating"

This activity introduces students to a variety of databases in their discipline by asking them to quickly review and prepare an “elevator speech” on the database’s best features and content. Students then do three rounds of “speed dating” to share with other students what they’ve discovered.

Scholarly Article Autopsy

This lesson is intended as a single session within a major’s research methods course. Rather than using a shorter “scholarly vs. non-scholarly” comparison worksheet, this activity asks students to work in groups to systematically examine a scholarly article in depth, identify and evaluate its various components visually and in writing, and then compare it to a non-scholarly article on the same topic. Groups then report back to the entire class.

Scholarly Articles: Reading for Understanding

This activity/assignment was designed for a first year composition course in collaboration with an English/Writing instructor. It could be used in an information literacy credit course, First Year Experience course, or in another discipline-specific context. The purpose of the lesson is to lay the foundation for students to be able to read scholarly work more effectively and critically.

Evaluating Historical Sources

Made to be an in class activity or a library resource requested by professors for courses. The first page goes with the instruction portion of a class. 'What is a primary source? What is a secondary source? What is a tertiary source?' It takes them through example types of sources, particularly concerned with history courses. The second and third pages require evaluation of a student's primary and secondary sources.

Scaffolding: exercises for introductory communication theory classes

Lesson plan for a 1-hour introductory Communication Studies theory class. Emphasis is on getting students to use the appropriate tool for their information need while considering indicators of authority. Collection of exercises requiring students to do the following: 1) look up background information on a communication theory; 2) chase down further readings; 3) find a scholarly article that applies a communication theory using the ComAbstracts database.