Scholar as a Personal Learning Tool

Added by john.morrison, last edited by jtojek on 12 Jun 2007 10:04 AM Labels:  (None) Add Labels   Enter labels to add to this page: Tip: Looking for a label? Just start typing.

Scholar can be used as a Personal Learning tool, just to meet your own resource building and learning management needs. Consider the following, from simple to increasingly sophisticated uses of Scholar.  Start with one or more uses and you'll find that other uses easily follow in Scholar. Install the Scholar Bookmarklet if you haven't already done so to make these uses even easier.

• Personal Learning Tool Uses
  
  
  • Keep track of vetted and to read - Introductory Use
    • toread
      Rationale: Keep track of articles and items you haven't got time to read. Save a reference to them so you can return to them when you have got time, then review them and decide to delete or add them to your vetted list, as below.
      
      Use: When you're looking at an item you want to save, click on the Scholar Bookmarklet, add the tag toread to the Tags line in the Add a Bookmark form and save.
      
      
    • vetted
      Rationale: Keep track of articles and items you've read and are worth keeping. Save a reference to them and categorize them with some topic tags so you can easily find them later.
      
      Use: When you've reviewed an item you want to keep, think of topics that make sense to you to categorize the item or article and then click on the Scholar Bookmarklet. Add the topics in the Tags line of the Add a Bookmark form, simply putting a space between each, and save.  You'll be easily able to find the article again on your Scholar homepage under your My  Bookmarks stream or My Tag Cloud.
      
      
  • Topic or Discipline resources - Introductory Use
    
    
    • keeping track of topic or discipline resources
      Rationale: Keep track of collections of articles on topics or on subjects of importance to you.
      
      Use: This involves using the Advanced Search tool, saving a search, then from your Scholar homepage selecting Add a Stream to locate the search and save it to your home page. For example, save a search based on your Discipline and a search based on a topic (Tag) important to you.
      
      
  • Research tool - Advanced Use
    
    
    • Rationale:  Scholar can be used to setup several multi-criteria, complex and well tested searches in order to capture items that are of research interest to you. These searches, when saved as Streams, will continually be looking for resources which meet your sophisticated search criteria. In the early stages of Scholar, your searches can be simple, broad researches to ensure resources are captured. As Scholar grows, you'll want to return to your searches to refine them, so extraneous items are not being caught by them.
      
      
    • Use: This way of using Scholar needs familiarity with Scholar, some planning of a group of terms to use in your searches and testing out of these terms (Tags) in different searches. Expect to spend some time fine tuning this approach. You'll need to go through the following stages with the Advanced Search tool: exploration and testing of search terms, organizing and saving searches, monitoring the output of searches to see that they are actually capturing what you want, and finally refinement to fine tune the output of your searches. You may want to go through this cycle for both tags and users in Scholar, so you end up with two sets of streams.
      
      • a stream based on tags on a research topic
      • a stream based on users who save resources on the research topic
        
        research tool use based on work by Joe Tojek, Principal Learning Architect, Capella University

    • Building an expert profile in research methods using social networking (Tojek, Francis)

    • This presentation for Blackboard 2007 demonstrates a learning activity under development for an Advanced Practicum in Research Design, in collaboration with Capella University distinguished senior faculty Dr. Bruce Francis. This activity seeks to apply the use of emerging information tools such as desktop and visual search, and the embedded functionality of social bookmarking sites such as tagging and RSS, to course learning objectives that ask learners to demonstrate the ability to analyze and evaluate various research methodologies and their application in the field.
      In this activity, learners and faculty collaborate to harness the collective activities of a community of scholars to build expert profiles that support their learning about specific research methods for their dissertation.  A jig-saw style pedagogy pattern (See Figure 1.) asks each learner to individually explore a topic area that corresponds with their research interests and then to collaborate around common tasks such as knowledge domain definition, query evaluation, and the automated monitoring of community content and expert activity. These tasks are accomplished using Google Desktop, the Quintura visual search appliance, and the Blackboard Scholar social bookmarking service.
    • Figure 1. A jig-saw style pedagogy pattern for expert profile development
      
    • The instructor provides guidance and feedback to help learners pick appropriate topic areas for their individual expert profiles and also provides the topic categories that the team will use to define the knowledge domain of the jig-saw activity. For the research methods jig-saw, these break out as follows:
    • Individual topic areas:
      -         The Delphi Process
      -         Action research
      -         Survey research
      -         Information visualization tools
    • Knowledge domain topic categories
      • Definitions and demonstrations
      • Review of the method
      • Example applications