Give students an article from a popular news source and have them trace the research back to the original study/paper.
Steps
- Provide students with a set of resources, either from the examples below or that you have constructed.
- Give students the following directions: All of the resources listed below are by the same person, [INSERT AUTHOR NAME HERE]. For each resource, spend a few minutes browsing or listening. You don’t have to read, listen to, or watch the whole thing, but read or watch enough that you feel confident that you understand what format you’re looking at. Then answer the following reflection questions:
- What format is each of these sources?
- How are the purposes of these formats different?
- How is the information likely to differ?
- How is the information packaged differently?
- Who is likely to read each of these formats?
- What is an example of a time there would be a reason to choose one over the other?
Example Sources
Note: Don’t forget to remove the parenthetical answers before distributing to students!
- Carissa Veliz
- Privacy is Power (book)
- Privacy and digital ethics after the pandemic (scholarly article)
- Read this and you won’t click ‘I agree’ ever’ again (popular article)
- Some thoughts about #Apple’s latest #WWDC21 and #privacy. (twitter thread).
- The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Carissa Véliz on privacy, AI ethics and democracy (podcast)
- Amy Bruckman
- Should You Believe Wikipedia? (book – link to publisher)
- Decentralization in Wikipedia governance (scholarly article)
- Community, Online Communities & Social Media with Dr. Amy Bruckman (podcast)
- Should You Believe Wikipedia? (video)
- Aaron Purzanowski
- The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own (book – link to Google Books)
- Consumer Perceptions of the Right to Repair (scholarly article)
- Right To Repair: Why Companies Like Apple Make It So Hard To Fix The Products You Buy (video)
- Winning the War on Repair with Aaron Perzanowski (podcast)
Considerations
- Give students a heads up that some of these are popular formats not discussed in the video playlist, such as tweet threads and podcasts. This exercise can be used to extend the conversation about format to include these familiar formats and address when and how they may be appropriate to use in research.
- If you would like to customize a set of resources around a particular author in your field, the librarians would be happy to help. Alternatively, here are some tips on trying the process yourself:
- Start with a scholar who has written a book on your topic
- From there check Google Scholar or their CV for scholarly articles
- Googling their name is likely to turn up podcasts, videos and popular magazine articles or blog posts
- Check for twitter threads using twitter advanced search