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Summary v. Analysis

Published July 13, 2009 pedagogy , teaching activities Leave a Comment
Tags: analysis, information literacy, students, summary, teaching activities

For the course I teach (MCS*2020) I require students to write a business report on an information management/information technology topic. Over the past few semesters I’ve found that students are quite good a summarizing information, but they lack the ability to analyze. Collecting a series of articles on biometric security is one thing, but sifting the good arguments from the bad, or applying the arguments to a different context are challenging tasks.

I’ve been searching for months for a good in-class activity that will illustrate the key differences between summary and analysis. Early attempts to explain the difference between summary and analysis were less than sucessful (I used PowerPoint, I tried YouTube, etc.), but last semester I tried something new.

I found the following article on file-sharing, an activity that they are quite familiar with:

Bowie, N. E. (2005). Digital rights and wrongs: Intellectual property in the Information Age. Business and Society Review, 110(1), 77-96.

This article examines the ethical reasons (excuses?) that students often give for file-sharing (you have to hit them where it hurts). I split the article into five smaller sections and had them analyze Bowie’s points in small groups. First, their job was to summarize what Bowie said (i.e., list the key points), then I asked them to analyze the argument (is it strong or weak? why?). The group discussion that followed was much more interesting – and most of them got the difference between summary and analysis.

I think this strategy engaged the class because the students hold relatively strong opinions about file-sharing. From my perspective as instructor, it’s a perfect topic because it touches on some of the key themes of the course (intellectual property, technology, information, etc.). Of course, I had to remind them that their analysis of the arguments (as students) would likely differ from the analysis of record executives (who have more at stake) - which launched another interesting discussion on perspective and context. Much, much better.

Tagging to Teach Subject Headings

Published June 6, 2007 pedagogy , teaching activities , web 2.0 Leave a Comment

Cow Tag

At WILU 2007 I heard an interesting presentation by Sarah Polkinghorne (U of Alberta) and Cameron Hoffman (U of Lethbridge) about using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching. One of the activities that particularly appealed to me was using Flickr to teach students about subject descriptors and headings in databases (and the LCSH in library catalogues).

Basically, Cameron preloaded a number of pictures to a Flickr account, and told the class that they needed to come up with as many descriptive words as they could for each image (also known as “tags”). Of course, for a tag to be effective it needs to be spelled correctly, used in common language, and relevant to the image. Cameron used this exercise to springboard into a discussion about classification and subject headings.

I think this is a brilliant exercise – mostly because of its simplicity. Students instinctively know that images need to be described with words before a search engine can find them, so it’s only a short leap for them to understand the importance of subject headings in a database (where most of the information is text). This exercise also exposes students to the difficulties of classification in an interactive way using a popular free resource.