Thursday, May 29, 2014

Up, up and away

The first session that I attended on Thursday was entitled 'Beyond the Database Demo', which focused on discourse analysis.  I again was intrigued by the clever title yet I did not fully grasp the concept.  Unfortunately I was a bit late for the session, so I think I missed some vital information, but the presentation in its entirety is available at http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wilu/wilu2014/Presentations/15/.

The speaker identified 4 main problems that students' experience with the research process: lack of focus (I need 5 documents, but I don't care which 5 they are), lack of synthesis (how their research is part of the larger concept, topic), problems with citing or format and the result.

She then moved on to discuss how discourse analysis could be applied to research if we view scholarship as a conversation.  She gave two examples:
  1. there are rules for all genres (writing an email to a friend is different than writing an email to a business associate) 
  2. for English language learners, we give them writing examples for them to analyze and figure out language, phrasing, format, etc. so that they can learn to write in a similar way.
Application of concept in information literacy courses:
  • In Nursing Ethics, used the Robert Latimer case and asked students to compare the two perspectives, looking at:
    •  bias
    • word choice
    • language
    • how the statement is construction
    • information included, or left out
    • what is the message the writer is giving
    • how can we check / verify the information
  • In a multiple session course:
Follow Up - here are two articles that I want to read...
  • Bizup, J. (2008). BEAM: A rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing. Rhetoric     Review, 27(1), 72-86.
  • Ganski, K. http://ganski.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/flipping-freshman-composition-library-instruction/

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