This afternoon I had a date with the online library database and it went like most first dates go. 1.) I probably liked it more than it liked me and 2.) I have more questions than I initially initially expected.
I want to give a big shout out to Maria Brahme, our Liaison Librarian, who showed us the ropes. I definitely took advantage of the RefWorks tool immediately. Right now, I’m using it more as a bookmarking tool for articles and books that I’m coming across, but I assume I will organize them a little better the deeper I get into the literature. My research project is going to be focused around reworking curriculum for a tech course so that it can 1.) be updated to include more modern techniques and 2.) so it can be facilitated online. I realize that the overall goal of lit review will be to get to the articles which are cited frequently and make up the thought leading work of the field. I’m hoping to get there, but right now I’m sort of taking a reverse engineering technique of looking at recent publications (most of which have been published within the last decade) and seeing what the common threads are.
Some of these common threads have already started to bubble up to the top, and that has lead to more questions that I want to pursue through this research project. As I read I started to jot some different paths down on my whiteboard:
These illegible handwritten ideas correspond with these questions. Whats the literature on:
- …taking a traditional face-to-face course and moving it online? Specifically on measuring student assessment of the course?
- …digital storytelling?
- …Constructivism?
- …SAMR?
- …Preferred pedagogy of the discipline (public relations/strategic communications?)
My aim is to address the discipline’s needs (one stakeholder), the pedagogy (the other stakeholder), the assessment, and the technology in the research. Again, I hope to get much much deeper in this but here’s what I found in my first rendezvous in the library abyss:
Ann, P. K., & Ann, P. K. (2004). Constructivist learning perspectives in the online public relations classroom. PRism Online PR Journal, 2(1)
Bryan, A. 1., & Alexander, B., 1967-. (2011). The new digital storytelling : Creating narratives with new media. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger.
Coombs, W. T., Coombs, W. T., & Rybacki, K. (1999). Public relations education: Where is pedagogy? Public Relations Review, 25(1), 55-63.
Geyer-semple, V., & Geyer-semple, V. (2012). Through classroom walls: A collaborative public relations education for creating integrated, digital media campaigns. Communication Teacher, 26(1), 37-44.
Jun Wang, Marlon Pierce, Yu Ma, Geoffrey Fox, Andrea Donnellan, Jay Parker, , et al. (2012). Using service-based GIS to support earthquake research and disaster response. Computing in Science & Engineering, 14, 21.
Platt, C. A., & Platt, C. A. (2011). Blogging in the communication technology course. Communication Teacher, (4), 228-233.
Stewart, C. M., Schifter, C., & Selverian, M. E. M. (2010). Teaching and learning with technology : Beyond constructivism. New York: New York : Routledge.
I’ve also gone ahead and put up a second website for research since it looks like most MALT AR sites are separated from their main reflection blog. I’ll still post everything here and it will syndicate over to the site. One thing I figured out recently is that you can create an RSS feed out of an tag or category in WordPress, so I can just tag posts here as “Action Research,” install a plugin called FeedWordPress on the Research site, and syndicate it over on the other website with this feed: http://pepperdine.adamcroom.com/tag/action-research/feed/.
