Annotated Bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography in which each source is accompanied by a summary of the source. Generally speaking, the longer the source is, the longer the summary will be. Thus, summaries of books tend to be longer than summaries of newspaper articles.
Example 1
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
In his landmark book, Hutchins radically reorients the study of cognition by asserting that cognition lies not only inside people but is distributed among them and the material and cultural tools they employ.
In studying cognition, the author moves from the laboratory to the real world setting of navigation, where he shows how navigational computation takes the form of a "propagation of representational state across a series of representation media" (p. 117). By using and coordinating tools (representational media), such as charts, sailors simplify navigation and cognitive activity, and thereby become able to perform more difficult computations. Tools do not amplify cognitive abilities but they transform tasks, making them easier to achieve.
When people integrate tools and computations into a system, computational properties emerge that differ from those of individual members--just as properties of human beings differ from their individual cells--due to the social interactions among them. It is the social organization that allows group cognition to differ from individual cognition, so that via a division of labor, people can accomplish collaboratively what they could not individually, such as sailing a ship. Consequently, the cognitive unit of analysis moves out from the individual to the computational system, a social group of people.
Once this boundary definition changes from the individual to a more flexible one, then adaptation, or learning, can be seen at many levels of analysis: within an individual’s mind, or at the local interaction level between persons or between a person and some mediating technology, or at a more global level. Individuals adapt, learn, and reach their goals by coordinating many structural media: “some internal, some embodied in artifacts, some in ideas, and some in social relationships” (p. 316). Restricting cognition to the individual mind disembodies it from its context , history, emotion, and cultural settings. Since, as Hutchins points out, cognition is fundamentally a cultural process, a cultural and social ecological level of analysis is needed to understand what human cognition is.
Example 2
Nelson, C. (2002). Contradictions in learning to write in a second language classroom. Unpublished dissertation: The University of Texas at Austin.
Nelson used a multi-theoretical perspective to move beyond descriptive analyses and toward an explanatory understanding of how students learn to write in a second language. The multi-theoretical case study included radical constructivism, activity theory, and complexity theory.
Nelson looked at how international students in a computer-assisted, first-year university rhetoric and composition course learned to write research-supported arguments in a second language classroom at a major university in the Southwest over a period of one semester. The major conclusion of the study was that contradictions were the primary driving force of learning in this class. Learning was not simply a straightforward process of participation but emerged nonlinearly as students reflected on and acted on contradictions arising from perceived discrepancies between their present experiences and their previous schemas, including sociocultural schemas. Moreover, the nature of the students’ learning was mediated by the sociohistorical influences they embodied, by the material and psychological tools they used, and by their interactions with other individuals both within and without the classroom ecology.
Online citation generators
Eventually, you will need to use style manuals to learn how to cite your sources correctly. For now, however, you can use one of these online sources:
- Easybib (MLA)
- Style Wizard (APA)