Welcome
After reading this page and before you begin working through the lessons in this course, be sure you've read the following:
After that, please post a brief, introductory statement about yourself in the Student Introduction discussion board in Canvas in order to document your attendance the first day of the course. A few more details for this first discussion board posting are shared below. In addition, be sure to complete this brief Information Literacy Pre-Assessment so that I can have a better idea of your current grasp on the concept.
This course consists of six lessons. You will complete each lesson in order because they build on each other. By the time you have finished this course, you will have gone through the research process from start to finish. The good news is that you do not have to write a paper for this course. You will choose a topic, select keywords, locate sources using Google and library databases, evaluate sources, explain your process, and document those sources in an annotated bibliography.
We have a lot to cover in our short time together so we are going to get right to it!
This is how the lessons work off each other:
This lesson is all about plagiarism and how to avoid it.
Here we'll discuss how information comes about and you will ponder your place in the information cycle.
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.
We used Google last time, so this time around you will use the library databases.
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.
This one is all about citations...the why and how of MLA.
You will take all the resources that you have found in the 6 lessons and create an annotated bibliography.
Now that you have read all this, I am reminding you once again to read the syllabus, course outline, introduce yourself in a post to the Student Introductions discussion board on Canvas, and complete the Information Literacy Pre-Assessment. We'll have a short activity reviewing Lesson 1 during the first week of class.
Finally, if you mention something about your favorite book character (yes, comic book characters count!) in your introduction, I'll give you 1 point extra credit... my way of making sure you read this.
Enjoy the class!
Research Skills for College Students by Florida College System, Council on Instructional Affairs, Learning Resources Standing Committee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Last revised January 2018 by the LIS 2004 Course Revision Committee.