While I could (and might!) just assign the standard end-of-term research paper, the unintended consequence of doing so often results in students looking around for any quotations they can throw in to meet the arbitrary requirement of sources. Why an Annotated Bibliography?Īnnotated bibliographies get students experience with some of the important steps of literary scholarship: finding secondary criticism and digesting it. This assignment asks you to summarize and critically assess 6 sources and contribute them to a shared, collaborative, online bibliography using the Zotero 2.0 beta plug-in ( for Firefox. My one misgiving is that I hate to have students read articles about House of Leaves before we have finished reading the text. Moreover, I hope it will disincentivize the tendency for rushed students to glom onto each others’ sources. Doing so will allow me to trouble shoot any problems the students are having with the assignment before the crush at the semester’s end. I quite like Bill Wolff‘s suggestion to have students comment on each other’s entries, but I decided I didn’t have the time to implement that twist this semester.įinally, I decided to have 3 due dates for the assignment. Still, getting a little bit of perspective seemed worthwhile. No one needs duplicate entries on multiple sources. This seemed important so that we could honor the concept of what an annotated bibliography is. I also decided to allow only two students to write about each source. Since I’m hoping to let the students use this assignment to pursue an idea that they find interesting in class, it seemed important to not focus as much on the length of the sources (although they will certainly be conscious of length). The last time I taught this class, 95% of the class read the same monograph–primarily due to its length. (I’m still working to figure out how to best acknowledge Creative Commons credit on assignments that create for my classes.)Īs you’ll see, I decided against having my students read a full book for the assignment, opting instead for articles and book chapters. I especially drew ideas from Mark Sample‘s annotated bibliography assignment for his Fall 2009 course. I appreciated all of the comments that I received on the blog and on Twitter about the initial draft. I’ve finished the assignment, which you can see below. Your annotated bibliography should appear, with your annotations beneath each citation.I just wanted to post a quick note in a follow-up to last week’s post about my Annotated Zotero Group Bibliography assignment. I choose Copy to Clipboard for the Output Method.
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