One of my principle reasons for using this blog in my research/study is that it offers an effective and searchable way to put my first-draft thoughts and quotes/references down in a central and searchable space. I found this very useful when I did my Masters and hope that it will prove equally useful now.
My main challenge is the overwhelming amount of ideas and information that I’m currently swimming in. By taking on – at least for now – the challenge of developing an holistic understanding of the factors influencing (positively and negatively) the use of TELT in Higher Ed, I’ve opened myself to trying to understand the nature of H.E itself and how all of the pieces work together (or don’t, depending on how they seem to feel in the morning)
This has meant that I had a virtual bombsite with (digitally) jotted down questions and ideas for my job and quotes and scattered references and issues. I think I’ve now put this into some kind of triage/processing system. In brief, I’ll read the paper/book/etc, scrawl barely legible notes on it in pencil, highlight (it seems) every other word and then convert that into a blog post here.
From there, useful quotes (all annotated and properly cited) go into a quotes/refs page in Scrivener under the broad factor heading (e.g. Teachers and teaching). Simultaneously I have another page (organised by factor) with appropriate citations that is for my questions and ideas. These get filtered down to key points which go into a Notes for Lit Review page (again organised into factors) and this will give me the structure of the Lit Review itself and help me to make some semblance of order of my thinking.
I’ve just finished updating the Questions/ideas and Quotes/Ref pages and am up to transferring that to Notes. All of which means that it’s been a little while since I’ve actually read something new however revisiting the range of papers that I’ve already looked at was interesting in terms of seeing which areas my thinking has progressed in. (not many but some)
Going by my project plan, I should be moving on now to looking at Universities as Organisations as a factor – which I’ve never been 100% sure what I mean by but it seems relevant and like a handy catch all for a lot of spare influencers.
Generally still feeling ok about things.