When teaching students and colleagues about open educational resources, I often hype Zotero. There’s so much searching to be done, and it can be overwhelming to manage everything one finds. I had always approached Zotero as a tool for organizing my own research. I had simultaneously been teaching students about Zotero in my Seminar in Academic Inquiry and Writing. This first-year writing course helps students find strategies for searching for and evaluating the appropriateness of source material. I had always thought of this research work as mostly private, though I did encourage students to join our class group and create a folder of their sources in our shared library.
- Put a license on a public group library
- Attach copies of resources that are openly licensed and links to the original location of those that are not.
- Model what a good open library looks like and give your students the option to share their work publicly or create a private library
- Curating a collection of resources for a particular audience is a fantastic way to emphasize the distinct and crucial skill of resource analysis.
