I had such grandiose plans to finish my theory paper on Friday night and head off to Disneyland on Saturday morning. Fortunately for me, my 5 yr old had a meltdown of epic proportions at pre-school and made some really unfortunate decisions which led to us calling off the trip. This was a lifesaver as I'm not really sure how I planned to finish a paper, clean my entire house (that looked like a grenade went off), and pack for four people all in one night!
But back to the paper! My theory is constructivism. I have always liked the theory of constructivism and the thought of learning by doing. This struck a chord with me as I researched my lit review topic of 1:1 computing. I had a very surface idea of what this theory was all about. As I got more into my research, I was surprised to find some many different branches of this theory and to find out some really interesting criticisms of the theory.
When it came to the writing for this paper, I started from a very different point than my lit review. I knew how I wanted to construct the paper and did a brain dump to create my rough draft. Then I got stuck. I wasn't sure how to expand out draft from my original ideas. I had an amazing brainstorm around Thursday nightish on how to move forward. I took each of my major topics for the paper and listed them in a word document. Then I went through each article and wrote down all the important thoughts about each topic that I wanted to cover. I wrote down some quotes that I liked and made sure to note the page number and author. Next to each topic heading, I listed my citation for each article so that I could just cut and paste the entire cite of all authors straight into my paper. This was a HUGE success and help. I was able to easily construct paragraphs from my thoughts. As a new topic presented itself, I outlined it and then created a paragraph from the outline. Novel concept, right! I was able to create a really strong paper using this method. I even finished in time to get a peer review from a classmate and do some editing before I submitted it. I was pretty proud of this paper!
But back to the paper! My theory is constructivism. I have always liked the theory of constructivism and the thought of learning by doing. This struck a chord with me as I researched my lit review topic of 1:1 computing. I had a very surface idea of what this theory was all about. As I got more into my research, I was surprised to find some many different branches of this theory and to find out some really interesting criticisms of the theory.
When it came to the writing for this paper, I started from a very different point than my lit review. I knew how I wanted to construct the paper and did a brain dump to create my rough draft. Then I got stuck. I wasn't sure how to expand out draft from my original ideas. I had an amazing brainstorm around Thursday nightish on how to move forward. I took each of my major topics for the paper and listed them in a word document. Then I went through each article and wrote down all the important thoughts about each topic that I wanted to cover. I wrote down some quotes that I liked and made sure to note the page number and author. Next to each topic heading, I listed my citation for each article so that I could just cut and paste the entire cite of all authors straight into my paper. This was a HUGE success and help. I was able to easily construct paragraphs from my thoughts. As a new topic presented itself, I outlined it and then created a paragraph from the outline. Novel concept, right! I was able to create a really strong paper using this method. I even finished in time to get a peer review from a classmate and do some editing before I submitted it. I was pretty proud of this paper!
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