Well, I've finished the first draft of my research paper. It's in proper APA format, so I could submit it today if I wanted to, but since it's not due until Monday, I'm probably going to sleep on it for a day or two, then go back and revise it. I always end up with better papers if I do that.
I have to admit, I was a little worried about this. You see, I'd gathered and read most of my sources, but I'd forgotten to get Dr. Wang's approval for my topic. Thankfully, she okayed my topic, and I didn't have to start over.
Speaking of my topic, I chose something that has been a tremendous part of my life for the last nine months: discussion forums in online classes.
Online classes are, of course, growing in prevalence, and they're mostly asynchronous. There are a couple of reasons for that, I believe - asynchronous classes are more convenient for working adults (nontraditional students), who tend to make up the bulk of online students, and many people lack the hardware and bandwidth to take full advantage of synchronous tools like videoconferencing or Second Life.
Discussion forums are the heart of asynchronous education (in fact, that's the working title for my paper: "The Heart of Asynchronous Education: Designing, Facilitating, and Assessing Student Participation in Online Course Discussion Forums"), and I wanted to explore what educational researchers had written about making good use of online course discussion.
I found that there is not yet a real consensus on best practices in online discussion forums, and that there are ongoing debates as to how to define participation, the role of lurking, and what should be done to facilitate and assess online discussion.
As far as my writing habits, this hasn't been a one-day thing. I've spent a lot of time reading, making notes, writing, editing, and digging up more sources over the course of the last week and a half or so, even though I had the majority of my sources before then (and had read and taken notes on several of them).
APA format is interesting. After I wrote the paper, I went back through it with the APA manual in my lap, fixing all of the citation mistakes. When it comes to formatting, never listen to people: just get the manual. APA (or MLA, or Chicago Manual) formatting is like computing the value of pi: you'll never quite get to the end of it, and opinions are pretty much irrelevant.
I have to say I learned quite a lot about discussion forums from the articles I read, especially since there was so much disagreement and different perspectives among the different authors. I found the social constructivist approach (as taken by A. P. Rovai and others) to be interesting, but I found that it completely ignored the internal and solitary processes of learning, as if learning were a process that ONLY took place in social contexts. I repeatedly found myself drawn to the arguments of Vanessa Paz Dennen, who offered no simple answers, but certainly asked the right questions.
Artifact: Term Paper
Course Reflection
15 years ago
Your reflection was very informative about your paper, and I enjoyed reading your prospective. I was involved in a Career-Tech. conference today, and the speaker said something that I thought was very appropriate. He said that there would always be "a child left behind because of TIME." He said that all individuals can learn, but at different rates. Education has as many facets as the people involved. Because no two are alike, learning is always going to be an evolving process.
ReplyDeleteVery nice subject. I bet your paper was really interesting. I have to admit that I am a bit of a lurker myself. I like to contemplate on things a while before I write and sometimes I have to read things more than once.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about APA. I checked 50 different sources of how to cite different types of information, and Lord knows if I actually did it correctly!