English 1550 (Tuesday, Sept. 27)

Instead of holding class on Tuesday, Karen and her students met on the fourth floor of Maag Library for a session on how to best use the library's resources, particularly for research papers. Honestly, I found the session informative and actually learned a few things from it, so I'll probably incorporate it into my English 1550 course schedule. The instructor was friendly and attempted to make the session as digestible and approachable as possible. I liked the way that he walked through some of the steps of the researching process (like using keywords, finding databases, and determining the credibility of sources), but I'm not sure how I feel about the citation tool he showed students. Instead of creating their own citations following a particular style (like MLA, APA, or Chicago), students can use pre-made citations available on the database website. Although the instructor described this as a major time-saver, I can't help but feel like it's cheating ... at least a little bit. By only copying and pasting the citations, students won't really understand the reason behind what they're doing. However, it's naive of me to think that most students don't already use a citation generator. At least this way the citations should be, for the most part, accurate.