Electronic resources for CAL students

Posted on April 8, 2011 by The Cyclist

Karen Jackson and Zbig Gaś write on electronic resources useful for CAL students

These are what we consider the top 10 electronic resources for students in the College of Arts and Law. There are, of course, many more listed under the subject categories on eLibrary (www.elibrary.bham.ac.uk).

Google Scholar

A useful tool for finding material when you don’t know where to look. It will find academic material and, if you access it via the eLibrary, it will tell you which articles you can read for free.

ProQuest (new interface)

This is a collection of 30 bibliographic databases in nine subject areas including Arts, History, Language & Literature, and Social Sciences – some which include full-text of articles. You can search within selected areas, or across them all.

ABES (Annotated Bibliography for English Studies)

Finds key articles and books in any area of English Studies. The annotations in each entry explain why the work is important and where it fits in with other studies of the subject. An excellent resource for finding your bearings in an unfamiliar topic.

Literature Online (LION)

The essential resource for the study of literature. LION contains a substantial corpus of full-text English literary works from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, as well as references to publications about all aspects of English literature. Our LION interface also connects to the MLA International Bibliography which covers European literatures as well.

Web of Science

Don’t be put off by the name!  This is a vast database of references to articles, books and conference papers in all subjects – arts and social sciences as well as science, engineering and medicine. A useful feature of it is that it can find other articles which have cited the ones you find on your search, so it moves your research forward in time.

Historical Newspapers

Covers The Guardian and the Observer from 1791 to 2003 – right from the first issue. Read original news coverage of the sinking of the Titanic, Jack the Ripper or Charles and Diana’s Royal Wedding – the perfect way to find primary source material.

Times Digital Archive

This archive covers The Times newspaper from 1785 to 1985 and contrasts nicely with the Historical Newspapers resource. Search for world events such as the Battle of the Somme or read reports about Napoleon. A great resource for getting ahead in your research.

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

Contains the documented workings of the House of Commons (bills, command papers, reports of commissions, etc.) from 1688 to the present day. A unique collection of primary source materials for historical and political studies.

Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS)

This is where you can find the statistics to back up your arguments. ESDS contains over 5,000 datasets resulting from a range of surveys conducted by governments, banks, academics, statistical and market research agencies.

COPAC

This is the union catalogue of the major national and university libraries in the UK.  If you can’t find a book or periodical that you need on our library catalogue, try COPAC next. You can search COPAC using the library catalogue’s own interface or, better still, COPAC’s own search screen which can be found on eLibrary.

You can get more help here:

http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/subjectsupport/

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Essay feedback decoded

Posted on March 15, 2011 by The Cyclist

Following on from the last post on assessment criteria, it would be useful to have a look at some of the most common comments markers put in your essay feedback, and some instructions on what to do next.

1. Knowledge

Essays often suffer from either a torrent of information or lack thereof. When your tutor says “there is not enough information on the topic”, it means that your essay was perhaps superficial, you did not go through enough bibliography to gain enough knowledge and understand the various perspectives on the subject. If, on the other hand, the marker said “there is a great amount of information, not all of which is relevant”, it means that you were a bit overzealous. What to do next? It’s pretty self-explanatory really. If you don’t have enough information (or variety) widen the net a little bit. If you have way too much information, go through it again and scrap anything that doesn’t blend well.

2. Interpretation and analysis

This is a very important aspect of your essay. If the marker said something like “the essay follows the basic conventions and does not demonstrate sufficient analysis” or “the analysis fails to demonstrate any criticism towards the sources”, what does it mean? It means that although you may have read, you don’t have deep knowledge of the context, the background to the opinions expressed in the bibliography. Your tutors will be looking for signs of critical thinking here. A great way to understand the wider context of a scholar’s approach and point of view is to read reviews of their book or relevant literature to their article. If a book is central to your essay’s arguments, reading its reviews is a brilliant way to find out what other people thought of it, and of course build an argument around. What to do next? Read with a critical eye. Read with specific questions in mind. Question the arguments, the opinions, everything. Show your tutor that you’re not simply regurgitating information, but it goes through a process of critical assessment in your head.

3. Construction of argument

It’s not enough knowing the material and understanding it. You have to demonstrate that you can give your opinion and arguments validity by backing them up with information. This is where it all falls together. If your tutor says “the arguments lack conviction and are not adequately supported”, you must demonstrate more strongly why you believe A or B. If the evidence doesn’t support your belief, go where the evidence takes you. What to do next? Work harder on your arguments, make sure your data stacks up, if not, follow your data.

4. Relevance

This is partially covered by no. 1 above. An essay is not a demonstration of knowledge, i.e. the most knowledge doesn’t get the best mark. An essay is a demonstration of proper and accurate use of relevant knowledge to answer a specific question. If you start including irrelevant information it will show and your result will not be as good. What to do next? Stick to the point. If your essay question asks about the organisation of the Roman Army, don’t start with an overview of Roman History and all its institutions. Sometimes less is more.

Other things the tutors say:

“lack of fluidity” = your information is there, you just didn’t write it in your style from the beginning to the end, or perhaps you jump from topic to topic, and it doesn’t make easy reading. Try emulating the style of a (scholarly) book you enjoyed reading

“lack of depth” = Read more

“Lack of reflection” = Think more about what the reading material says to you, process it, don’t just relay information, make it yours, criticise it, express an opinion

 

If you have any other comments you’d like decoded, leave a comment here and I’ll try and do it for you.

______________________________

image by Tim Riley

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Assessment criteria: what to make of it all

Posted on March 2, 2011 by The Cyclist

 

When you receive your essay marks and feedback, it can initially appear quite obscure. What can you make of the mark you got? What is your feedback really trying to tell you? What should you do next, if anything? Here we will try to tackle some of these questions in order to help you translate essay feedback into specific actions for improvement.

Assessment criteria

If you are in CAL, your essay is assessed based on 5 or 6(if you are in English or Languages where language proficiency also counts) set criteria, in which your mark is calculated against 8 degrees of achievement, from ‘bad fail’ (1-24/100) to ‘outstanding’ first (90-100). These criteria are:

1. Acquisition of knowledge

Does what it says on the tin: have you learnt enough? Can you demonstrate through your essay that you have finished the module with something in terms of new knowledge? Is your knowledge outstanding or unusually deep (First) for your student level? Or is it just reasonable (2.2)? Whatever you put in is what you get out of it.

2. Interpretation and analysis

How original are you in your analysis of the reading? Do you have a good understanding of the material, showing due caution and criticism(First)?  Or are you just coping without getting the greater picture (2.2 or 2.1)?

3. Construction of argument

Can you argue with confidence, armed with good understanding of the material (2 above) and deep knowledge(1 above)? Then you deserve a first. If your arguments are solid, backed by good data, and you can confidently navigate through the various opinions, that’s great. If not, perhaps you need to work more on knowledge of the various trends, methodologies and so on.

4. Relevance

Stick to the topic. Don’t go off on one, as your word limit means that your essay will be superficial and not demonstrate enough knowledge and understanding of the material. If you must say something, stick it in the footnotes, but don’t overdo it. Don’t go for huge introductions which give a longer overview of your topic than is necessary. Sometimes less is more. In addition, if you do have great knowledge, make sure you only demonstrate that which is relevant-nobody likes a show-off.

5. Documentation & presentation

This is extremely important. Documentation means that all your arguments, knowledge, analysis must be well documented, with proper references (as per your School’s guidelines). Poorly referenced work will be penalised and could even be at risk of plagiarism. Presentation means that your essay needs to look good. Make sure your format is consistent, learn how to use your word editor efficiently. Don’t use weird fonts and sizes, unnecessary colours. Usually this is where language skills come in as well. Do you know your apostrophes, your your and your you’re, your they’re and your their? Are your sentences well constructed? Is your prose fluid and engaging? Try reading it with a different eye, pretend you’re a reader and not the author. Even better, get a colleague to read it and get feedback (offering to do the same for them).

 

If your essay demonstrates high achievement in all categories, you’re a star! If not, how can you focus on improving a specific area of your work? While it could be easier to improve your documentation by being more meticulous in your referencing, how can you improve your analysis? You need to read a lot, there are no two ways about it. Work hard and you’re bound to improve. You can ask your tutors for help in your particular area. Comment below if you have a question.

 

Coming next: what to make of essay feedback and what to do next

image from here

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Teach 2000 for languages: a great tool for learning vocabulary

Posted on February 21, 2011 by The Cyclist

Teach 2000 is a ‘memory trainer’, a tool which I personally found extremely useful when dealing with foreign languages and vocabularies. Some learners, particularly visual learners, find it easy to absorb new vocabulary by memorising it. Teach 2000 helps exactly with that.

You can start a new glossary and enter up t0 2 definitions. Simple input mode allows you to simply put in the word and its definitions, separated by a choice of symbols you can determine in advance, such as ‘=’.

When you have a list of words, the software then generates a test to help you memorise the vocabulary.

The advanced input mode allows you to include more information on the word, such as what part of the speech it is (noun, adjective etc.). It also allows you to determine some quiz options, such as having the answer first rather than the question, deliver different question formats, such as multiple choice, and give feedback after each question.

You can even create a map/image quiz, which also allows you to upload a map and ask questions about it. In addition, you can also upload or record sound files to include in your quiz.

Teach 2000 is a free software, which can be downloaded from here. There is also a portable version, which allows you to carry the software around you on a flash drive for use in lecture theatres and teaching rooms where the software isn’t installed. Isn’t that brilliant? And all this for free!

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Historical Characters (and Periods) Murdered in Songs Shock

Posted on February 10, 2011 by The Cyclist

Reposted from elearnCAL

The Spanish Inquisition done to the Human League’s Fascination, Leonardo da Vinci done to Dear Prudence, Napoleon to the Violent Femmes… YouTube Channel ‘History for Music Lovers‘ (sic) – this is one of the oddest treatments of history that I’ve seen and the people behind it have clearly put a lot of work into it and I’ve absolutely no idea if it has an educational use… any suggestions?

Anyway, my fave is The Canterbury Tales done to California Dreaming – Pilgrims leavin’ town/on a long journey – sing along!

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Effective presentations: some useful tips

Posted on January 19, 2011 by The Cyclist

During your time at university, you will inevitably have to present your work in the form of an oral presentation rather than in an essay or portfolio. Oral presentations need not be something to dread. If you’re organised and confident about your knowledge of the material, you’ll do just fine. However, you do need to be very well organised and structured. Here are some useful tips:

  • do your homework. If you’re well read it will show
  • make sure you get the pitch right-what’s the presentation for? Is it assessed? Is it to inform or to build relationships? Make sure the tone is right for your audience
  • list your aims early on. If your presentation has 3-4 aims, let your listeners know in advance, so that they know where you’re heading
  • you can’t say everything. Presentations are not about saying a lot, but about ensuring that what you say is perfectly heard and understood. Less is more! If you’re using a PowerPoint or Prezi slideshow, keep it clean, tidy and don’t put too much text on each slide. The best presentation I’ve seen lately was without text at all – images only: why not give it a try!
  • first impressions last the most-make a good one! Start with a bang, a joke, a quotation, a positive statement, a stunning image
  • keep your audience interested. Make eye contact, modulate your voice, use body language etc.
  • involve the audience

An organised and well researched presentation will go a long way. Download our guide here and find out more. Good luck!

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Avoiding Plagiarism

Posted on December 7, 2010 by The Cyclist

What is plagiarism?

According to the University of Birmingham’s website,

“[P]lagiarism is the submission for formal assessment of an assignment that incorporates, without proper citation or acknowledgement by means of an accepted referencing standard, the intellectual property or work of a third party.”

Plagiarism can happen deliberately, i.e. when someone copies and pastes sections of a book or website into their work or uses someone else’s essay as their own. However, it can also happen when references are inadequate or non-existent, therefore meaning that what is borrowed content in an essay is presented as one’s own. This can also happen by accident, if the student isn’t aware of referencing techniques and does not attribute all the sources.

How to avoid plagiarism

Apart from not cheating, plagiarism can be accidental. These are some good tips to avoid plagiarism:

  • Always reference your sources, be it book, journal or website.
  • The concept of referencing is based on the need for evidencing your essay conclusions. As most of your essay is written based on secondary literature, any views, opinions or knowledge that aren’t commonly known have to be attributed. For example, you don’t need to reference that the Norman conquest of England happened in 1066, that’s common knowledge. However, if a historian thinks that William the Conqueror’s strategies were rather flawed, you can’t repeat it without saying where you found it. Simple.
  • Make sure you have grasped your School’s referencing techniques. If your referencing is inconsistent or inadequate, you’re more likely to commit plagiarism
  • Do not ‘borrow’ material you wrote for another essay or project-that’s also plagiarism
  • Do not use essays submitted in other Schools or universities, or written by other people-that is serious plagiarism
  • make sure your direct quotes are correctly identified, probably with ” ” and a reference
  • If you are paraphrasing someone make sure this is very clear, do not leave any room for confusion or doubt

Look at the example below. We have a quote from Lillian Ray Martin’s book, The art and archaeology of Venetian ships and boats, Texas A&M University Press, 2001, p. 9 (preview available on Google books).

Depending on how you use the quote, it can add value and validity to your essay, or be considered plagiarism.

Direct Quote

As you can see, the student here directly quotes from the book and uses diacritical marks (“) to indicate that the words are the author’s and not their own. In addition, the student also gave the exact reference to the book and page the quote came from.

Correct Paraphrase

As you can see here, the student paraphrased the author’s original words, but also gave the reference, as the knowledge came from the book and is not the student’s own research.

Incorrect paraphrase

As you can see here, the student used the author’s words in verbatim, also giving a reference to the book and page number. However, as the student did not insert diacritical marks, it can be taken to mean that these words are in fact the student’s and not the author’s. This can be considered plagiarism, and most departments would either penalise the essay with a percentage of the mark or by failing the essay entirely.

What to do next

There is nothing to fear if you have understood two things:

  • your own School’s policy on plagiarism
  • your own School’s referencing style

If you are clear about plagiarism and know how to reference your work, you have nothing to fear. If you are in any doubt, consult your personal tutor immediately. Each school and degree programme may potentially have its own policy and referencing guidelines, so make sure you follow them. If you are stuck the night before the essay submission deadline and you have to copy something in order to complete it, it’s not worth it as you’ll most likely be caught. It would be more honest to ask for an extension and reassess your time management for the next time. See 10 steps to a successful essay

Relevant links

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Plagiarism detection through Turnitin

Posted on December 2, 2010 by The Cyclist

Turnitin is a useful tool for online assessment and plagiarism detection, and is increasingly used by departments as the main means of assessment submission. Turnitin scans a huge online database of material to find matches between the submitted essay and:

  • websites
  • online book resources and e-libraries
  • previously submitted essays in a number of participating institutions. This is particularly important, as a lot of cheats use essays submitted elsewhere.
  • online journals

In Downloads and Other Resources you can find a pdf guide to submitting an essay via Turnitin, or just view this slideshow.

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Blogging for learning: pros and cons

Posted on November 22, 2010 by The Cyclist

Blogging is becoming an increasingly useful tool for learning. If you are the kind of learner who likes to go over their notes, summarising and reviewing, perhaps blogging is for you. It is extremely useful in that respect, as it allows you to keep an e-diary with the day’s (or week’s) activities, adding your reaction to them, your opinions and your conclusions. For example, you could summarise the day’s lectures and seminars in 2-3 paragraphs, which would help you with consolidating knowledge, understanding tasks and planning for the next session. What was the gist of the lecture? What was the nature of the seminar? What was your input? What were the outcomes? What did you take away from it all?

For me, the most important function of blogs is that they could potentially create an online community with comments and replies to specific topics and themes. The classroom can then become a virtual discussion board, something which is invaluable.

There are numerous platforms for blogging, most of which are extremely easy to set up and customise, giving you your own, personal e-space. The most popular are:

WordPress

WordPress.com is a very attractive and extremely powerful platform. It is freely available and supports embedding videos, images and other files such as Microsoft Office documents or pdf files.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blogging platform, and like WordPress is also freely available. If you already have a Google account, you’re already half-way there!

Posterous

Posterous is an increasingly popular platform, freely available with connectivity options for Twitter and Facebook.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another popular and powerful tool.

Whichever tool you decide to go with, it’s hard to go wrong, as they all pretty much support posting, commenting, inserting media and linking to other websites and social networks. My personal favourite (as you will surely gather from this blog) is WordPress. It’s stylish, simple to use, but incredibly powerful when it has to be. There are hundreds of templates you can use as well, making customising it so much more fun than with Blogger.

The Cons

What are the cons? Surely it can’t be all good with blogs. At the core of most problems lies the fact that what you will be writing is available to the whole web. Once you’ve come to realise that, then it’s easy to avoid these pitfalls:

  • never mention people/places/modules in a way that they can be identified. For example, don’t write “My lecturer John Smith was rubbish today, he’d obviously had a drink” or “Billy Bob didn’t do his share of the reading for the seminar, that was unacceptable”. This would cause problems as you can understand
  • don’t mix personal stuff and learning: give your blog a learning focus, and soon it will be a focal point for your cohort. Waffle too much and find yourself cherishing the odd hit you get by accident
  • make the content of your learning the focus of the blog, not your tutor’s tie or the lecture room’s colour scheme
  • do comment on things such as interactivity (or lack of), suitability of learning space and in general anything you feel has an impact (positive or negative) on your learning
  • do comment on things you liked and why – expand your interests
  • share your research tips with others through your blog: where can you find good material?
  • be aware that people will be reading your blog so maintain a good style at all times

In addition, some institutions are a bit nervous about blogs, as they may not like people coming out with personal opinions in public. If you express controversial, abusive or defamatory opinions your institution might have something to say. Do rant but be fair.

Good luck!

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Dissertation preparation: never too early

Posted on June 28, 2010 by The Cyclist

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If you are just about to start your third year at uni and you are thinking of your dissertation, the summer is a good time to start preliminary work.  Although there is no need to panic, it would be extremely useful if you did some background reading and formulated some questions. Here’s how to go about it:

Step 1

Pick a subject. This should be ideally a question, a problem. This can be something like:

“What was the social impact of the Ottoman military transformation of Selim III?”, or “The conquest of America and its impact on European trade and production: the death of European sugar and cotton?”, or “The reflection of contemporary society in Wordsworth’s poetry”. You see, here you can investigate a subject you are already vaguelyfamiliar with, but ultimately you pose a question. If you have already selected a subject, great. Go to Step 2

Step 2

Do a bibliography search on your subject. You can go about this in various ways. Ideally, you should be able by now to do this on your own, by searching your library’s catalogue, Google and, crucially, Google Scholar and Google Books. However, it may be useful to talk to your tutor as well, since they may be able to point you to a book or article which is a good place to start your search. There’s no point starting from a 1920′s book if there have been 23,000 publications that are more up-to-date.

Step 3

Find one title which will be your starting point. Read this and make notes, keeping an eye out for two things:

1) questions the author raises, issues which you may think deserve addressing

2) further reading, as highlighted in footnotes and its bibliography.

This way you are slowly building your notes and your reading list.

Step 4

Recap. Revisit your initial dissertation topic in the light of what you have read. Bearing in mind that you may need to use primary sources such as documents, archival material, archaeological findings or manuscripts, make sure your question is not too ambitious.

Write up a short plan. Divide your essay into chapters. Make sure to allocate enough space for each topic. If your dissertation has to be 20,000 words, don’t draft a plan with 12 chapters as this will not give you enough room to expand each subject adequately.

Talk to your tutor, explain you plan and get their advice. Take on board any recommendations, make last-minute amendments and GO! You are ready to start in earnest! Make sure to give your tutor regular updates.

Time management

It is essential to draw a time plan. Successful time management (and project management) requires that you divide your project into small, manageable chunks and allocate each of them enough time. Don’t forget to always add 10% for unexpected difficulties, changes that need to be made etc. Create your own deadlines and treat them the same way you would treat a deadline from your tutor. Give yourself time. Don’t overstretch and work overnight the night before a deadline, that’s never a good idea and results are rarely good. Be relaxed, rested and in general happy. Don’t forget to do other things you enjoy-being engaged with your dissertation 110% of the time is never a good idea.

Good luck!

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