Getting a taste of what is to come…

For the last few days at work, I’ve been involved in marking. For this assignment, they have to complete a bibliography with five different sources. They use a document called “evaluation calculator’ in order to determine the quality of the source. There are different evaluation calculators for different types of sources, such as books, articles, and websites. For all the different kinds of calculators, the top portion is the author, title and publisher fields. Then it’s the ‘criteria’ section, which asks the student the purpose, audience, authority of the source, and whether or not it has a bibliography, how the source can be used, and whether or not it’s biased or current. Each of these fields have a drop down menu. The student is to select the item that is most suitable to describe the source. The last section is the ‘annotation’ section. Students are to write a few sentences about how useful the source is, and provide other comments to demonstrate that they’ve carefully evaluated the source.

I find these assignments difficult to mark- not because they are full of grammatical errors and such, but I am just not all that sure the students understand the point of the assignment. Students often contradict themselves. While they say that the source is ‘very one-sided’ in the ‘bias’ field, they don’t explain how it’s one-sided in the annotation section and will say things like ‘this is a very helpful source’. I also find that students are not very good at picking out the authority of websites. They’ve evaluated government websites (published by the European Commission or the Australian government), and in the authority field, they will select “not sure”. Furthermore, in the annotation, they will say things like ‘I am not going to use this source for my topic because it doesn’t list any authors”. They don’t realize that it is a government publication, and that the government is the creator of the information. They also don’t understand that although we read government information with a grain of salt, information published by the government is usually pretty reliable.

I just realize that there are so much I know that I take for granted. At a glance, I can tell (even as an undergraduate student), the difference between a newspaper article and a academic journal article. The students here would evaluate a newspaper article and decide in the annotation section that they are not going to use it because ‘there is no bibliography’. I don’t think they understand what kind of sources to use for what purpose. Most of us would know that there usually isn’t a bibliography for a newspaper article. Furthermore, I can tell by scanning through a website whether or not it’s a government, commercial, non-profit or personal website. I understand how each of these sources can be used. I really hope that I can teach students these skills.

This is the final assignment for the information literacy portion of this course. It’s suppose to demonstrate that they are able to find, select and evaluate the sources. For the most part, I don’t feel that they really understand, based on the assignments I have marked. Having said that, I am glad I got to do a little bit of marking before teaching, because I get a better sense of what areas I can emphasize on when I am teaching.

Although I get frustrated about living in Dubai a lot, I do think my job is important. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me here right now. Information literacy is my passion, as I think it is my job to teach these young women how to be critical. I understand that they had been ‘programmed’ not question anything told to them, as I had been ‘programmed’ to always ask ‘why?’ They are raised in such a different environment, but in order to be a successful person living in the world today, one must be informed and critical. Whether or not they are looking for a job, raising their children or looking for information for any other personal or professional reasons, it is important to know how to find what’s needed and whether or not the information is reliable. I think this is going to be a very interesting challenge. I wonder how much impact I can actually make on these students’ lives.