so this short presentation explains to you just what an annotated bibliography is and looks at what you need to do to get your assignment three started for essay writing for university so before you begin the annotated bibliography task which is assignment three you need to make sure that as we talked about in week seven you’ve completed the first two of the let’s go activities in module four so that was analyzing our topic and clustering or mind mapping or brainstorming your prior knowledge and so that the purpose of that was for you to settle on and decide which two problems you are going to research in your annotated bibliography and then write about in your research essay so the slide notes there that you might like to look ahead and attack activity four three and four four but you can get started with the annotated bibliography tasks even if you haven’t done those so the most important thing is that you’ve decided on the two problems you’re going to be researching in relation to our topic which has stated here again on this slide so you’re looking for two problems that our Australian lifestyle is created for the natural environment and you’re also looking at for information about ways those problems are being addressed so in short you’re looking for information about the problem and you’re also looking to see if you can find information and research about solutions to those problems so you might have at this stage some idea of what you want to say about the problems and your take on the topic for eris on the last two assignments but you also need to be aware that I should do some research and some reading and as you find useful academic sources and in the in the process of compiling the annotated bibliography your ideas might actually change so you have to be ready to be a little bit flexible so an annotated bibliography is quite a fancy little bit frightning sounding term for something that’s actually quite straightforward so a bibliography is another way of saying a list of sources so sometimes people use bibliography and reference list interchangeably they’re not actually the same thing so a bibliography is a list of sources that you’ve consulted and researched used to research your topic but they may not necessarily be actually referenced or cited within the final essay so this annotated bibliography that you’re going to produce you’re going to find four sources in relation to your problem four different sources but it doesn’t actually mean that you’re going to use them as references when you write your research essay you might find other ones you might decide they’re not very useful but you just have to find four sources at this stage in relation to your two problems so usually a bibliography does look like a reference list in that it’s a list of citations with the with the publication details but when we add the annotated part to it that means that after each citation you include a short summary and evaluation of the source so that’s what an annotated bibliography is it’s a list of sources but each one has a short comment or paragraph about what it’s about and how useful it might be for you with your research towards the topic so as you’re going along and you’re looking at the sources that you find you might be thinking about the problems that you’re investigating is this Reese resource that you found might be a newspaper article or a journal article or a book or a document on the web is it actually related to the problem that you’re investigating so that goes back to your analysis of the topic and your decision on what problems that what problems you’re going to research you also have to decide what kind of material you’re actually looking for so in our assignment you’re asked to find four different types of resources so that means you cannot in your annotated bibliography use four books you cannot use for journal articles you cannot use for government reports they have to be different so you might have a book you might have a government report you might have an article from the newspaper and you might have DVD so that’s four different types of resources and also keep an eye out and see as you’re starting to research your topic you’re going to find hopefully lots of information and some of it might keep referring to the same book or the same report that might have been published or written about it that’s giving you a hint that that’s a key piece of research on your topic so you might want to then go ahead and try and look for that as well so in completing this task in essay writing for university you’re actually drawing on some skills that are taught in prep skills for university which you are we will either be doing this term or you will have completed in a previous term if this isn’t your first term of steps so the information literacy component in PS you went through how to effectively use the library how to search the library catalog and other information sources and now you need to be able to hark back to that and apply those skills in combining keywords in formulating search strategies to find resources about the two problems you have chosen so in our annotated bibliography you’re also going to include a short description of how you found each resource each of your four resources and you’ll see this in the model that’s on Moodle as well so you need to be able to describe the keywords that you used whether you limited your search by date or type of resource or whether you use some keywords and they didn’t work so you tried some other ones and they were better and gave you a better return of sources so that is something that’s really important because we want to be able to see that you’ve got the skills to be able to research in an academic way as you prepare not just this essay but as you go into undergrad as well so part of what we’re assessing is that you’ve got those basic information literacy skills they’re essential for you being able to succeed in your undergraduate study sometimes you may find that once you get into your undergraduate degree an annotated bibliography might be part of a larger assignment or it might be a standalone assignment as well and many undergraduate courses include annotated bibliographies as part of their assessment so by having this experience here in steps you would be well prepared for that eventuality so your annotated bibliography needs to only contain four sources but you will see if you’ve read ahead and read the task description for the research essay which is assignment four we expect a minimum of six sources preferably more than six that’s the minimum so the four sources that you use and find here in the annotated bibliography assignment may well be four sources that you use when you write your essay also but then again you might find that they’re not as useful as you thought they were and they won’t appear in your research essay either way is fine because part of this task is about evaluating how good the sources you’re finding are going to be for you in writing about the problems that you’ve chosen so to do the best job on this assignment you need to use the template that’s provided for the annotated bibliography so make sure you’ve downloaded that from the assessment link on Moodle for assignment 3 look at the models that we have provided for you of annotated bibliographies to a better idea as to what is expected and really make sure as with all assignments that you do that you’ve read the task description and the requirements in the course profile and the task sheet and look at the help sheets and submission guidelines also and follow them very carefully and as always if you’re not clear or you just want to double check that you’ve got everything in in order for this assignment make sure you ask questions of your lecturer so there’s a couple more videos about the annotated bibliography that go into detail about how to work with your search strategies and how to do your evaluation and if you watch those and also read the accompanying material in the study guide you should do a good job on this assignment