The workshop, ‘Referencing with Lego’ has been adapted from Carina Buckley’s (2015) article which I refer to in my blog Conceptualizing Plagiarism – the idea, which can be found here:
Conceptualizing Plagiarism – The Idea! | PGCert (arts.ac.uk)
The first part of this workshop is based on the micro teaching session that I did with peers around a year ago, January/February 2023.
The Session had such good feedback that I new that I wanted to do more with the session.
The Micro teaching session was only short, and I was limited in the 20minutes that I had. I had always wanted to develop the idea into a longer session with further activities to get students practicing referencing in a fun way. Hopefully this session will be as successful as the microteaching session. There are lots of reasons for wanting to do an activity-based session around referencing, many of them I talk about in the blog ARP – My Research Question ARP – My Research Question | PGCert (arts.ac.uk)
The plan for the session was adapted from the Micro teach plan, and although the first part is essentially the same, I have made a few changes to timings.
The second part of the workshop is a little tamer, with me demonstrating some useful tools for referencing, e.g. Cite them Right and the UAL Visual Referencing Guide. Students were asked to bring along their laptops so that they could join in at this point too, so that they were active throughout the session.
The third part of the session is in two parts and is essentially a matching game. I wanted students to be able to create references for books that they were either already familiar with, or likely to become acquainted with, so I chose books that were from their reading list/s.
This part of the session was the most time consuming to prepare for and involved the tasks:
- Find appropriate material to reference. A number of images from book covers were used, and students had to match the bibliographic data card.
- 2. Copy to create several resource packs.
- 3. To create a reference for each of the covers, using Lego bricks. This was my original idea, but I did not have enough Lego. I wanted to stay with the Lego theme, so I printed Lego bricks on paper, 2D, but looked 3D, and added different parts of the citation on a different colour bricks.
- 4. Theses had to be cut out before the session, which was very time consuming.
- 5. At this point I was not aware of numbers and room layout as I was visiting the students in their lecture room. So I wanted to ensure that I had enough for students to work in pairs or slightly larger groups.
Collaboration is of course essential. This increases the fun aspect, and competition between individuals and groups. Although competition was not suggested by me and no prizes were mentioned, the competition seemed to be a natural outcome and is an important element of Game Based Learning. (More on Game Based Learning can be found in my blog “Blog 18-1-23 – Part 2”
GBL V Gamification
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The workshop PowerPoint
Reference
Buckley, Carina (2015), ‘Conceptualizing Plagiarism: Using Lego to construct students’ understanding of authorship and citation’, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), pp. 352-358. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. https://dio.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1016418. Accessed: 28/1/2023