session 2
The large project or dissertation 17 November 2012
Last meeting we talked about projects involving a teaching and learning issue, CPD, technology and having a wider impactstructuring the report in particular starting with early chapters on writing your introduction / carrying out reading / starting conversations
This meeting we found that most people has been able to get started on their projects but there were several changes of plans from the last meeting, a revised list of ideas for projects is attached [apologies once again where I have got it wrong]. I hope that you will be able to keep the conversation going within your groups between sessions.
I gave out a short booklet on the literature review, this was written with doctorate students in mind. The key issues were the types of review (eg systematic / just in time / pragmatic), types of literature (eg academic / professional / grey) and deductive (top down) / inductive (bottom up) / iterative (abductive) approaches to reviewing reading. Points to watch were to stay aware of the context of past work and offering a commentary on texts. A thematic review is better than a long list of literature. We considered the themes within a particular reading on ipads in a school in Australia, this was accessed at http://www.minnisjournals.com.au/educationtoday/article/Reading-with-iPads--344
There were further resources on action research at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wie/research/centre/teaching/actionresearch/
We then had a very good presentation of inserting tales of contents / tables of figures
Next meeting is 19 January; by that time work you should have a draft of your introduction to the topic and an overview of action research to explain your methodology. How you present your literature is up to you. On the latter, some have a literature review at the start of their dissertation but I think people preferred to make it part of the reconnaissance. In any case you will not have completed your literature review but you should be able to outline the key themes concerning what you have read by then.
Please do use the blog so that we know what work you are carrying out and to get feedback on that work. It is at