Academic Practice Workshops 2022/23

Library Services will be offering a number workshops during the 2022-23 academic year. For a description of what each workshop covers, please scroll down to the information below.

**For a timetable of events, please click Library Services Workshops - 22-23 (v1).pdf.**

Students may sign up to the workshops through MetHub. Simply search for each workshop using its title or by using the keyword ‘library’.

Please remember to check as you sign up for sessions whether they are delivered on campus, in person, or online, through Teams.

Further sessions may be added during the year. Details of these sessions will be included on the timetable provided above and publicised within the libraries and through social media.

If there are any topics you would like us to explore in future workshops, please let us know at academicskills@cardiffmet.ac.uk.

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MetSearch: Learn the basics and find quality sources

MetSearch is key to your academic success, pointing you to literature in your discipline. This essential workshop will take you through the basics of searching, including filtering results. You'll also learn how to keep track of your favourite sources and use MetSearch's handy citation tool.

Advanced MetSearch: Build on the basics

Want to save time and effort scrolling through pages of MetSearch results? This workshop will show you how to construct great searches. You’ll also learn about MetSearch’s browsing and citation searching features, which can lead you to unexpected, but relevant, academic resources. This workshop builds on our basic MetSearch workshop, which you will have ideally attended.

eJournals: Search for journal articles to enhance your assignments

As a Cardiff Met student, you have access to over 115,000 eJournals, but are you making the best use of them? In this essential workshop you'll learn what eJournals are, why you should use them, and how to search for and access articles in eJournals.

Evaluating information: How and why you must do it

Not everything you read is reliable. But how do you navigate your way through unreliable information to sources that are suitable for your assignments? This essential workshop will give you the tools to identify and check reliability. You will have opportunity to apply your new-found knowledge.

Databases: What are they and when should you search them?      

There is a wealth of information beyond MetSearch. Academic journal articles, books, newspapers, statistics, images, video, technical reports and more await you in our collection of databases. This introduction to Cardiff Met's databases will give you the confidence to know when you need a database and how to choose the right database for your assignment.

How to search: Get the best from MetSearch and databases

There's nothing worse than not finding anything for your assignment!  But have you searched in the right place using the right words?  In this workshop you'll learn how to decode and demystify your assignment question, how to use Cardiff Met's resources, search with a plan and solve common problems.

Reference management tools: What are they and how can they help you?

Do you want to keep track of what you've read, store pdfs of readings, and produce a bibliography in Word with minimal effort? This brief introduction to reference management tools such as EndNote and Zotero will demonstrate their functionality and encourage you to start using them.

Learning at university: what’s it all about?

What is learning at university? How is it different from other types of learning you might have done before coming to Cardiff Met? What do tutors expect of you, as a learner, as you embark on your studies? In this workshop, we’ll be exploring these expectations by taking a closer look at the structure of learning, its nature, and how you can engage effectively with the requirements of your course.

Being critical: making effective use of academic sources

Lots of you will be told – or might have been told already – to ‘be more critical’ by your tutors, but what does it mean? What are tutors looking for when they ask you to ‘be critical’? How are you supposed to engage critically with the academic sources you’re using? In this session, we’ll be taking a closer look at critical thought as it is applied to these sources, what it looks like in writing, and how you can go about being ‘more critical’.

Defining academic writing: what is it and how do you start to do it?

What do we mean by ‘academic writing’? How is it different from other genres of writing? What do tutors expect to see in a good piece of academic writing? As you might expect, in this session, we will define academic writing by identifying its key features. We’ll also look at why these features are so important to the purpose of academic writing.

Referencing: why is it important and how do you do it?

Nearly every student – undergraduates and postgraduates – has had a moment of panic when it comes to referencing. In this workshop we’ll look at why referencing is so important (not just in terms of its ethical significance), its purpose within a piece of work, and – most important of all – how to format references. The session will focus on author-date (or Harvard) referencing. Look out for future sessions on APA referencing.

Reflective writing in practice

Reflective writing is a core part of many programmes at Cardiff Met. In this workshop, we will explore different models of reflection and look more closely at how a piece of reflective writing can be structured using one such model. By the end of the session, you will have a much clearer idea of what distinguishes reflective writing from more traditional ‘academic writing’.

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