Module 1: What is academic culture and its core values?

1. Academic culture is:

- Contingent nature of knowledge: knowledge is ever-changing
- The importance of scholarly rigor and the need to be able to explain to others with care and precision
on work
- The recognition that knowledge, discovery and sharing is a collective enterprise.
- A recognition that understanding is enhanced through the bringing together of different perspectives.
- The belief, core values, and expectations shared in an academic community
2. Independent leaning is a core expectation of academic culture. Students are expected to work on their
own, to research.
3. What’s essential to academic culture is critical thinking: taking an idea, and analyzing it.
4. core values and expectations of academic culture are inquiry (the sense of finding things out), and
communicate them, think about way to do and improve => means that you talk about thing with your points
of view and express your thoughts.
Introduction to digital literacy
- Working with information using digital tools
- Create information
- Communicate effectively
- Manage digital identity
- Engage with networks to further learning
How information and digital literacy practices relate to academic culture and how this can help you in
your studies?
- Information literacy: is that the value of information is contextual (law, medicine,…), people find
information through thhe particular resources to use and how to search them, how to find the right
kind of information you need to assess it and effectively use it.
- People are not just consumers of information. They’re also producers of information
- Digital literacy: what you find online is it relevant? How you evaluate sources? Is it reliable?
thinking about the consequences of the information you’ve found.
 Information literacy into academic culture: Information literacy is a fundamental part of study at
university. You need to understand, where are you going to find information to support your
point of view? How are you going to assess that information for reliability? How do you evaluate
it to make sure it’s an accurate way of defending what you’ve got to say?
Survival skills for university
- Develop routines for time management
- Collaboration with other students
- Language skills
- Open minded about what students find out
- Scientific methods: critical thinking, start to question the information sources and assumptions of
media we read
- knowledge
Academic integrity: tính liêm chính
5 core values
- honesty: in the way you communicate in written and oral forms => need to reference their work and
ideas (ex: get someone else write your assignment)
- trust
 - fairness
- respect
- responsibility
- courage
academic misconduct:
- plagiarism, self-plagiarism, re-submission, cheating, fabrication, falsification of data or results,
facilitation of such actions of another student
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Module 2:
The scholarly and cultural record
To build our knowledge, we need to move beyond merely accessing information.
- Make informed and critical choices when selecting, managing, and interpreting information
 How?
- Cultural record (texts we get on daily basis such as social media) and the scholarly record (texts
written by experts) can help us understand the differences between various types of information
when you select information to use in your assignments, you need to be able to recognize whether the
sources are cultural or scholarly.
Primary, secondary and tertiary sources
- Primary sources give us a primary account, that is first hand information of an event (such as data
you collect in the experiment)
- Secondary sources: give us secondary account. It is written with hindsight, and might be an analysis
of the significance of a piece of pottery or and interpretation of a diary entry (such as book review)
- Tertiary sources give us an account that is twice removed. It draw upon and summarize primary and
secondary sources (such as handbooks, dictionaries)
Discipline specific information
- Why are different kinds of sources used in different disciplines?
=> because they use different kinds of information in different ways
Course information sources at University
3 main sources outside of your tutorials and lectures: textbooks, course notes (= course readers, handbooks),
and scholarly journals articles
Characteristics of journal articles
- Focus on getting an overview of the main points, instead of trying to understand every single word
- We can become part of conversation by taking a critical reading approach to academic sources and
by being selective about how and what we read.
- Scientific and humanities articles:
+same:

Access information
- Libraries
- Search information (the more reliable and accurate that data can be)
Database such as Taylor and Francis, JSTOR, SCOPUS
Searching for information and documenting the search strategy
Define information
- Defining information: analyze your assignment prompt or question and break it down into a set of
sub-topics, Defining key terms
- What information do you have already? => to find gaps in your knowledge and identify additional
evidence you need
- What information do you need? (primary, secondary, or tertiary source)
- Enter search terms (including synonyms) into search engine => lots of results
- While searching, document where you’ve looked => keep track
Search strategy
- Quotation mark
- Synonym
- Boolean search: and/or, not
- Limit the date range
- Related articles
- Citation chaining
Documenting and evaluating the search strategy
Critically evaluating information
- Purpose of the information or resource
- Authority: credibility and reputation
- Publisher reliable, peer-reviewed journal
- Objectivity
- Accuracy of the source
- Currency
Critically evaluating web-sources
- Publisher: looking at the URL (ex: .edu => education website admisnistered by a school or a
university)

3 reliable sources: .edu, .org, .gov

- Purpose of the web resource: whether it is sponsored (does not always equal bias)
- Aesthetic of the web source: bad graphics, confusing formatting, eye hurting colors, and unnecessary
=> not reliable
- Referencing
Wikipedia
 - Scholar purpose: academic language, reference
- Authority: biggest credibility issue of Wikipedia. Sometimes Wikipedia fails on authority
- Audience: not for academics, aims at the general public => Wikipedia fails for audience
- Objectivity: we don’t know who the author is, so how do you know if the information is objective?
- Accuracy: equally be more accurate, or less accurate or both, so accuracy is questionable
- Currency: no doubt that currency of Wikipedia is completely variable
 Wikipedia is not an entirely reliable source.
 Should not use it for assignments
Relevance of sources to your assignment
- Is the information related to your topic or does it answer your question?
- Does the source meet the needs of your assignment?
- Is the information written at an appropriate level? (for children or teenagers for laypeople, university
educated audiences
- Is the information appropriately is explored? That is not too general or specific for your needs,
whether the source explores the topic to an appropriate level of depth
Managing information: Files
- Including the publication information and topic
- You can change the name to your own established system so that you can keep things organize.
- Year of publication, author’s name, key words in the title or content
- Save drafts that are updated as you work each day => to keep track of the current version you’re
working on along the identify details of the assignment
Managing information: Folders
- Decide where to save the file
- The simpler the better
- Course, year, study period, semester, aspect of the course the information relates to like course
readings or assignment.
Processing and coding
- Reading the beginning of the article to get a sense of what’s being discussed and decide if the source
is credible and relevant.
- Then select relevant sections throughout the article that will give relevant information.
- Make notes to help you remember

- Assessment of credibility and relevance => understanding the main ideas, summarize the main idea
in a couple of sentences in your own words. Should read the following parts: abstract, introduction,
headings and subheadings, conclusion. Notice sourses cited that look useful for your assignment =>
record sources that look relevant and add them to your list to look up later.
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Highlight, make notes, write comment when you read the material

Copy and paste highlighted ideas to fill in your table as notes

Avoiding plagiarism
To avoid plagiarism, it’s important to understand what referencing is
What sorts of things need to be referenced.
Avoiding plagiarism involves genuine engagement with the literature by reading the texts and then putting
the ideas together with your own insights into your writing and into your own words.
Referencing and attributing resources
Referencing system and referencing style
 To give credit to the author and give enough details so that the readers can find the sources that
you’ve used.
Module 5 – Disseminating information
Copyright
- Is the right to control the copying of their work
+ infringement action
+ access to numerous paid databases and their content for your research

+ Creation of work
Combination of creative commons licensing
Digital networks for learning and research
- Forum/network with other who are in the same/similar field of study/interest
(learn, share materials, discuss)
- Develop personal learning network

 Become curious and autonomous learners

Identity
- How we express ourselves
3 types of online identity
 - Transactional identity: information that we fill out forms for government (thông tin trên giấy khai
sinh)
- Social identity: personal data shared online through social networking services
- Professional identity: images of skills/ experiences
 Cẩn thận với sống ảo trên MXH

How can we present ourselves in different online domains?

- In academic context: developing an elevator pitch to help you present yourself in a positive and
interesting way
Emailing to lecturers
- To be brief and to the point
- To be in a professional context
Write an email
- An email is not a text message or FB posts
- Spell things properly
- Avoid using emoji
- Write full sentences
- Don’t use text speak, don’t swear
- Be obvious
- Always include a subject
- Be specific and concise
- Attach any relevant documents
- Really be formal, be polite
- Say “Thank you” or another appropriate sign-off such as sincerely
- Sign your name
- Use Cc section when needed. Send email to lecturer, Cc your groupmates
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