Research & Writing Toolkit, Illustrated!

The library and information literacy talk continues with special guest Mary Cash.

Impressed by what you see here in our Wordle? You can find information on these topics and more when you visit the Research and Writing Toolkit on our Student Wiki: http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Academic_Resources_-_Research_and_Writing_Toolkit

And, for those of you who already know about the Toolkit, how do you use the Research and Writing Toolkit in your courses?

Besides having links to the Toolkit on my Resources page and on several of my Unit Homework page, I send my students to specific assets we've listed on the Toolkit, including the Research 101 tutorial from the University of Washington's library. Also, when I grade papers and run into students who have grammar or sentence issues, I often send them to a specific section in the Help with Writing part of the Toolkit - I often send students to the Comma Splices and Fused Sentences section.

LisaMarie has a discussion early in the semester in her anthropology courses that has students go to the Research Writing Toolkit to do some exploring and then they need to find something they liked and report back to the other students on that website or tutorial.

So, how do you use the Research and Writing Toolkit in your courses? Liz and I are going to be giving presentations on the Toolkit at the eLCC conference in April and at the D2L Fusion conference in July, and we'd like to share with others how our faculty use the Research and Writing Toolkit. And, if you're not using it now, perhaps we've inspired you to try to come up with some ideas on how to incorporate the toolkit into your course:) Please share those ideas with us in the Community's Cultivating Excellence discussion.

-Mary Cash

Information Literacy & the Research & Writing Toolkit…in Practice

The library and information literacy talk continues this week…

Do you address information literacy in your classes?  Do you incorporate the Research & Writing Toolkit in your assignments?

Tell us how!  Please visit the Community to share your ideas.

Quality Time: Evaluating Sources

Mary Cash, CCCOnline Librarian, is back this week!  Please feel free to join the library and information literacy conversations in the companion Community threads!

Do you have discussion or other assignments where you ask your students to find web sites that are relevant to what they are learning for a particular unit?  Are you frustrated with the quality of the sources they find? Taking time to teach your students to evaluate sources will not only improve the quality of sources your students use for assignments, but you will also be helping your students develop the important life-long learning skill of becoming a good consumer of information.

I teach ENG 122 – the research paper – and it’s important for my students to learn good research skills.  When I first got my class, there was a discussion on academic integrity, and another on source credibility.  But most of my students weren’t very discerning when it came to choosing sources for their research paper.  They didn’t seem to understand why choosing an article about using the herb St. John’s Wort from a website designed to sell herbs might not be the best source for their argumentative research paper.  Likewise, some students who were against animal testing didn’t think twice about quoting heavily from the PETA website.

I decided my students needed to learn to think more critically about the sources (all of them) they were reading and planning to use in their research papers, so I put on my librarian hat and went to research what other instructors and librarians did to help students learn to be better consumers of information. What I finally opted to do was add in an additional short essay to the unit that has the discussion on sources. The short essay – called the Source Evaluation – requires that students watch a tutorial on evaluating sources (Evaluating Information Interactive Tutorial).  Then students need to go locate a website and an article (preferably from an online article database) related to their topic. The Source Evaluation assignment asks the students to evaluate each source on the basis of the following criteria: Authority, Objectivity, Accuracy and Scope. In their essay, students need to explain why, or why not, each source meets the 4 criteria and to offer explanation and examples to illustrate this, and they need to state if the source will be a good one for their research paper, and again, why or why not.

In addition to adding the Source Evaluation Essay, I revised the source credibility discussion to ask the students to consider what they learned about source credibility from their Source Evaluation assignment.  Over and over, students state that they didn’t realize they couldn’t believe everything they read on the Web. Websites and articles they originally thought of as great sources for their papers turned out to be biased, unsupported, from a questionable authority and don’t meet their research needs. Doing the source evaluation made students realize they shouldn’t take information at face value and that they needed to be looking for higher quality sources.  And this was what I was aiming for. I want my students to leave ENG 122 with better research skills and to be better consumers of the information that constantly bombards them.

If you want to learn more about Evaluating Sources or if you want your students to learn about this, we have quite a bit of information available on the Student Wiki under the CCCOnline Library Resources and the Help with Research section of the Research Writing Toolkit.  Here are the links:

·         Learn about Evaluating Sources from the CCCOnline Library Resources on the Student Wiki

·         Evaluating Sources from the Research and Writing Toolkit on the Student Wiki
-Mary Cash

Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.

Are You Using the CCCOnline Library Resources? (Please Take Our Survey!)

Mary Cash, CCCOnline Librarian, will be our guest this month in the Cultivating Excellence blog.  Please feel free to join the library and information literacy conversations in the companion Community threads!

Do you have assignments that require your students to do research or use library resources? We just wanted to remind you that you’ll find our Online Library resources on the Student Wiki under Academic Resources: https://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Academic_Resources_-_CCCOnline_Library_Resources

Our Online Library Resources include access to the CCCOnline/FRCC College Hill article databases, links to each of the system’s community college libraries, information on evaluating sources, Online Reference resources, help on doing research from a distance, and online reference assistance such as AskColorado, 24/7 Live Chat with a Librarian offered through Colorado Libraries. You’ll also find our revised and expanded Research and Writing Toolkit, which offers help with Academic Integrity/Plagiarism, Doing Research and Writing.

So, now that you know what online library resources we have, we’d like to pick your brains to find out how you’re using our resources in your classes with your students and we’d also like to know what kinds of library resources/library assistance you’d like to see that we’re currently not offering.  Please take our short survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WW27CB7

-Mary Cash