Task 1 — Information Fluency

Identify three questions before searching for information

first two tasks of this PoE will be submitted twice each – once as a formative mark during the semester in the same way that an ordinary assignment would be marked, and again as a final PoE submission to measure the improvements you have made to these attempts. As such, please remember to keep all notes and work you complete with regards to these tasks so that you can refer to them later as necessary.

Task 1 — Information Fluency

There is a lot of information on plagiarism available on the world wide web, and it is often difficult to figure out what information to trust, and what information to ignore. For this task, you will need to apply specific Information Fluency steps in order to come up with relevant sources, determine the credibility of these, and then apply them to a given task.
Imagine that you are a tutor of first-year higher certificate students, and that you have been asked by the Business Management lecturer to create a short one-page visual summary advising students how to avoid plagiarism. The lecturer was recently horrified at the levels of plagiarism she noted in students’ first assignment submissions, and does not want a repeat of this in future. Aside from the administration and extra marking that resulted from all of the plagiarism reports, she really does want to see her (and your) students succeed, and thinks that a short summary document for students will help them.

Note: Tasks 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 need to be submitted through SafeAssign. Your visual summary from Task 1.4 does not need to be submitted.

With this scenario in mind, complete the following steps and instructions using Information Fluency, as advised by Lee Crockett:

T.1.1

Identify three questions that you will ask yourself before attempting to search for information relevant to your scenario.

T.1.2

Using the above questions to inform your search, identify three possible sources that appear relevant to your topic (you may use online, database and/or hardcopy books/chapters in books etc.). Write down the full bibliographic

T.1.3

For each one of your identified sources, indicate whether it is credible and usable for your topic or not. Provide two clear reasons for your decision in each of the three cases.
Hint: For this task, which is part of the Analyse and Authenticate component of Information Literacy, you may wish to refer to Section 5.4.3 of your prescribed book (on pp.88 – 90) by Siewierski (2015) for some additional guidance on checking if your sources are credible or not.

Identify three possible sources

NB: Please note though that you will not be penalised if you decide that a source is not credible or usable for your topic – identifying irrelevant or poor-quality content is a vital academic and workplace skill, so be critical, and think of the best, most credible, and relevant information for your students and topic.

T.1.4

Use a mindmap or another user-friendly visual format of your choice to summarise the key points of the advice for avoiding plagiarism from ALL THREE of the sources that you located (whether these were found to be credible or not). This summary does not need to be detailed or in full sentences, but the tips/advice must be clear to the reader, and your summary tips need to reflect their sources using the in-text Harvard Method.

Please note that when you resubmit Task 1 with the necessary revisions in your final PoE submissions, improvements on the quality of the information used in your summary will be the key criteria, so you will NOT be penalised for including information that is not credible at THIS particular point. The focus here (for now) is on how you extract and present relevant information in a given format, and not on the actual information itself.

In your continued role as tutor to the first-year higher certificate students, you decide to improve their understanding of academic integrity by getting your students to write a short essay on the nature and extent of plagiarism, and on some of the ways they can avoid it.

Before you can give your students the task though, you decide to complete the essay yourself so that you can demonstrate what an excellent essay on the topic looks like – your students can then use your great essay to benchmark their own efforts.

Your final PoE submission will include revisions of parts of Task 1, the full Task 2, as well as a new Task 3, which you have not yet attempted. Please ensure that you follow instructions carefully, and that you consult the relevant rubrics at the end of this PoE to ensure that you complete the tasks correctly.

Improvements to Task 1

Consult the feedback that your marker provided for all of the sub-tasks of Task 1, and then, ensuring that you are now using three credible sources, resubmit Task 1.4. You should ensure that:

your content is now also credible (not just relevant) and that it would be useful for your students to use (3);
you again show the source of your summarised tips using the Harvard in-text method (1); and
at the bottom of your visual summary, you reflect the full Harvard style bibliographic references of your sources (1).

Consult the feedback that your marker provided for all of the sub-tasks of Task 2, and then resubmit all sub-tasks of Task 2 to reflect their improvements. Again, your skeleton outline does not need to be written in full sentences or formal paragraphs at this point, but your marker will specifically look for improvements and quality in the following areas:

A comprehensively and correctly analysed topic table (2);
The use and correct referencing of three credible sources that conform to the specified formats (4);
The content of your skeleton outline is complete and correct in terms of dealing with the topic and the different components of the essay, and that all claims have credible supporting sentences (5);