Prue Salter’s Blog: Exploring the Power of Technology as a Learning Tool

I have just finished re-doing my literature review on self-regulated learning. I am sure I will have to revisit it again, but for now I have done another good whack at it. At the time of my doctoral assessment, I was not happy with the literature review as I felt I had to really rush it to get it done in time for the doctoral assessment paper. So instead of approaching it from the thorough, systematic way I would normally do it, it was a bit (a lot) ad hoc. This was reflected in the comments from the markers where it was clear my lit review was the weakest area of the paper. But that is ok, I knew it would be, and I always planned to come back and do it properly, it has just taken me a year or so to get around to it! As much as I would like to be able to just do it half-heartedly, I can’t, I have to do it properly.

When I did it before, I spent too long in the general ‘learning’ literature. I went too far back in order to get a good grasp of the field as a whole where really it is just from the mid 80s that self-regulated learning starts being researched (at least under this term). So by the time I got to the paper, I had been bogged down in the pre-1980s ‘learning’ area literature and so had only really spent time in the first half of the research, not the latter half. I was still trying to work out who the key people were and what the key papers were. And this is not an easy task. It seems obvious to me now who the key people/papers are, but at the time one seems as important as another and it is only through extensive reading and seeing certain names pop up over and over again that you work it out. To make it harder at the time around 6 of the key texts (each with 15 or so articles in them, all relevant to what I was doing) were not in the uni library so I had to order them from Amazon then by the time they came I didn’t really have time to read them properly and incorporate that research into my paper. In fact looking back now, I am amazed they let me through to the next stage!

So this time I wanted to do it properly so I wouldn’t have to go back and do it again (or at least not to this level again). And at least I had a decent starting point this time, I knew what to look for and where to look for it.
So this is what I did.
1. Checked that all articles I’d printed were listed in my references spreadsheet.
2. Checked that all e-versions of articles were printed.
3. Took out the articles that were not specific to SRL.
4. Went through every issue from the last 10 years of the major journals in the area (did around 20 journals – see below). This was incredibly tedious as it involves finding a database that has full text versions of the articles, clicking on each issue (and some have 4-6 issues per year) and reading the title of each article in that issue. Then if I found an article I had to check I didn’t already have it, then download it, save it, print it (I hate reading off the screen for these articles) and reference it. I know I could just use the search function and key words to search the database, and that is what I did the first time round. But by doing it this way I came across quite a lot of interesting articles that I had not located before with the search parameters. So tedious, but I can feel confident that I have been thorough and that I haven’t missed anything major.
5. Then I went to the most recent books/articles of importance and spent half a day reading through their reference lists. Is there anything more tedious than reading a list of references. I think not. Same sort of process as above, if I came across something I thought would be relevant, check if I had it, if not, go online and locate it to download it. Much better though than having to go to the library and photocopy it though like in the old days.
6. So I ended up with around 250 references on SRL.
7. Next step, a couple of days in bed where I speed read/skim every article to get an overall feel for everything in it’s entirety. While doing this I managed to cull a few references that I thought would be relevant but weren’t, and find a few more that I needed to locate.
8. Then the fun part, time to start at the most recent through to the oldest and read each one thoroughly and see what needs to be added to my current literature review. This took X days

Journals that I have now trolled through systematically from 2000-2010:
American Educational Research Journal
Educational Psychologist
Educational Psychology Review
Contemporary Educational Psychology
Cognition and Instruction
Australian Journal of Educational & Developmental Psychology
Australian Educational Researcher
British Journal of Educational Psychology
Educational Researcher
Learning and Individual Differences
Theory into Practice
Journal of Educational Pyschologist
Educational Research Journal
Learning and Instruction
European Journal of Psychology of Education

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If you don’t like filling out forms, don’t head towards research. There seems to be an awful lot of tedious form filling. I have ethics clearance from UTS, so next job was to start applying for ethics clearance from Department of Education, called a SERAP application. You need this is you want to do any of your research in government schools. The main form, Form K, ended up being 55 pages long. 55 page form, honestly, is that madness or what! So after collecting all the paperwork they wanted including 2 certified copies of passport/licence and other assorted bits and pieces, I have filled in the online application and posted the package to the appropriate person in UTS, who then adds more paperwork and forwards it to DET. I then get to wait for 6-12 weeks for a response…..

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Has been nice to be on leave this semester and not be under pressure to produce. It is also great to be able to give everything time to simmer, I feel like everything went into a big pot around Nov/Dev with the DA paper and presentation, applying for ethics approval and presenting at AARE. Even though I have done bits and pieces, it has really just been simmering under a low heat for the past few months, letting all the ingredients come together and combine. Now I am ready to lift the lid again and see how it is coming along. I think my metaphors always revolve around food. Anyway I am feeling more positive about everything again, think I was a bit over the whole thing as had been so immersed in it, a bit of distance can do wonders.

So the plan is to try and get a solid draft completed of the first few chapters while I am on leave this semester.

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As Year 3 begins, a short reflection on: MY SECOND YEAR EXPERIENCE

The big difference for me in the second year was the level of intensity. In the first year there was so much to take in, so much to think about it was absolutely overwhelming. I went to every seminar, talk, course the uni offered. And I think in the first year this is a good approach, it hooks you into the community, you are exposed to a wide range of ways of thinking.

The second year was a bit calmer for three reasons.

Firstly, a year along the path things were now a bit clearer, the path was less murky and I became more selective in what I attended as I had enough knowledge to make an informed decision as to whether it would be useful to me or not. I knew what I needed to focus on for the first 6 months, I needed to prepare for my doctoral assessment and submit my ethics application. Things had started to come together with greater clarity. I was starting to find my own way and had a better balance in life with a slightly reduced workload in my business.

Secondly, I began to deliberately relax my personal standards. Although it feels uncomfortable for me not to do something to the best of my ability and beyond, I accepted that if I try and do this PhD to a standard to which I feel totally happy with, I’d have to kill myself with the amount of work needed – maybe if I was doing it fulltime I could do that but not while I am working. So I am having to hand in work that is a standard that normally I would think is not good enough, but in the end it turns out to be acceptable and I am just trying to not cringe about it. Perhaps it is more my perception, if I did it as thoroughly as I would like, I might feel better, but perhaps the standard wouldn’t be that much higher anyway.

Thirdly, my ‘writing’ group has been a breath of sanity in a sometimes insane space. Throughout the first year we were put into groups in our cohort, did activities together, but you naturally gravitate towards like-minded people. At the FASS conference there was an inspiring presentation from a group of doctoral students who had set up a very successful writing group. The plan was that in our second year this process would be facilitated by UTS and although they did attempt this I would not say it was particularly successful – at least from my perspective. Myself and two other women from my cohort decided to do a fortnightly skype call. This really was a lifeline throughout the second year – particularly as the umbilical cord had been severed and we were no longer in the first year supported program. Every fortnight we’d chat for around an hour or so, where were we all up to, had anyone read anything interesting or found good resources or heard about good seminars or conferences. We had a space where we could discuss our fears, our weaknesses and our insecurities. We had a forum where we could raise methodological issues we were grappling with, concerns about our own research questions or bounce ideas around. We gave each other feedback on our doctoral assessment presentations, our ethics applications and anything else we did along the way like poster presentations or conference abstracts and papers. We kept each other motivated and most importantly kept the momentum going. It is very easy, particularly when you are part-time, to just let things slide. But when you are having regular updates on a fortnightly basis it is just that little bit of added impetus that is sometimes needed to get you over the line.

Now as the third year begins, I am on leave for a semester while my mum has chemo and then will plunge into data gathering in Semester 2. Hold on tight, here goes the rollercoaster again!

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Well I know this might be obvious to others, but it really has just clicked for me…a PhD is basically about training you in how to be a researcher. I didn’t really get this until recently. Seems pretty obvious now……. It is like an apprenticeship in how to conduct research properly, the topic in some ways is immaterial. I am not sure what I really thought a PhD was all about, I must have had some sort of an image in my head, but I can’t really pin it down. I do know that it is not what I expected at all and not really what I thought it would be.

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A red letter day.

1. Doctoral Assessment officially completed and accepted.

2. UTS Ethic approval obtained.

Whoo hoo. Still got Dept Ed Ethics hurdle to clear but it is a start!

Also did a poster presentation that is a good overview of what I am doing. Here is the A4 version (rather than A0 size).

Met a woman the other day who just completed a PhD – had not told a soul she was even doing it, not even her mother. Hardly anyone knows she even did it.

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How is your uni work going?

This is a question I am often asked and it is hard to give a short answer.

If I had to, it would probably be: “Better”. I am in Year 2 now. Year 1 was stressful as per the blogs below. In the first year I found it difficult to get my head around the whole concept of what the PhD is and what you have to do for it, I found being back in Kindergarten again (ie knowing nothing and being the totally inexperienced one) confronting, it was challenging to not feel in control (always a major issue for me) and to feel that perhaps I was not really of the calibre to be a part of this academic process, particularly my writing skills which tend towards the informal and direct as opposed to formal academic speak and a philosophical discussion which just seems to me like you are going around in circles and would be better served by just getting to the point.

The other problem was that if I go back to my uni days when I was doing the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Maths together, I really felt the distinct differences between the way these two groups of people thought. Well, being in the education faculty for the doctorate, I have again found this dichotomy of viewpoints which means that at times I feel quite alienated from the people around me in this world as they all think in a way that feels foreign to the mathematical side of my brain (and unlike when I was at uni I don’t have the alternate set of people to go and get a good dose of logical left brain conversation with – shame I am not still teaching with the Maths staff at SCEGGS!). People in the ‘arts’ faculties are good at taking pieces and pulling them altogether, meandering along a path and trusting it will bring them into the right direction. I feel very uncomfortable working like this. I like to have the big picture and then move into the details – an approach that does not really sit well with this type of research. I also am very outcomes focused, particularly practical outcomes, and these people are much more all about the journey, which I admire them for, it is a good way to be, but does not resonate with my life paradigms.

Anyway, I have got through all this. Mainly by deciding not to worry about it too much. I know what I am supposed to do now and I am forging ahead with it. Plus last year my workload for the business etc was really heavy which made it difficult to find any time for uni work, this year I cleared my plate a bit plus I have a good space to spread out all my uni work so these two things have also made a huge difference.

So in the first half of this year I have done my doctoral assessment presentation (a half hour presentation + half hour of feedback to supervisors and other doctoral students) and handed in my 10000 word doctoral assessment paper. Waiting now for the feedback. This is a fairly big hoop to jump through where you have to outline after a year and a bit, your ideas on what you are going to research and how you are going to do it. So you need to demonstrate you have read and thought about your topic and have some clarity around your research question, the significance of what you are doing, your methodological perspective and approach.

Have prepared my ethics application, about 40 pages all up, will submit to the UTS ethics committee on Wednesday. Then again it is just a matter of waiting for the feedback like with the DA.

So at the moment I am going back and re-reading in a much less pressured way everything I have read to this point. I am focusing on all the methodology readings at the moment (50 library books out on methodology at the moment) then I am going to re-do self-regulated learning, then learning stuff, then digital generation stuff. But taking it at a pretty easy pace.

Hopefully doctoral assessment and ethics stuff will be back in time for me to do my pilot case study at a school in September and the online survey of schools in Sydney in Term 4.

Then next year I will select 3-5 schools to do case studies on and will spend 1-2 days per term in each school doing data collection. Year after that is analysis and write-up so may be able to complete the whole thing in 4 years. Just need to see how smoothly data collection goes, if I need to I am happy to factor in an additional year – we get 8 years anyway as a part-time student.

The other thing I have done is massively relax my personal standards. Although it feels uncomfortable for me not to do something to the best of my ability, I have accepted that if I try and do this PhD to a standard to which I feel totally happy with I’d have to kill myself with the amount of work needed – maybe if I was doing it fulltime I could do that but not while I am working. So I am having to hand in work that is a standard that normally I would think is pretty crappy, but it is doing the job and I am just trying to not cringe about it. Anyway perhaps it is more my perception, if I do it as thoroughly as I would like, I might feel better, but perhaps the standard wouldn’t be that much higher anyway.

So no animals this year as no zoo course, we did rescue a little bird though the other day. It flew into the apartment and landed on Mark’s shoulder, a little tame bird from the lorikeet family, obviously a baby and a pet. Of all the apartments to fly into choosing one with2 cats was not clever. The WIRES people told us to take it downstairs and put it in a tree and see if it takes off, but it just sat there and looked at us and then walked back onto Mark’s hand. So we had to take it to the animal hospital at North Sydney and hope someone comes to claim it.

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Well the second year has commenced. I would have liked to have been much further along than I am but c’est la vie. If I wasn’t trying to squeeze 9 days work into a 6 day working week would probably have been easier.

We spoke to the people just starting the doctoral program at UTS this year, used to think would feel better when I was  no longer the person who was just starting but it really makes no difference where you are compared to other people, in the end it is just your project, your work and what you need to do that is your focus.

So I need to finish reviewing the literature I have gathered and spend some time finalising methodology. Let’s see how it goes over the next month!

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CERTIFICATE 11  IN ANIMAL CARE AT TARONGA ZOO COMPLETED! (PhD still going…..)

Well, that’s it, the year long zoo course is all over. No more visiting the hospital to check the progress of the sea turtles or possums or powerful owls or echidnas or snakes. No more days at Marine Mammals where I scrubbed scales off limitless stainless steel buckets, cleaned mountains of display glass, hauled around buckets of fish, recorded which penguins had eaten, took fish out of the freezer, put mutilated fish into the stinky fish bin, put bags of seal poo in the freezer (to test for stress in hormones), made countless seal swabs (paddlepop sticks , gauze and rubber bands to make giant cotton buds to collect saliva samples, also for stress testing) and generally was a go-fer for all and sundry.

So did I enjoy it? Yes I did, although towards the end I was getting a bit over it. If I could volunteer once a month I’d do it, but minimum is once a fortnight and I just don’t have the time for that at this point in time, maybe after the PhD is finished.

I really enjoyed the behind the scenes glimpse into the zoo, I liked the practical nature of the study – such a stark contrast to the esoteric PhD. I liked the satisfaction of doing something physical, doing defined tasks that had a start and an end and did not require me to sit on a computer as I usually do. I liked looking onto another world, I do get bored very easily so having the zoo diversion was a great distraction.

However, I know I would get bored with the repetitive nature of the job – you have certain tasks that have to be done every day and although the animal contact is cool, you still have to do basically the same thing every day which would get to me. I also don’t really like working with other people, working as part of a team is not my preferred working way, I prefer to be given my bit to do and off I go and do it by myself. I also don’t like the enforced morning tea and lunch breaks, I’d rather work almost straight through and go home and hour or more earlier. And although I do love animals, it is not nearly as much as the people at the zoo do, which I guess is why they do it despite the really crappy salary.

I used to think the zoo was expensive, and it is, but the ticket sales cover only the food bills of the animals. No salaries, no capital works, a huge shortfall.

I also am a bit unsure what I think about zoos. They obviously really care for the animals and do everything possible to ensure they have the best quality of life, but they are still kept in small enclosures and unnatural conditions. The zoo justifies its existence by saying the role of the zoo is to educate the public about conservation and also breeding programs to help endangered and threatened species. I can’t argue with the breeding program aspect, and I agree the zoo does make a huge effort to educate the public, but I have to question how effective it really is.  During the seal show they do this massive spiel about how leaving rubbish around can hurt wildlife and how it is important to always put rubbish in the bin and one of the seals comes out and actually picks up rubbish and puts it in the bin. And yet they all leave and there is rubbish left everywhere. It infuriates and frustrates me. So I think my feelings are now that animals should not be in zoos unless a) the species is in crisis and zoos are the last chance to save the species through breeding programs b) animals are injured and cannot be returned to the wild.

So for 2010, I have cut down my work from 4 to 3 days a week, not doing zoo course, not going to be strata secretary for our building, and so hopefully next year I will be able to get much further along with the PhD and also be able to say  “we had a really quiet and relaxing year”. We’ll see!

In the pictures, the first one is Michi, star of the seal show, a Californian sea lion. The little one is Ronnie, a NZ fur seal who was found injured on the coast.

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