Disinformation” (related but slightly different terms for this include “Fake News” and “Misinformation”)
Context & Preparation
Our fifth assignment sets the foundation for work we will engage in for the remainder of our course: you will prepare an academic document called a literature review, and then adapt your research findings for an oral presentation and blog post later in the course.
Picking up on discussions we’ve had in the class to date, your topic is “Disinformation” (related but slightly different terms for this include “Fake News” and “Misinformation”). Our objectives with the literature review are to
Read and share academic research findings using the common scholarly genre of a
literature review
Learn about and practice key, transferable–to–the–workplace skills such as
summarizing, critical reading, citation, analysis, and synthesis
Learn about academic writing and how to differentiate it from workplace writing
Formulate a meaningful perspective on your topic, including what seems to be
known and not known about it (according to the academic research you find).
Assignment Schedule
Week 8: Search for information on your topic. In our library session, you will learn some skills to narrow your focus: the topic is broad with many directions you could go in.
Week 8–9: find a minimum of 4 academic (aka “scholarly”) sources on your topic via the UFV library. Bring digital OR print copies of these to our Week 9 class as you will need to work closely with at least one of them.
Week 9–10: Using strategies to be reviewed in class, read your sources carefully, noting gists and other key information. If your sources are lengthy, that’s okay: we will discuss how to manage this.
Week 9–10: Draft a thematically organized literature review, showing areas of both agreement and disagreement between your sources. This review should involve summary but not be purely summary.
Limit direct quoting in favour of summarizing/paraphrasing for sake of efficiency and clarity and focus primarily on analysis and synthesis.
Week 10: Bring a hard copy draft of your literature review to our Week 10 class.
Week 11: Submit your literature review. Date TBA.
