I was absolutely exhausted when I got home last night, and then I had insomnia, waking up at 3 and never really falling back to sleep. Getting through tonight's class is going to be painful. Summer school (13 hour days x 4 days in a row) is not healthy for me, but the plus side is that I am enjoying the classes - great students and for some reason I seem to be more relaxed than I usually am, especially doing two new preps at the same time. So, that's my first reflection - please, God, don't let me ever teach summer school again.
I once again found myself going off topic on a rant about graduate school culture - I really need to stop doing that. I think I did it Monday and Wednesday. Sigh. What sparked it last night was knowing that none of us teach how or provide practice on writing a literature review, yet it's completely foundational to everything that we do. The assumptions that we make about students (and that students likely make about us) are mind-boggling, and yet there is no real space for open conversations to take place to demystify each for the other. Not sure that rants in class are the best venue..
Anyhoo, tonight was the first "tools" night, and I was exhausted before even arriving to class trying to get up to speed on Mendeley and Diigo. It was cool to see Evernote, learn more about how Google scholar connects with UT libraries, and start our Google "help page" doc. I am learning so much from the students, as I knew I would.
The "brainstorm scholarly writings and rank them by timeliness and quality" activity took much longer than anticipated - I think when I've done this before I have given them the list instead having them brainstorm it. I forgot a key aspect of the debrief, which was to identify which ones count come tenure time. Most on their lists do not. Still, this activity brought a new idea - that Diigo is good for keeping track of the gray literature that can be hard to find. Good thing to add to the book (courtesy of Mito.)
One a-ha was that our need to have "physical" copies of the .pdf on our local drives/Mendeley desktop is in part just like our need to have a hard copy in our offices. We don't trust that we will always be able to access it from the databases. Why not just let Ebsco store the .pdf for us, and we can download it when we need it? I guess if we are annotating .pdfs, though, we do need a local copy. Still, I do think this shift may take place soon.
The demonstrations went pretty well, with everyone speaking up to share the features that they knew. There are still some outstanding issues with Mendeley, but Mary Alice is coming in on Monday to help us with those if she can.
I have to work on our AERA proposal tomorrow and Sunday. The class is giving me a lot of ideas, we'll see what I can pull together.
(Note related to the book - we can go through my discussion questions and lecture notes to pull together the core argument for each chapter.)
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We could also use the discussion questions/demonstrations as the activities at the end of each chapter, as suggested, and/or make them part of the online activity book.
ReplyDeleteJ
Trena, I am co-teaching EP 582 Research Design with Dr. Gary Skolits next fall and we assigned Boote and Beile (2005) "Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation" for reading to help illustrate the meaning/significance of literature review. In fact, I think you sent me that article! :)
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to coming on Monday and talking Mendeley! :)