Reflection upon library meeting and beginning of annotated bibliography--Week 2

Taxonomy of Reflection: Week 2

Remembering: What did I do?

This week, I met with Dr. Dennis, the librarian, and reviewed twenty articles for my forthcoming literature review on gifted students in group learning.

Understanding: What was important about it?

The meeting with Dr. Dennis was purely helpful. She gave me lots of nice tips and search keywords (to be written up an submitted soon) to help in my discovery of useful articles. Her advice was good too, about expanding my searches to include international students.  It helped set me on the right track.

The annotated bibliography was important for the obvious reasons: I need to read about my topic so I can understand it. I have to do this before I can write about it. It's all pretty straight forward.

Application: When did I do this before? Where could I use it again?

Well, the information about search techniques that Dr. Dennis shared with me should be useful for the rest of my life, particularly if I really get into RefWorks seriously. I can see that being a very useful tool.

I have written annotated bibliographies for many other classes. This one had a slightly more formal form. I can see using the last two categories in the future: "How does this relate to my questions?" and "what do I need to look up?" This is very useful.

Analysis: Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?

Not so much, apart from procrastination crush. As it was last week, the realities of my life now mean that the bibliography just had to wait until the weekend. So, my weekend was a busy whirlwind of reading and reporting. I have planned on stopping by the Ned McWherter Library on the way home from work tomorrow to write up three articles, so hopefully I can avoid the crunch in week three.

Evaluation: How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?

I feel that I did okay. Some of the sources I reviewed were notable (for my purposes, at least) for just one of two lines that will be helpful in the paper. That seems a little cheap, but one has to find attribution where one may, mustn't one?

Waiting till the weekend didn't work. Fix that.

Reading articles worked. I even shared one particularly good article with my wife, as I think it has implications for how we will design our homeschool classroom for TBD Taylor who is currently five months from joining us. 

Creation: What should I do next? What's my plan/design?

This plan now is to stay the course, while making the review schedule more regular and, therefore, less onerous. 

Personal Reflections

Few this week. I enjoy reading articles and writing papers. The feedback is immediate and enjoyable, both from reading a well-written article and understanding new ideas, to creating a document and seeing my ideas come together in a coherent and hopefully lovely document.

Writing the annotated bibliography, however, if one of those intermediate steps that I realize is necessary, but that grants no joy to the worker. It just must be done, to assure the quality of the final step. The researcher must walk out on faith that all will be better because of the drudgery. This is wisdom.