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RHE 398T Help Materials

These pages support instructors of RHE 306 and RHE 309 to teach information and digital literacy skills.

Welcome

Teaching research skills in RHE 306/309

First year students are being asked to engage with information and research on a broader scale than ever before. Pay attention to their information literacy skills. Read this summary of a 2016 report from the Stanford History Education Group to get an idea of the level and experience of freshmen.

Introduction and Background

These pages are created by librarians here on campus. They include guidance on how to teach information literacy skills in the form of lessons and in class or out of class activities. Elise Nacca, Head of Information Literacy Services at UT Libraries can be contacted at any time if you need support.

What is information literacy?

Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know. Read about how librarians talk about this topic here.

Information literacy is the ability to:

  • recognize an information need
  • know where and how to search for that information
  • know how to evaluate that information
  • know how to use that information ethically

Information literacy bumps up against media literacy (sometimes news literacy), which, in addition to the skills needed to access, evaluate and analyze, asks students to understand the role of media in our society and become responsible media creators on their own.

Digital literacy is typically defined as the ability to learn and effectively use digital tools in pursuit of the above skills.

Materials to Support your Teaching

Use the links at left to navigate to pages that cover specific topic areas.

Plagiarism Prevention

Want to teach your students about plagiarism? We have a tutorial with quiz (for Canvas) to help students avoid plagiarism. If you want your students to watch the tutorial with no quiz, that lives here.

Appropriation and Attribution from Ethics Unwrapped (McCombs School of Business). This 9 min video gives an overview of these concepts situated within considerations for a digital environment. Discussion questions are included. 

Materials for your Students

The RHE 306/309 Students page is designed for your students as a research guide for the course and you are encouraged to share the link with them. The page covers resources (primarily, but not exclusively, library databases) helpful to your students and tips for using these resources.

Contact a librarian

Please don't hesitate to contact your librarian, Elise Nacca. You may also connect students directly to me for research help.

Librarian

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Elise Nacca
Contact:
Perry-CastaƱeda (Main) Library (PCL)
Website

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.