Reading and Writing

In preparation for Saturday's class I need to summarise my learning over the past fortnight and share that with my classmates.
We were kindly give access to an amazing PowerPoint analogy of a garden as well as a poem describing how this persons felt coming into study as a adult. Very inspiring and touching, and got me to wondering what I could do. After some consideration I realise I want to keep updating this blog, and use this for my summaries. I'll keep adding links, pictures and my thoughts and everything will be in one place.

So......the first two weeks of Special Topic are nearly done, and it's time to share where I've been, when I'm not here. My thoughts are still scattered through my class notes and the beginnings of the assignment. This blog is now well underway, and I went to the Library this week for some literature. I came across Teaching the Unprepared by Kathleen F. Gabrielas an extra reading. What a helpful book!
It reinforces a lot of my current thinking and will articulate a lot of the half thoughts I have about how to improve the relationships I build with my students. Learning centred learning  is the  main topics here, one I fully support but need to keep evolving. This book has great strategies to increase student engagement as well as give them solid support. In particular, by establishing a learning inventory early in my next course, I hope to begin empowering students to take responsibility for their learning, thus letting them take control and make the transition to become a successful student.

Next I need to establish the order of investigation into my subject, the wording of which still needs refining. Some discussion will clarify what I need to tweak. Setting goals will help me round the search out, and then to gather all of the reflections and findings into a coherent body of work for presentation. Focussing on that should prevent too much procrastination, something I do very well.

I have made some good footprints, now to continue the journey by making my own path - with the help of my students, classmates, teachers and colleagues, oh, and a bit of well thought out referencing, something amazing is sure to happen.

what kind of researcher am I?

I came across this today. It has a downloadable log book which helped me to define my first thoughts into which paradigm and which methodology I would want to use. I found there seems to be quite an overlap as to how to see the differences and am starting to see this comes from the way in which schools of thought have evolved in the last 100 years.
Getting started as a researcher

So where am I going?

Research question

has adjusted from A. How can we define measure the effectiveness of reflective writing for a practical course by students?

to B. How is students’ reflective writing effective for a practical (food producing) course?

Methodology:

Questions and answers, find the evidence, reflect on that and draw conclusions.

I am liking the idea

a  Appreciative enquiry

Joe Hall & Sue Hammond; Lessons from the Field 

Paradigm:

I quite like the Post Structural paradigm:

collaborative – the researcher is as much involved as the researched, not just an observer and recorder – I can add in my own reasoning and experiences – this could bring about a faster result/conclusion if  I am working in it rather than on it. Uses historical  as the base on which to explore how the relationships of the researched validates the subject of the research.

from Grant & Giddings' Making Sense of Methodologies 2002.

That was quite a heavy read and I needed to get back to it a few times in bits to see if I got it, and to see how my thinking changed - careful reading helped me focus where my own paradigm would fit.

It makes me think of Piggott’s Problem Resolving Action Research model (with its emphasis on change), but now it is people, not concepts, so it might end up being too big a concept to use in this case. Better start off little and see how it develops – brings me back to the positive  paradigm (in which I could remain objective with anonymous subjects), or radical paradigm (which is about effecting a social change - and that is what would happen with successful reflective writing in a course teaching food production). I still prefer the collaborative idea in a Post Structural paradigm though as I can use my own experiences too.

Special Topic

How can we encourage deeper learning by students when their time for learning is getting more compressed?

a quick Google reveals a lot of literature on this subject with surprising findings. Google Scholar has some work, but not specific to this subject, and what I found interesting was not available to me unless I sign up to something else. Then I came across Interleaving as a method of teaching and learning in everyday Google:

Interleaving

I do this instinctively with my course work, but had not connected that to our new Baking programmes at L3 and L4 which actually also interleaf, come to thin of it. So a part of my original question may already have some answers

spacing-and-interleaving

 This is what we are now delivering across all levels. The proof will be in a year's  time when we have had 2 years of teaching and have feedback from industry as to the ability of our 'new' graduates.

It is good to know I am not making stuff up, but that this subject has the potential to be researched well, and supported by others in education.

GOALS: So over the next week I need to start constructing more questions to guide my study, set some timeline goals and continue to identify what literature will support my writing.

beyond !Learning - the beginning?

Well, not really. I first thought about starting a blog a couple of years ago when I did the Grad Cert in Applied eLearning and wrote reflections about the Special Topic I had chosen, but figured it was enough to use the forum within that online course. Here I am again, easily 6 years later starting another reflective Special Topic study, this time for the Grad Diploma in Tertiary Teaching.  (as well as a foray into discovery about how research works)
I've been using Google+ since July 2015 and really like the Community features, so why not take the plunge and actually start blogging!

A great inspiration to me is the blog that Selena Chan from CPIT began in 2005 for her own digital learning  journey: learning elearning which I first came across after attending a workshop with her (as it happens, also in July last year) about enhancing teaching and learning practices. What an amazing record of her journey with mlearning, research projects and so much more progress over the last 11 years! I'm sure she'll pop up more in this blog as my own journey unfolds.

About the title of this blog - inspiration from Marc, my better half. I can always rely on him to interpret my vague notions into a creatively succinct piece of genius, and it's so much fun when he gets it and articulates what I had back there in my head somewhere. Thanks Marc!
I hope to be able to share many moments of realisation here that will transport us to another layer of understanding.

To stop waffling: it is so easy to ramble on when you first start - after all I am beginning by talking to myself! But I was intending to reflect on what I am learning and thinking about that learning journey. 
2 questions 2 topics - one for research purposes and one for Special Topic.
I had quite a few half thoughts since July and December 2015, and spent the last 3 weeks wondering what would pop out.
This afternoon  2 came out:

1. How can we encourage deeper learning by students when their time for learning is getting more compressed? - Special Topic
2. How can we define the effectiveness of reflective writing for a practical course by students? - Enhancing Professional Practise Through Research

They'll need some refinement but for a first day I'm happy