Begin the Beyond

Over the last few weeks, with the assistance of my librarian colleagues Sarah Whittaker and Keith Nockels, we have rolled out the new information literacy component of our second year Biological Sciences "Research Skills" module. This consists of four components:

• Bibliographic database searching
• Critical appraisal
• CiteULike
• Refworks

Each of these except Refworks has an associated assessment, which for the first two consists of online MCQs. The CiteULike assessment is designed to give students practice at writing critical appraisal of scientific papers as well as using CuL. Based on our experience with students using delicious as part of their PLEs, we asked students to:

• Briefly describe how they found the paper they bookmarked: 10%
• Write a critical appraisal of around 500 words: 50%
• Relevance to degree stream: 20%
• Descriptive one-word tags used (including a degree-specific tag): 20%

UoLBiochemistry
UoLGenetics
UoLMicrobiology
UoLZoology
UoLBiolSci
UoLPhysPharm
UoLMedPhys

Students bookmark and annotate (at least) one paper a week for three weeks - in our previous experience, three is the magic number of repeats needed to maximize the "light bulb moments" in student social media use. So far, the results are encouraging, but judge for yourselves at the links above.


Related:

• Breathing life into Beyond Google
• CiteULike vs delicious