I was just looking. I was just, like, doing my normal searches. You know, like, anything that I – for me, I’ve always been interested, if something just, like, immediately piques my interest I immediately go to Wikipedia –
Student's normal search process - love to see this!
looking up topics that we were interested in.
topic selection This is similar strategy to what I saw in IF interview. "Looking up" topics - in this case unrelated to each other - to see what kind of information is out there. This student was definitely looking at topics that were of personal interest to him.
any topic that, like, would have an argumentative – like, we have to find and research and try to have, like, a sort of opinion
instructor Here is the basic gist of the assignment (as the student remembers it). Needs to do some research and needs to be a topic about which there is an argument.
I think she said five or more –
Instructor directed on number of sources
I chose all my scholarly journals, I put them together. I chose some YouTube videos; they were –IF: Mm-hmm.CF: – like, a bunch of TED talks.
Compiling research materials.
Is there room for us to think about the iterative process; can we work with instructors to "reward" (or assign) students to alternate the searching, reading and writing.
And – And I seen how – I saw how many, um, scholarly journals or how many sources came up for it, right? Um, number of sources. Right. And then, if I – if I felt like it wasn’t enough for me to thoroughly talk about the topic, I would move on. Right? So, when I did segregation, there – like, I guess, like, my specific topic was modern-day, so there wasn’t really much about it. Right? So, not much info. Right? And then, when I did gentrification, there were a lot, right?
This part of the process is interesting to me. Links topic selection to search (seemingly a single search).
It also seems a little misguided. What can we do in our lessons that could make tiny changes to this attitude?
one of the purposes was to be able to use the resources in the library, like, adequately enough to write a research paper, right? Um, another one was to just, you know, make us more aware of, like, the things around us and how – how, um, thorough we can write about, um, what – like, the problems that are in society.
From this student's perspective, purposes are: (1) use library resources; (2) be aware of social problems. I am interested in watching response to this question across the interviews because these are not necessarily the purposes that we/instructors have in creating these assignments.
she wanted us to create a research paper about – well, about anything basically. Um, she gave us a bunch of ideas. She ac – like, she gave us, like, um, ideas like – hmm, like organic foods, GMOs, and just, like, you know, just problems in our society. But then, I chose, um, gentrification, so that’s what that’s about.
"she" is the instructor, so this interview starts with "helper" idea right away
source types
I'm glad that we asked about purpose. In this case, student IDs purpose as: (1) use library resources; (2) awareness of social problems. Neither of these is about learning more about a topic, fostering curiosity, etc. Might be interesting outcome to share with faculty, if we see similar comments by other students
choose topic (or finalize topic) based on the amount of information that you can see...in one search?
This raises an interesting point about students' expectations of the search process (and also maybe back to curiousity/purpose of assignment)
something about a single class to learn the library database
"She" is the instructor - first mention of the assignment is instructor as helper, though the help doesn't seem very helpful here, TBH