Hello & Welcome LBSU 302! Fall 1, 2015

“Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning.”
Information literacy competency standards for higher education,(ACRL, 2000)

Hello and Welcome to my research blog here on blogspot. My name is John Macomber and I am your new Instructor for the Hybrid course of LBSU 302: Information Fluency and Academic Integrity through Brandman University. There are 14 students in this class for Fall 1 and I am looking forward to getting to know each and every one of you through class and your individual research blogs. I have served as an Academic Librarian at Victor Valley Community College in Victorville, CA and currently serving as a Library Technician for Barstow Community College. I have previously worked as a librarian for both San Bernardino and Riverside Counties in Southern California. I have taught online and hybrid versions of LBSU 302 for two years for Brandman University.

As the class progress and you start your first posts I will start the process of linking your blogs to this page so you can see all of your classmates blogs and posts.

What is Information Competency? This course is similar in subject to an information competency course taught through many academic libraries. Usually these classes are a short course to introduce English 101 students to academic research, APA standards, and electronic resources.

LBSU 302 - Information Fluency and Academic Integrity - is an enhanced version of an information competency class: Understanding academic research through documents resources and academic databases, information use, citing sources and Library use taught in college and university settings.

Many of you will most likely have questions in the first week related to your research blogs and your first post. Make sure you are reading all the instructions and answering the questions to receive full credit. Feel free to email me regarding anything relating to the course.

Your textbook:
Research Strategies, 5th edition by William Badke

To save money I do recommend you purchase the required textbook for this course from iuniverse which has the ebook for $9 rather than the softcover for $20.

Good Luck!

“Mr Mac”

Mr. John Macomber

Week 7 Annotated Bibliographies

To make sure this week’s assignment is in the correct formatting, review the APA Annotated Bibliography sample provided by OWL Purdue. 
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/

You should have a total of 6 total sources for your Annotated Bibliography, 3 of the 6 need to be journals. You can use up to 4 sources from previous assignments. 

Why only 4 previous assignments? With all that you have learned throughout this class you may have found new articles that better reflect your new research abilities or new materials that are more closely related to your topic. You should expand on your previous weeks and find two new articles or books more closely related with the research question. 

REMINDER: NO RESEARCH NOTES THIS WEEK! Your research notes should be written into the second half of your paragraph or break into a second paragraph. The start of each paragraph should be an overview of the document and why it was selected and the second paragraph your CRAAP research notes

Also in the week 7 for Blackboard I have posted the Powerpoint that the Hybrid class uses during lecture. Their may be some notes that are valuable to you for this week to help you better understand the assignment.

Mr. Mac

The Myth that is Google Scholar

The Myth that is Google Scholar

My hope by now is that many have you have seen the folly / myth that is Google Scholar. As a class using a University database we are privileged to have such extensive, free to use databases at our disposal but the claim that a free to use database of full access articles is just around the corner can be tempting. What many of you have noticed when getting fed up with certain EBSCO search results and relying on the fail safe that is Google Scholar you find Pay Per View results. This is because many of the most relevant results are actually paying Google in some cases for priviledge of position in search results.

If you step outside the realm that is our university library and into the public use, you would be better off using Google Advanced search by .edu domain than trying Google Scholar.

The only issue in our case as many are looking for their field attached to careers is in some cases you may find some of these results are not articles but rather how to obtain your degree and the .edu sites become different universities trying to show you BA's as a social Worker or BA's in Psychology.

Yes with Google Scholar the term free to use sounds great we find many free abstracts but will find many results with Full Text with the low low price of 39.99 for the day L

Why do this when you have a University library databases free and at your disposal considering you did in fact pay for them being a Brandman Student?

Hopefully like Directory of Open Access Journals which was found this week you will find new actual scholarly journals and will venture outside of the bubble that is Google, Google Scholar and Wikipedia…

Mr Mac