IDL 3.2b Establishing Relevance

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Academic Skills for University Success: Capstone

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The University of Sydney

Academic Skills for University Success: Capstone

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Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Academic Skills for University Success

This Specialization is aimed at preparing students for undergraduate study in an English-speaking university. The course equips you for full participation and engagement with your studies by building awareness and understanding of the core values and expectations of academic culture, and providing you with practical strategies to apply to your studies. In the Capstone Project, you will apply the academic knowledge and skills you have learnt throughout courses 1-4 to research, write and present a project proposal that addresses a complex, real-world problem related to your field of interest and/or future study. After completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Apply a range of idea generation techniques 2. Apply research strategies to search, collect, select, process, and cite information 3. Use the research process to develop and critically analyse ideas 4. Apply critical thinking skills to evaluate and analyse ideas and evidence 5. Use problem-solving skills to identify gaps in knowledge and define issues 6. Develop creative and innovative solutions to real-world problems 7. Use appropriate academic genres for written texts and multi-media presentations 8. Use written and oral skills to communicate ideas effectively for academic contexts

From the lesson

RESOURCES - Optional

This module is for the resources from the other courses you have studied. There is no new, or extra, material here. You do not have to watch any of this material.

IDL 3.2a Establishing Relevance7:09

IDL 3.2b Establishing Relevance5:55

IDL 3.4a Processing and Coding: Step 1 and 27:54

IDL 3.4b Processing and Coding: Step 34:06

Meet the Instructors

Katherine Olston
Deputy Director (Digital Learning)
University of Sydney Centre for English Teaching
Luke Alexander
Academic Literacy Instructor and MOOC Learning Instructor
Centre for English Teaching
Lydia Dutcher
Education Manager, Graduate Programs
Centre for English Teaching
Jessica Blackburn
Academic Literacy Instructor and MOOC Learning Designer
Centre for English Teaching

[MUSIC]

Hi, in this lesson, we're going to practice evaluating relevance.

To recap, the four questions we need to consider to evaluate relevance

are does the source meet the needs of your assignment?

Is the information source written at an appropriate level?

Is the information appropriately explored?

And is the information related to your topic or question?

Just as a reminder, this is our sample assignment question.

The two articles will assess for relevance are Anderson's Unhomely at Home,

Dwelling with Domestic Robots, and Noda, et al.'s

Impact of robotic assistance on precision of vitreoretinal surgical procedures.

Firstly, both articles meet all of our criteria for credibility.

They have a scholarly purpose.

The authors and publishers are authoritative.

They are written for an academic audience.

They are objective, they are accurate, and they're relatively current.

But do they meet our criteria for relevance?

Let's have a look.

For both articles we can quickly answer the question

does the source meet the needs of your assignment.

As we've discussed, the sources are credible which is of central importance to

university assignments.

And as the question doesn't tell us to restrict ourselves to a certain source or

kind of information, we can safely assume that they're appropriate for

this assignment.

However, for the other three questions, we need to look at them more specifically.

We'll start with Anderson's Unhomely At Home article.

The first thing we need to do is decide whether the information source is written

at an appropriate level.

Glancing through the first article, you can see difficult phrases, such as,

the human use of [human beings proceeds as a matter of rapid statistical

codification through the monitoring and regulation of reciprocal messages.

This sentence would suggest the article is written for

an audience of academic peers and thus, quite advanced.

But it's still worth continuing to assess its relevant at this point

as you might still understand some of the main ideas.

If we then ask the question, is the information appropriately explored,

we can see some of the limitations to the text.

One way to answer this question is to read through some of the titles or

subheadings and the topics sentences.

Here we have the subtitle of over anthropomorphization,

where we can find a review of previous literature on the subject

of the fuzzy boundary between life and non-life.

The next section, a little robot goes a long way, discusses Nintendo's Chibirobo

game to highlight the unhomely biopolitics of technological lives.

The final section, dwelling happening community, and

ethics of animate belonging, is a discussion of the first two sections.

Anderson sums it up himself when he calls Chibirobo a rather obscure title,

meaning that the information contained is highly specific.

Perhaps much too specific for our needs.

The language and the references are also telling us

that he's taking a very philosophical point of view.

Now, let's consider the final question.

Is the information related to your topic or question?

Though the Anderson article has some cool insight into robotics and

AI, his analysis is based on interaction as seen through a video game.

It doesn't really say anything about jobs or

employment other than discussing robots engaging in basic household chores.

If we were writing a long essay,

some of Anderson's overall philosophical ideas might be useful.

However, the obscurity advanced in his topic, his philosophical approach and

the specificity of his research mean we probably don't need to focus

too much energy on this article.

For the moment, I'll put this one aside, and have a closer look at Node et al's

Impact of robotic assistance on precision of vitreoretinal surgical procedures.

Going through these three questions again,

we can start with whether the information source is written at an appropriate level.

Again, a quick glance through the first page tells us there's

quite a lot of technical language that's very difficult to understand.

I have no idea what stabilize the manipulator tip just above

the fundus means.

This is technical language that's very discipline specific and may be a little

too advanced, particularly, as I'm not a student in In this field.

For the next question, is the information appropriately explored?

The Noda et al article is a research article

as demonstrated by their extensive method and results section and thus, focuses

specifically on one piece of research on using robots in the operating theater.

However, that doesn't mean we can't use it.

There may be broader claims or information in the introduction or conclusion, or

the more specific information could be used to provide examples or

evidence in our essay.

Finally, let's look at whether the information is related to the topic or

question, and this is where we see a difference.

The Node et al article doesn't directly say anything about employmrent either, but

in the introduction, it does talk about how

recently robotic-assisted surgery has broadened its application, and

has been introduced into the surgical theaters worldwide.

Importantly, the conclusions specifically states that the benefits of robotic

assistance for the sophisticated vitreoretinal surgeries was confirmed.

This is important from a technological, economic and

social perspective because it provides evidence that robotic

assistance is beneficial in this specific area of medicine.

And we may use this as an example in our essay of an area where

AI is increasingly being used to do a traditionally human task.

The Node et al article therefore meets our criteria for

relevance in a limited way, and might be good for the assessment.

[MUSIC]

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