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Tired and burnt out, man! Bring the Christmas already. Got a stinking cold, two exams to invigilate, and 5,000 words of funding application to do before I can even think about relaxing. Could use a little cheerleading at this stage, I guess
Go Chris! You can do it! Also, thank you for teaching me the word “invigilate” (I’m not too proud to say I didn’t know it).
Hehe, seeing the word “invigilate” made me realize immediately that Chris was at a British uni.
Chris, can you work on the funding application during the invigilation, or is it one of those scenarios where all you can do is watch them?
I snuck in a little work, but it’s kind of one of those scenarios where you have to keep looking up every few seconds. But hey, a little work is better than none …
And yeah, I’m totally outed as British! You got me, Kaitlin
Thanks Julie! It’s appreciated
Happy holidays and a relaxing festive season to you …
Maybe I should ask Amanda French to do this. I really want someone who is a better musician/lyricist than I am to write a Grading theme song to the tune of Rawhide: “Keep grading, grading, grading/ though your hopes are fading/Got to keep on grading? (and then I run out of ideas….
You know, I don’t know the words to “Rawhide” past those first few lines…. But yeah, get Amanda French on that!
No advice to give or get, just a fan note for the different open thread Wednesday photo each week. They are fun. And they remind me, every time I see one, that the week is more than half over..!
I”d be interested in tips for research assignments in literature courses. I teach 19thC fiction and usually assume (in undergrad courses) that the reading load is intensive enough without secondary material, at least until we get to senior seminars with research papers. But next term I”m teaching s lower-level Brit Lit survey course for which one goal is to teach research skills. I’m planning to use our reading of ‘Great Expectations’ as the opportunity for some kind of excursion into criticism–partly because I’m tired of getting plagiarized assignments every time I assign the novel (damn you, SparkNotes!). Aside from the obvious “find, summarize, and critique three articles” sort of thing, does anyone have any ideas, especially for something that might be a bit more fun for all involved?
Rohan, I’ve become a big fan of replacing the standard research paper with an annotated bibliography. The students are required to find 5-7 sources. Not more than two can be on the same primary work, and one has to be a full-length monograph. This semester, I’ve been thinking about throwing everyone into a Zotero group so that we can all share sources with one another, in case people do want to end up using the materials in their final papers, which aren’t required to use research.
Of course, I don’t know that this is all that different than what you’re already doing. So I wonder if it would be possible to make an annotated bibliography into a game. You know, find some articles and give them clues to finding them that would teach them to use the MLA database. Or start leaving notes in books in the library. Something that would get them excited to search more deeply rather than stopping at the very first source that they run across.
I’ll have to keep thinking about this…
I’m considering replacing a paper in Comp I next semester with some kind of annotated bibliography project. I’m curious to hear what others do come up with…
William, I’ve been using a group annotated bibliography project for a few years, and overall I like it very much. Most recently, I’ve done this with a composition course with a subtitle of rhetoric and documentary film. For this annotated bib project, I have students break up into groups (3 or 4 per group). Each group has to research an area of documentary film (history, politics, critical reception, whatever). Each group has to compile 60 or 80 annotations (20 per person) from sources distributed across the Internet (@50%), library data base sources (scholarly journals and such) (@40%) and books) (@10%). Each annotation is about 100 words long (or longer). Individual works are compiled into a master document and each group submits that document. The final grade is determined by averaging the group component (the group’s end product) and the individual’s participation in the project (the quality of the individual’s 20 annotations). Each group member also evaluates themselves and their peers and that factors into the individual grade.
This past semester (fall 2009), I used this assignment, but the students created their annotated bibliographies on GoogleDocs. This has some great benefits: in GD, no one person was responsible for formatting and making sure everyone did their work. Each person in each group had equal ownership of the project. With this, more people participated and took ownership of the project. The downside was that GoogleDocs has some issues with formatting (or keeping work formatted). Ultimately, I didn’t count off on formatting issues because students were having such a hard time with it in GD. Next time, I’ll work with this a little more.
However, the assignment is one that teaches students a lot about research, summary/paraphrase, and citations.
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What I am considering doing is taking an assignment Dr. Kinsella gave us as undergrads in Research to go into the library with a set of questions (some general, some more obscure) and try to find sources to answer them. I’d like to combine that with doing an annotated bibliography somehow.
Here’s a bit of software to review that might be neat for organizing a virtual library:
http://www.ironicsoftware.com/
Yep. That’s the name of the program. Has anyone used this?