Annotated Bibliographies
This project looks at using bookmarking software to enable students to build collective or individual annotated bibliographies, or article repositories for both formative and summative purposes. Blackboard Scholar and delicious.com have been used as examples to demonstrate how students can build resources to support their learning and how these resources can be shared more widely or built upon in subsequent years.
An annotated bibliography is a list of sources that have been chosen, ordered or categorised, and briefly annotated to describe the content that is relevant to an overarching theme. For example, see Pearl Goldman’s Legal Education and Technology II: An Annotated Bibliography published in the SSRN Nova Southeastern University Legal Studies Paper Series. Such lists are great resources, although they are frequently out-of-date as new work is published; and the categories used are not always mutually exclusive, leading to cross-referencing or duplication of entries.
Electronic formats can be readily updated and the use of tags allows re-ordering and categorisation to be done by the viewer to obtain the entries that they particularly wish to see. Using students to populate and annotate a bibliography hones their research skills, their ability to critique and evaluate content, and a level of self and peer assessment.
Student Guide – How to Contribute to an Annotated Bibliography. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, so feel free to download the MS Word Doc and adapt for your own use.
Bromby, M. & MacMillan, M. (2011) Building and Sharing Resources: Annotated Bibliography, Learning in Law Annual Conference, UKCLE, Warwick University 2011.
Forensic Evidence and Criminal Justice students at GCU have been assisting with an annotated bibliography of ‘Innocence’ literature relating to their studies of miscarriages of justice. Students undertaking ‘Innocence Projects’ at other universities have also contributed to this work.
Michael Bromby 