Final of Final project

Well...of course once I sat down to work on my final project I decided to change topics and go in a different direction. I began by thinking of an annotated bibliography assignment which is often something librarians suggest to instructors because if done right can give students a good background on finding specific types of sources and more importantly evaluating the sources.

Then I began to think about how to use the tools we have learned about in class in the annotated bibliography. Then I thought about my experience with Moodle this semester and it all came together.

My idea for my project is to create an example Annotated Bibliography assignment for instructors to use and adapt.

Here is the site: https://moodle.umn.edu/course/view.php?id=2528 (you should be able to enroll with your x500 and it is easy to unenroll when you are finished looking around)

I enjoyed working with Moodle as a framework--partly because my speed is increasing in creating content and partly because so many of the digital writing tools we have been working with are all contained within Moodle--so it was easy to create examples without having to describe the "set-up" process for other tools such as UThink, Blogger, or PbWiki.

I created learning objectives and began trying to think like an instructor and what materials he/she would want to be able to teach and facilitate this activity. It quickly caught my imagination as it is so flexible and can be adapted in many different ways depending on how an instructor would like to use it.

Here are a couple of examples I thought of:

• For course on race in america--have all of the students create a group annotated bibliography throughout the semester. Have them post their citations and annotations to a class blog (creating incentive to post early so your item isn't posted by another student). This can be used to build subject knowledge on the topic.
• For a writing course--have students create individual blogs on their semester long project topics and begin collecting materials early and throughout the semester (e.g. weekly/bi-weekly posting deadlines). The instructor or peers can check quality of the sources.

Obviously deadlines and number of sources can be adjusted based on an instructors needs.

In the Moodle site I wanted to create a framework of resource material an instructor could use to teach or refresh students finding and evaluating skills with lessons and mini-tutorials they could "plug and play" into their own course.

I created lesson outlines for the following:

• Who creats information? How do we get information?
• The scholarly publishing cycle
• Selecting a topic
• In-class exercise for creating rubric for grading blog posts
• In-class exercise for creating rubric for evaluation of sources
• Writing annotations
• Creating citations in RefWorks

I outlined the 15-minute Finding Lessions and created an example for "Newspaper Articles" (May need to click on Newspaper Articles: https://moodle.umn.edu/mod/book/view.php?id=180405&chapterid=2852)

I created an example Wiki Knowledgebase to demonstrate how students, possibly in small groups to create a help guide on finding specific sources with tips and tricks to go beyond the 15 minute Finding Lessons.

I also created an example blog entry for the Newspaper article with an framework for how student posts could be formatted.

I also added the RSS feeds for a couple of Library sites to the side column of Moodle which ties in nicely and would add fresh content to the page.

Next Steps:
The next steps with this project would be to continue to create content--much of which is re-purposing content from other instructional materials and working to find an audience for this type of resource. How would an instructor like to "discover" this type of resouces? Where do instructors go to look for this type of thing?

I hope to have time in January to continue with adding content. I am still learning how to use Moodle as a "container" but it may make sense to move this to a website or wiki or other format with a lower threshold to access the content.

Learn more: Handout for project