The last few semesters, I’ve been using a new version the traditional annotated bibliography in my course where students complete the annotated bibliography in the first few weeks and then, after learning more about information literacy, write a reflection on the work they did at the beginning. I ask them to think about the formats of information they used and why, how they evaluated the information they found, and the choices they made about giving credit to their sources. As a project, it seems to work pretty well and the conclusions students come to about the quality of their work are often close to the same ones I would have in my own evaluation. Except, I think, those conclusions are more meaningful to students when they have the opportunity to come to them themselves rather than have me shaking a finger at them about poor citation, questionable sources, and an obvious emphasis on convenience over quality.
The first on the list of questions I ask students to reflect on, though, is this: How does this annotated bibliography reflect who you were as a researcher at the time you completed it?
Honestly, students have a lot of trouble with this question, possibly due to the way I’ve phrased it. What I’m looking for is for them to comment on the level of research experience they had when they completed the assignment and how the choices they made in completing it were informed by their experience up to that point. Mostly they just talk about their reaction to the assignment when they first saw it, especially the fact that I was allowing them complete freedom over their choice of topic and sources. Not a bad answer, but not hugely relevant.
Anyway. I started thinking about the research assignments I completed as both an undergraduate and a graduate student and how that reflected who I was as a researcher at the time.
Note: The following contains spoilers for all three seasons of Hannibal and the first six-ish seasons of Criminal Minds.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see Stan Lee speak at an ALA Conference in Las Vegas. He was there as a featured speaker and after a short, lively talk about his career in comics, someone had the idea to sit Lee down and do a Q&A style interview with him. This might have been fine except that as a man in his nineties, Lee didn’t have the best hearing, which made answering the interviewer’s questions a bit difficult, especially on such a large stage.
Despite these difficulties, Lee kept up his good humor. At one point, when the interviewer asked him a question (I don’t remember now about what), Lee responded by saying something like,
“I didn’t hear what you just said, but let me tell you why Superman sucks.”
He then launched into a rundown of why the superheroes he had helped create were objectively better than Superman. The crowd loved it.
I bring this up because I’ve been a little dry on blog post ideas related to my research and professional stuff lately so this post is a bit of a non sequitur, not really related to anything I usually write about.
So let me tell you why Criminal Minds sucks.
At my institution, there’s a one-credit information literacy course taught through the library called UNL 205. Most everyone in my department has taught this course at one time or another but as the information literacy requirement here on campus moved into the majors, there has been less and less demand for it. I’m wrapping up a section of the course now, the only one being offered this semester, and this will likely be the last time I’ll be teaching UNL 205.
That’s not to say that I won’t be teaching a credit-bearing IL course at all or that UNL 205 won’t be taught anymore. Due to some shuffling of department responsibilities, I’ll be teaching a different information literacy course geared toward students in the humanities and particularly philosophy majors. UNL 205 may still get taught every now when then, but most likely it won’t be by me.
Studying Research 