DWRL Lesson Plans - Annotated bibliography

Rather than outline or map a group of sources in a 5-7 page written paper, in this assignment students find 6-7 sources form them into an annotated bibliography. Students should write 300-500 words about why each source is relevant and interesting. Part of the way this assignment is assessed is the degree to which students are able to articulate how the given sources are articulate and interesting. All sources must be cited in MLA-style. Students are strongly encouraged to find at least 3 argumentative sources pertaining to their topic, each arguing from a different set of premises to reach a different set of conclusions, and students are encouraged to use their remaining sources to provide context for their topic. All of this work is done outside of class in order to make time in class for various interesting readings. If you choose to give your students this assignment, be sure to encourage them to come to office hours for help brainstorming about various research strategies.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Some students will inevitable have a hard time finding sources, so do plan to make yourself available if students need help finding sources.

Instructions For Students:

Your task in this assignment is to compile an annotated bibliography in which you organize a mass of research that you’ll later draw from when composing an argumentative essay in Paper 3.1. (For those of you who haven’t encountered an annotated bibliography assignment before, an “annotated bibliography” is basically a Works Cited page in which each entry also contains some commentary on that particular source.) Your annotated bibliography for this assignment should contain 6-7 sources, and the commentary for each source should run 300-500 words. Remember, like a Works Cited page, the sources in your annotated bibliography should be listed in alphabetical order and cited in correct MLA style. Since each source’s commentary will come directly after the citation, if you want to do something like set your citations in bold in an effort to make things seemed more organized – be my guest. It goes without saying that your assignment should contain the standard MLA info at the top (your name, my name, course name, and date), and that your pages should be numbered. Lastly, at the top of your annotated bibliography, you should include a brief introductory paragraph in which you introduce your topic, state what issues or sub-arguments are covered in your topic, and make some mention of why your work will be interesting and fun.

At least 3 of your sources should be different arguments about your topic. (“Different” here means arguments that use alternate sets of premises to reach alternate sets of conclusions.) At least 2 of your sources should be historical or contextual (i.e., an interview found on the web in which the subject of your research project discusses relevant issues).

Evaluation Suggestions:

One way this assignment could be assessed is through a points system. For instance, each citation and annotation will be worth 20 points. 4 points will be granted automatically, just by virtue of students having found a source and written something about it. The remaining 15 points for each source will be earned as follows:

1 point – correct MLA citation;

2 points – quality of source (citing some random blog is not sufficient, unless you can articulate how the blog an example of something);

3 points – some awareness of how rhetoric’s at play in the given source (if the source is an Op-Ed piece this should be fairly straightforward; if the source is merely contextual, you should articulate this but also display some awareness of how biases effect how that history is presented);

4 points – your ability to coherently and comprehensively and appropriately summarize your source (“appropriately” means that the style of your analysis should be relevant to the type of source you’re citing – if that source is argumentative, merely paraphrasing it will not do);

3 points – evidence of original intellectual engagement and care for the source;

3 points – your ability to relate your source to other sources within your annotated bibliography.

Course Type:

Advanced Writing Course

Intermediate Writing Course

Introductory Writing Course

Course Description:

The New Yorker is a highbrow magazine that’s been around since the 1920s. Published weekly, the magazine regularly offers various forms of cultural commentary, from fiction submitted by respected authors, to investigative journalism written by first-rate essayists, to cartoons composed with unfailingly witty captions.[1] Each issue contains calendars highlighting upcoming social events across Manhattan. Quite often longer content in the magazine relates to current events outside of New York City, and increasingly outside of the United States. This course will examine all the various rhetorics that surround the magazine. We will consider each week’s cover and the various rhetorical strategies therein at play. We will read several famous articles from the magazine’s past, as well as current articles commenting on the world in which we live. Ultimately, we will consider the various ways that arguments in the magazine are made.

Regular reading of The New Yorker will guide us as we practice research and writing over the course of the semester. Vital to your success will be your ability to “interpret” another’s argument, which basically means coming up with a cogent, interesting account of what an argument means, what it’s trying to do to/for the reader, what technical choices the author’s made in order to try to achieve the effects he wants, and so on. In light of this, you’ll also be asked to compose your own arguments. You will pick a controversy towards the beginning of the semester and, in addition to our reading from the magazine, investigate this particular issue. The goal of this research will be for you to produce a New Yorker-style essay by the end of the semester. This is all designed to enhance your ability to analyze the various positions held in any public debate and to advocate your own position effectively and responsibly.

[1] Kurt Vonnegut commented on The New Yorker in 1974 that “One thing we used to [say about literature] – when I was out in Iowa – was that the limiting factor is the reader. No other art requires the audience to be a performer. You have to count on the reader's being a good performer, and you may write music which he absolutely can't perform – in which case it's a bust. Those writers you mentioned and myself are teaching an audience how to play this kind of music in their heads. It's a learning process, and The New Yorker has been a very good institution of the sort needed. They have a captive audience, and they come out every week, and people finally catch on to Barthelme, for instance, and are able to perform that sort of thing in their heads and enjoy it.”

Tags:

Annotated bibliography

Research

Google Docs - Crowd-Sourcing an Annotated Bibliography

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:45:35 +0000

Author:

Eileen McGinnis

Image Credit:

"2 reasons why the term 'crowdsourcing' bugs me" via opensourceway's Flickr

Brief Assignment Overview:

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class. By addressing their classmates as an audience, students have an extra level of accountability to their peers to find quality sources and to write about them with care.

Type of Assignment:

Homework Assignment

Major Course Project

Assignment Length:

Multiple Class Periods

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Annotated Bibliography

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Collaboration

Open Access Software

Presentations

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Research, citation, group collaboration, awareness of audience, summary

Media Requirements:

No Classroom Technology Required

Adaptable For Use Without Classroom Technology

Media Console/Projector

Required Materials:

Students will need a Google account in order to access the group document. A media console with projector would be preferable, but strictly-speaking, this lesson does not require classroom technology as students do most of the work from home.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Mid-Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class. This collaborative exercise goes against the Lone Researcher model, but it is interesting to track how an article that one student finds stimulates another student's thinking in the final paper. There's also an ethos factor here--by addressing their classmates as an audience, students have an extra level of accountability to their peers to find quality sources and to write about them with care.

This assignment took about two weeks (i.e., less than a unit-length) to complete. 2-3 students would present each day, over the course of about 6 class periods.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

After introducing research methods in class, I asked students to find a source related to our texts for the third unit. They signed up for presentation slots available over the course of the next two weeks. On the day of their presentation, their annotated citation was due.

Instructions For Students:

Overview

In 250-400 words, write an annotated citation of a primary or secondary source. Your annotation should include (1) a concise summary and evaluation of the source and (2) an argument about how this source might enhance our reading of Gattaca or Oryx and Crake.

Specifics

This semester, we've examined materials that establish the historical and cultural contexts in which literary texts participate. E.g., we've looked at Lankester's writings on degeneration to understand the bleak evolutionary themes of The Time Machine. We've also consulted visual artifacts, such as late-Victorian cartoons about evolution and representations of genetics on recent magazine covers.

Now it's your turn: find an outside source that illuminates the literary and scientific contexts of Gattaca or Oryx and Crake. A few ideas: an interview with the author/director; an article in Nature or another scientific journal; a scholarly article or book chapter by a literary critic; an advertisement, artwork, film, etc. In class, we will discuss strategies for researching and assessing potential sources.

Regardless of your choice, your annotated citation will have three components: (1) an MLA-style citation, (2) a concise summary of an argument or an evocative description of an artifact, and (3) an argument that connects your source to the film/novel. Although you won't have much space to quote extensively, use specific language and examples to tie your reader closely to the source.

To receive credit for this assignment, you will also informally present your source to the class, summarizing your findings and pointing us to their implications.

Goals

Demonstrate care in selecting a source.
Provide a succinct but thorough summary/description of your source.
Successfully argue for what this source can tell us about the film or novel.
Clearly present your findings to the class.

Formatting

Each assignment should be 250-400 words, single-spaced. Include an MLA-style citation in bold at the top of your entry.
Add your citation to our class's annotated bibliography on GoogleDocs (no hard copy needed).
In-text citations should be formatted according to MLA style: insert page numbers for any quotations in parentheses after the quote (just the page numbers; no pp. or p.)

Evaluation Suggestions:

This short assignment counted for 6 percent of their total grade. However, the presentation component was evaluated on the basis of completion only, as it was not the focus of the assignment. Strong assignments demonstrated care in selecting a source, provided a succinct but thorough summary/description of the source, and successfully argued for what this source can tell us about the film or novel.

Course Type:

Advanced Writing Course

Intermediate Writing Course

Introductory Writing Course

Course Description:

This lesson was used in an introductory literary studies course: E314J - Literature and Biology

What does it mean to be human? Why do we behave the way we do? What’s the difference between life and non-life, organism and machine? Where are we (the human species, the planet Earth) headed next? Acknowledging certain obvious and meaningful differences in methods and outlook, one might nevertheless argue that both writers and biologists travel similar terrain, presenting themselves as (often competing) authorities on the “big questions” about Life. Instead of seeing literature and biology as necessarily antagonistic ways of looking at and understanding the world, we will read literature about science and literary science writing for their complementary insights. What do literature and biology look like at their interface? How do the scientific paradigms of their day influence how writers grapple with questions of human experience, identity, and ethics? In turn, how do literary narratives about evolutionary biology or genetics shape the way we think about these disciplines, the way they’re understood by non-scientists? No expertise in biology or in literary criticism will be presumed. The broad goals of this course will be to introduce science majors to the basic tools of literary analysis as well as to enable non-science majors to be savvier readers of the popular science they encounter. The course’s emphasis on students’ own critical writing will be helpful no matter what your major.

Tags:

Annotated bibliography

Chronological Annotated Bibliography Using Dipity

Cate Blouke — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:51:36 +0000

Author:

Cate Blouke

Image Credit:

Screen shot of sample bibliography created on Dipity.

Brief Assignment Overview:

Using the free digital timeline website, Dipity, students can organize and annotate their sources chronologically. This enables students to visualize the sequence of events and better address how particular texts interact with or talk past each other.

Type of Assignment:

Homework Assignment

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Cultural Context

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Annotated Bibliography

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

The assignment is designed to help students with their research, summary, and citation skills, as well as familiarize them with a particular digital environment.

Media Requirements:

No Classroom Technology Required

Required Materials:

Students will need Internet access and a computer. They will also need to create a free account with Dipity - which will allow them to make up to three time lines.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

Full Assignment Description:

This particular assignment was part of a larger unit in which students were asked to map out the life of an Internet meme of their choosing. To prepare for the essay they would be writing, I had them create an annotated bibliography of at least five iterations of their meme. Using Dipity for this assignment helped students to organize their sources chronologically and therefore visualize how the various iterations of the meme evolved. They were expected to include an image with each annotation, a paragraph describing the source, its argument, its author, and its "publication" venue. Dipity is useful in that it allows students to compile multimedia materials related to their topic, and it also provides multiple viewing modes through which to access the material.

Here is a student example (graciously offered by one of my students). Notice that you have several viewing options in the upper left-hand corner, and you can adjust the scale of the timeline to see more events or zoom in on particular events.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

I found it was particularly helpful to create a mock-up of the assignment to model for the students. I would point out that the Dipity site can run somewhat slowly at times - meaning that the creation process and/or loading the embedded timeline can sometimes take a while. The site is fairly intuitive, so it is not necessary to spend time demonstrating it in class. My students did not seem to have much trouble figuring it out on their own. Just in terms of annotated bibliography assignments in general, a lot of students seem to have a hard time grasping how robust their annotations should be. So I recommend spending a fair bit of time explaining that one or two sentences is not sufficient for generating a useful source annotation.

Additionally, the Dipity format doesn't really lend itself to including a "proper" citation, so you may want to consider how you want students to provide official citations (beyond just the links in each "event" entry). I organize my courses using a PBWorks wiki, so I had my students embed the timeline on a wiki page and then provide citations below it. You could just as easily have students e-mail you links to their time lines and provide their citations in a separate Word document.

Instructions For Students:

You will create an annotated bibliography with (at least) 5 entries related to a particular meme (or online version of a cultural idea/event/issue) that you want to investigate. One of the entries will be for the “original” iteration of the meme, and the other entries will be for texts that deal with the same idea in different ways. It will be important, therefore, to choose texts that are clearly related but different enough that you can talk about the diverse ways the idea manifested across media and publication venues. Ultimately, you will choose at least three of these texts to write about in essay one, Mapping a Meme.

Below is an example of an "annotation" - it includes a full bibliographic citation (formatted in MLA style) and a paragraph offering a brief summary of this book’s argument. If I were annotating an article, I would do the same thing. For a video or visual text, I would offer a brief description of the text’s elements or storyline and summary of its message.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Print.

Aristotle defines “rhetoric” as not merely the art of figures of speech, but as the ability to see available means of persuasion, focusing on types public speaking. Here, his emphasis is on the external effects of speech in terms of political implications and audience response (i.e. the public ends of oratory). For Aristotle, public speech consists of three vital elements: the arguments a speaker uses, the character of the speaker, and the disposition of the audience. He finds ethical appeals to be the “controlling factor” in a speech, and explains that these consist of good sense, goodwill, and good character.

For your assignment, after your provide a brief summary, make some sort of assessment of your source and offer some criticisms. Is your source scholarly, popular, or perhaps some of both? What does its purpose seem to be? Is it current? Is the research (if here is any) biased or objective? Why? Are the facts well documented? Who is the author? Is s/he qualified in this subject?

After summarizing and assessing, you can now reflect on this source. How does it fit into your research? Is this a helpful resource? What are the main similarities and differences between this and the “original” iteration? How well do you think you can connect it to other sources you might use in essay 1?

For each source, be sure to include an image and a link to the original source. When you are finished, copy and paste the embed code into a wiki page in your student folder. Be sure to set your timeline's viewing permissions to "public" or else I will not be able to see/evaluate it.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I used the Learning Record in this class, so my evaluative comments were largely based on the students' progress. However, here is the rubric I used:

[ ] The sources’ main arguments are made clear at the beginning of the annotation

[ ] Thorough

[ ] Accurate

[ ] Supported with quotes and paraphrase

[ ] Annotations are well-organized and follow similar organizational patterns

[ ] Writing relatively free from grammatical error

[ ] Quotes are properly framed

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

On the whole, my students seemed to do well with the assignment and appreciated the departure from a traditional writing assignment. They had trouble in terms of writing robust enough annotations, but I suspect that if I spent more time explaining my expectations this would be less of a problem.

Course Type:

Intermediate Writing Course

Introductory Writing Course

Course Description:

I used this exercise in my intermediate writing course (The Rhetoric of Stand Up Comedy). This course examines how comedians use humor to advocate positions in public controversies, to construct notions of group identity, and to criticize public figures – essentially, how they use humor to persuade. If laughter is a sign of persuasion (a question the course explores), students think through why audiences do or don’t laugh, are or are not persuaded by a text. Students think and write critically about what makes comic performances compelling, focusing closely on the relationship between performers and their audiences. They track how the purpose and message of texts changes as jokes move across media and venue in the digital age, looking at a wide range of sources - from comedy albums to HBO specials, from YouTube to Twitter.

Tags:

Free Software

Dipity

Annotated bibliography

Multimedia Presentation

Visualization Software

Collaborative Annotated Bibliography with a PBWorks Wiki

Bloom — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:49:56 +0000

Author:

Emily Bloom

Image Credit:

Screen shot of collaborative annotated bibliography in PBWorks

Brief Assignment Overview:

Students worked together to create a collaborative annotated bibliography on PBWorks that covered a range of literary scholarship relating to the novels and poems on the course syllabus. Each student signed up for a day to give a research presentation; on their assigned day they found a scholarly source, wrote an annotated bibliography entry on the PBWorks site, and presented it to the class. By the end of the semester, students had created an annotated bibliography that could serve as a resource for the whole class as they began writing their final research papers.

Type of Assignment:

Semester-long Project

Assignment Length:

Semester-long Project

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Cultural Context

Historical Context

Literary Criticism

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Annotated Bibliography

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Collaboration

Presentations

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

This assignment exposed students to different approaches to literary scholarship and research techniques. Sudents developed familiarity with library search engines, peer-reviewed journals, and academic conventions in the study of English Literature. They also learned to write annotations, cite sources using MLA citation style, and present their research to their classmates. By incorporating an ongoing research assignment into the course, I was able to maintain a conversation about research and scholarship throughout the semester. It also served to make research more collaborative, as students could draw upon the summaries that their peers had provided, and use the bibliography as a resource to identify relevant scholarship and to further pursue the conversations that they found interesting.

Media Requirements:

No Classroom Technology Required

Required Materials:

Students will need to sign up for accounts on PBWorks in preparation for the assignment. Instructors must create a single wiki page entry titled "Annotated Bibliography" on which students will add their entries. Any other materials are optional; for instance, several students gave research presentations using powerpoint, for which I needed a media console in the classroom. However, it would be possible to limit students to oral presentations.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Each student in the class will sign up for a day to make a research presentation. On your assigned day, you are responsible for 1) finding a scholarly source that is relevant to the text we are discussing on that day, 2) creating an annotated bibliography entry on the class wiki, and 3) making a short (5-7 minute) presentation to the class explaining the relevance of your research.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Instructors must expect this assignment to take a great deal of class time throughout the semester, both in terms of preparing students for the assignment and in allocating 5-7 minutes for each student to present their research throughout the semester. However, once it gets going, the research presentations should enhance class discussion as well as better-preparing students for research in literary studies. I would advise allowing several minutes of question and answer following the presentations to give students the chance to respond and discuss.

Instructions For Students:

Finding Sources

Scholarly sources, such as articles in academic journals and books, are written by experts for other researchers like you. They are rarely found for free through search engines like Google, but rather are subscribed to by libraries and are available in library databases. For more information about distinguishing between popular and scholarly sources, see <http://www.lib.utexas.edu/students/find/popularvscholarly.html>

1) Finding academic books: Visit the UT Library Catalog.

2) Finding scholarly articles in academic databases: Go to “Find Articles Using Databases” on the UT Library Website. From this page you can look up databases by subject or alphabetically, by the name of the database. Once you find a database, you can search for scholarly articles referenced in that database. The following databases are particularly helpful for our course:

MLA International Bibliography

LION (Literature Online)

ABELL

JSTOR

Project Muse

Writing an Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography includes all the usual bibliographic information, as well as 1-3 sentences that summarize the text. This short summary appears after the bibliographic information and is written in incredibly precise prose (think resume-speak). One challenge for this kind of writing is to choose powerful verbs that show what the source does not just what itsays.

Examples from The Art of Literary Research:

Rampersad, Arnold. “Too Honest for His Own Time.” New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1991: 3, 17-18.

Reviews the history of the censorship that publishers and book clubs applied to the books that made Richard Wright famous, to explain why the Library of America volumes devoted to his major works represent them, for the first time, “as he had wanted them to be read.”

Laird, J.T. The Shaping of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Documents, from the manuscript and the various printed editions, the extensive revisions of the novel over nearly a quarter-century. Disposes of many half-truths and outright errors, most of which resulted from Hardy’s own misleading statements.

Maddox, Brenda. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. London: Hamilton, 1988.

The appendix describes the migration of “the largest collection of Joyce material in private hands, the richest source of material on the life of Joyce until 1920” from Trieste to Cornell, and the controversy aroused by the publication of some of the obscene letters included in the purchase.

Posting to the Wiki

Go to the course wiki page on PBworks: https://bannedbooksbloom.pbworks.com. On the sidebar find the link to “Annotated Bibliography.” Log in with your username and password and you will be able to add your entry directly to the document. Do not alter or erase any other entries—just add your own. Put your name at the end in parentheses.

Making a Presentation

Give an extemporaneous presentation (not read verbatim from a piece of paper, but presented in an engaging manner). You are welcome to use powerpoint or any other visuals that would be helpful. The presentation will need to be more detailed than your wiki posting. Describe how you found this article and what you think it contributes to our understanding of the text. Explain the author’s argument and what kind of evidence he or she uses to support this argument. You are welcome to editorialize—to give your own assessment of the article’s strengths and weaknesses, but this should not be the main focus of the presentation.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Minimum Requirements

For a C or above, source must:

Þ Be from a scholarly publication

Þ Clearly illuminate the text we are discussing (cannot come out of left field)

For a C or above, presentation must:

Þ Be at least 5 minutes long

Þ Clearly summarize the author’s argument

Þ Give detailed descriptions of the author’s use of evidence

Þ Be delivered clearly and extemporaneously

For a C or above, wiki posting must:

Þ Be in correct MLA citation style