Getting your bearings in research

these materials come from a research methods class at Cal State East Bay. the class was developed using participatory design. while we sorted out how to explain this process/present these materials/etc within the context of this class, translating that process onto this twiki will take the involvement of the members of the twiki, just as doing so in the class took the involvement of the students in the class. subscribe to be notified of updates.

Publishing research and the construction of knowledge

• Knowledge is constructed in communication, so no one publication ever stands alone, only makes sense in larger communicative context.
• Another way to express that is that the point of reading publications is to interpret and use them. You can't do that without understanding the conversation, context, community that they arise out of. Eric Raymond's wonderful How To Ask Questions The Smart Way is essentially a rich descriptive guide to the hacker sense-making community.
• The effect of digital publishing on computing has been to fragment research communities. What we now have are a bunch of isolated conversations in separate rooms, as it were.
• Therefore, start in a breadth mode. your goal is to construct an internal model of the landscape of research related to your interests. that may be comprised of one subset of a large community of practice, or it may be the overlap of several established communities of practice, or it may require you to develop ties between previously unaffiliated communities of practice, or anything in between.

What to do

• understanding evidence in research
• digesting (don't simply read) research papers
• using mind maps to organize what you find
• Brainstorming
• Research Questions
• journal
• peer learning community
• UsingDBLP
• AnnotatedBib
• Maintaining a narrative

Tools

• ResearchSkeleton
• LaTeX
• MindMapping

[see also WebHome]