Sunday, November 16, 2008

Research While Researching?

Last Friday, I watched a student taking notes onto notecards from a database article he had printed out. He also had the internet up and was googling people and information from the article on which he was taking notes. I watched him for a few moments, thinking that this is best of both worlds - students researching from database resources and using the internet to further research or understand the information he was reading. Fantastic! I will probably explicitly teach this as a strategy on our next paper. Here's the new issue, though: As I watched him, I noticed that he began to take notes from the Internet source right off the screen, but writing the notes into the note cards that were linked by a code to the database article he was reading. I told him that taking notes from the internet source was fine (after he evaluated it), but that he would need to link that notecard to a bibliography source of the web site from which he was taking the notes. So, while it was inspiring to watch a student further educate himself, I am finding another level of instruction about this proces is needed.

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