Comments on: CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices

By: What do I teach, anyway? | Pegasus Librarian

What do I teach, anyway? | Pegasus Librarian — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:47:08 +0000

[...] on the level (but which I teach more and more often due to the feedback I get and the research we’ve done) is a circular research process that appears in the middle of this post. With upper level courses [...]

By: Library Literacy | Pearltrees

Library Literacy | Pearltrees — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:27:03 +0000

[...] In the Library with the Lead Pipe » CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest authors Iris Jastram, Danya Leebaw, and Heather Tompkins. They are reference and instruction librarians at Carleton College , a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. Becoming forensic librarians [...]

By: Heather Tompkins

Heather Tompkins — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:32:03 +0000

@Megan

Thanks so much for your interest and support of our project. Project RAILS is doing such great work, and we’d be pleased to submit our rubric! We’ll be exploring in a more in-depth way the connections between our project, the library literature and information literacy rubrics in some of our upcoming work.

@Kristen

Great question! Faculty sometimes have examples of literature reviews from past students that they have permission to use. Danya shares a checklist with her class that is based on the ideas from many librarians, including the Asian Institute of Technology, which has some good examples common “traps” to avoid and also a problematic literature review.

Another idea is to show articles that do not have any sort of literature review because to do so would fall outside the scope of the goal of that particular piece. This isn’t problematic as much as just emphasizing these works as points of comparison for articles that have literature reviews. I’m thinking about book reviews that review only one book, any work that has a close analysis of an object only, or even opinion pieces.

I’ll admit to finding some good examples out there by doing some open web searching for guides to literature reviews and adding phrases like “examples” or “problematic characteristics” or “common errors.” There are likely more sophisticated ways of searching, but this is what I’ve found works fairly well.

By: Heather

Heather — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:17:18 +0000

@Megan

@Kristen

Great question! Faculty sometimes have examples of literature reviews from past students that they have permission to use. Danya shares a with her class that is based on the ideas from many librarians, including the Asian Institute of Technology, which has some good examples common “traps” to avoid and also a problematic literature review.

By: Nachdenken über Informationskompetenz … | Hapke-Weblog

Nachdenken über Informationskompetenz … | Hapke-Weblog — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:49:04 +0000

[...] Leebaw, Heather Tompkins und Iris Jastram im Beitrag "Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices" [...]

By: Kristen

Kristen — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:13:09 +0000

I was wondering if you could tell us what you use as “demonstrations of bad literature reviews?” Do you use previous student examples, or ones that have been published? if published, could you point us towards a few?

By: Megan Oakleaf

Megan Oakleaf — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:25:03 +0000

Nice post, and some of your experiences mirror what some RAILS (www.railsontrack.info) institutions are observing as well! Do consider adding your rubric to the site, if you want…

By: Danya

Danya — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:37:16 +0000

Thanks to everyone for such thoughtful comments. I’ve used mindmaps to teach students in a senior seminar how to develop a researchable question, or to visualize the scholarly conversation, or in one-on-one consultations with senior students to brainstorm bodies of literature for their capstone projects. My colleague Kristin Partlo created this mindmap for senior students that demonstrates to students in both form and content how mindmapping helps them to organize their research. One point we emphasize with students is that early stages of research can (and should be) messy, there are a lot of conversations they are tracking, it’s important to find ways to organize their thinking in order to be creative and figure out their own argument, and there are a lot of tools to help them do that. Pen and paper or a whiteboard are great too. It’s less important how they map their thoughts than that they find a way that works for them. Mindmapping demonstrates to students, conceptually, how ideas connect in unexpected ways and students also learn a hands-on strategy for tackling big research projects.

By: Emily Ford

Emily Ford — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:00:48 +0000

thanks for your post and sharing all of these resources. I’d love to hear more about your collective thoughts about how others can start integrating forensics into their communities.

Also, tell us more about mindmapping! What do you do? I’m intrigued.

By: Iris

Iris — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:17:57 +0000

Ok, I've written up two sketches of lessons, one dealing with a more inter-cultural class like the one you describe and one being an example of a session I've done for a non-research assignment. I've also linked to some of the other places I've written about these kinds of "in my classroom" topics for lower-level students. I hope this helps flesh out the concepts in a little more concrete detail for you!