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LIS2004 Strategies for Online Research | Prof. Machado Dillon

This guide contains resources for students of Prof. Machado Dillon's LIS2004 course.

LIS2004 Course Outline

Introduction

What is Information Literacy?

In addition to the explanation provided in the Objectives section of your Syllabus... 

Human beings are passionate, curious, and always seeking to connect with each other and make sense of things. Learning is more effective when new information is meaningful and linked to some personal experience or prior knowledge. Learning is about both context and content. It is necessary to learn how to assess, evaluate, and connect in order to make information become knowledge. Information literacy skills are the hallmark of the ability to do research. What is important is for you to learn how to find information that “matters” and then figure out why it might matter.

Information literacy is a link between the life experiences of you as a student, the academic world of scholarship, and the postcollege real world of application of learning. An information-literate person has the ability to ask questions and knows the difference between ignorance and understanding. (When do I need information?) Information literacy builds a lifelong ability to determine where information is kept (Where is the best place to find this?) and in what forms knowledge is stored (Which knowledge products will likely have what I need?).

Information literacy relies on the use of a critical mind to discern credible from not credible, valid from not valid. It is actually the core of the first-year experience. It lasts, while the specifics of particular courses fade over time. After all, the nature of research, the core of higher education, is a learning process: “How do I learn about something?” Communication skills are essential to your ability to both learn and share what you’ve learned.

Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 | Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/college-success/pages/1-introduction

Modules

Lesson 1 Information Has Value: 

  • This lesson is all about plagiarism and how to avoid it. 

Lesson 2 Information Creation as a Process: 

  • Here we'll discuss how information comes about and you will ponder your place in the information cycle. 

Lesson 3 Searching as Strategic Exploration:  

  • You will come up with a topic of your choice...make sure it's one you like because you'll use it for all the assignments.  You'll develop a thesis from that topic and work on keywords and phrases. 

Lesson 4 Research as Inquiry: 

  • We used Google last time, so this time around you will use the library databases.  

Lesson 5 Authority is Constructed and Contextual: 

  • Here we'll go through searching the interwebs for information. Yep...you get to use Google! BUT you get to learn how to evaluate what you find.

Lesson 6 Scholarship as Conversation: 

  • This one is all about citations...the why and how of MLA and APA. 
Course Project

See the Course Project page for the most updated information.