Whoa, thanks for all the feedback! I've picked my lit review topic. It
is... *drumroll*
Situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeships in online communities
of practice as applied to undergraduate STEM and computing education
(with a focus on open source).
Whew.
Feel free to keep the feedback coming, though -- I'm sure this can and
will evolve as I actually spend the next week working on the lit review!
Translated into English as best as I can render, this means that I'm
looking at literature on how newbies get mentored into becoming useful
to a(n online) community -- by learning *in* that community rather than
standing on the outside and learning "about" that community so they will
be "qualified to join later." And how those sorts of ideas end up being
useful when you're teaching technical college classes (and presumably
want to get your students involved in real work in their field, and find
the internet to be the easiest way to do that).
This breaks down into a few "checkboxes" -- I am looking for papers on:
* Situated cognition -- "knowing is inseparable from doing"
* Cognitive apprenticeships -- exactly what they sound like
* Online communities -- self-explanatory
* Communities of practice -- useful framework for talking about pepole
who share a common practice (not just interest in a topic, but actually
doing stuff with it)
* Undergraduate STEM and computing education
* (Open source, if possible)
It is unlikely I will find references that hit all 5.5 checkboxes, so
I'm broadening my net by saying "3-4 out of 5.5 is fine," and will set
better cutoff limits after I've done a more thorough search. I have a
tendency to overbroaden and see connections and relevance in
evvvvverything (the "everything is relevant, I must read THE WORLD!"
disease), so narrowing down to an uberspecific topic is my attempt to
use that tendency to my advantage (and build a hopefully
super-interesting lit review with some quirky sources) and have a
manageable amount of reading to do, given that I'm also attempting to
read every single article the Journal of Engineering Education has
online before FIE (19 years' worth, so <1000 articles; I'll let y'all
know the final count).
Don and Michael -- I'll let you know if I find anything on your
suggested topics (FOSS in research, quantitative studies on FOSS in K12)
while I'm looking.
I *think* I can argue that conference papers should be valid for
computing education stuff (since the field seems to publish way more at
conferences than in journals) but I'm not sure about the rest of the
domains, they seem more journal-centric. I will ask, though.
--
Mel Chua
[email protected]
PhD student, Open Source & Education focus
Purdue University, Dept. of Engineering Education
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