# Weekly review April 8, 2012


I've been really inspired by Ryan Muller's ["weekly
reviews"](http://blog.learnstream.org/2012/03/weekly-review-through-march-25/)
on his blog, and thought for a while that I should try to do something
similar. I often feel like time is flying away from me, and that I am
not making as much progress as I should with things that matter in my
life - so this might be a good way to review what I've done, and also to
highlight what I've read.

I feel like I've gotten a bit off track this term, spent a lot of time
experimenting with Researchr and thinking about [[Science 2.0]], ways of
improving the scholarly workflow etc. However, I really need to refocus
on my PhD research, as fascinating as everything else is, and the fact
that I will be seeing my supervisor shortly at AERA in Vancouver was a
good motivation to "buckle down" and try to get at least part of my
literature review done before then.

This part of my literature review is on open courses and peer learning.
I want to see what empirical research has already been done (not a whole
lot), and also what theoretical frameworks and methods others have used
to investigate/discuss this topic. In fact, just the framing itself of
what is an open course, and why they are so interesting to me, is quite
fascinating.

I already had some interesting papers, but I spent quite a lot of time
finding others, both by Google Scholar searches for keywords, and by
finding out who are "active in the field", and looking at lists of all
of their publications. Generally, there is an incredible amount of
writings on Open Educational Resources, but much less on learning
interactions. Many of the papers which showed up in the keyword searches
were very generalist, and tended to mention for example Peer2Peer
University in a sentence as "one interesting new possibility".

I'm hoping to write up a much more organized literature review during
this week, so I will not spend this blog entry trying to accomplish
that, but I will quickly list the articles I've read that I've also
taken detailed notes on (there are many more which I read and took
clippings of, but have not yet written detailed notes about). Some of
the papers below I had read before, without taking notes, so I had to go
through them again to see what I could use in the literature review:

-   I read a number of papers by [Martin
  Weller](http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/), and I found his
  metaphor of the "topography of formality" quite visual and striking
  in [@weller2007bridging]
-   A bunch of papers about [[MOOC]]s and learning, including
  [@mcauley2010mooc], [@mackness2010ideals], [@kop2011pedagogy],
  [@kop2011cloud], [@fini2009technological] and [@bell2010network]
-   Rita Kop also wrote about personal learning networks in
  [@kop2010design]
-   It was interesting to hear about Alec Couros' course EC&I 831 in
  [@couros2010developing]
-   I came across Paul Bouchard in Rita Kop's writings and found some of
  his early work on adult learners very interesting, I read
  [@bouchard1998teaching], [@bouchard1998distance],
  [@bouchard1994self-directed] and [@bouchard1996study]
-   Read some papers on the history and development of Open University
  UK, including [@mcandrew2010defining]

I read 34 more papers where I did not add significant notes yet. Some of
these were not interesting, or mostly rehashes of other papers, but for
most I will have to go back and add significant notes. I find it takes
much more mental capacity to add high-level notes than to do the first
read-through, but it's incredibly valuable. Maybe I will try to track
the relationship between articles read and high-level notes written
during the coming weeks (I modified the cleanup script to make this easy
to display). ****

**Researchr**

****I tried to focus on literature review, and not do any work on
[Researchr](http://reganmian.net/wiki/researchr:start). But of course,
lit review means *using* Researchr for many hours every day, and there
are inevitably small issues that crop up, and which I am tempted to deal
with right away. Looking back, I did [17
commits](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/compare/03100cb46069610610726891e55b555d6d1b33c4...a2da690794054936b467853154bd4fa49dd538a7),
with some tiny fixes, but also with some useful new functionality.

Even such a small thing as cleaning up all the brok- en words from a PDF
export, [a one line
change](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/9d4f1d9a65aad453349e9cd64fd8786bfdd7537d),
makes a big difference in a tool you use so much. Bodong [let me
know](https://twitter.com/#!/bodongchen/status/186965657559109632) that
my RSS feed was broken, which I quickly
[fixed](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/cdc12c46874191460e2f8930204dc2c32405f90e).
I also made sure [to avoid RSS
duplicates](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/5b4f9ea1432f0d226a19bf235c811a5efeaf5653),
and [made it possible to update RSS
entries](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/0e36d37ca700e9fcc433a93dd66f823af81b5b0d).
Finally I created [a quick "citation selection
popup"](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/6d322c05c83d761e910d6a297550ba51f7ca0b9f),
and consolidated some files. I also [began working
on](https://github.com/houshuang/folders2web/commit/34825ed56d8fe51d53c92cef892a6088ba5866b1)
a script that can do some "cleanup and sanity checking" (like finding
PDFs not linked to any publication, etc.)

This upcoming week, I hope to continue reading articles, adding
high-level notes to already read articles, and develop a skeletal
literature review (which I'll also post on the wiki). Thursday I am off
to AERA in Vancouver, and will try to keep notes from sessions on the
wiki (also looking forward to meeting Ryan Muller, and anyone else out
there).

I try to post articles with significant high-level notes to my [wiki RSS
feed](http://reganmian.net/wiki/feed.xml), which is automatically
republished on my [wikiblog](http://reganmian.net/wikiblog).

Hope you had a productive week!

Stian