This paper asks and answers three closely related questions: What is the practitioner's hidden research agenda? How can electronic bookmarks @-bookmarks) ...
HOW CAN THE REVEALED RESEARCH AGENDA, E-BOOKMARKS AND A CRITICAL REVIEW TEMPLATE AID THE PRACTITIONER? Ian 'Kennedy University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Keywords - research agenda, bookmarks, critical literature review template, key keywords
Abstract - Continuing Professional Development requires engineers and educators to maintain lifelong learning. Both roles require the professional to research. Because of its immediacy and freshness, we cautiously accept that the initial port of call is the World Wide Web. Now, how should professionals find and manage relevant material in this proverbial haystack called the Web? This paper asks and answers three closely related questions: What is the practitioner's hidden research agenda? How can electronic bookmarks @-bookmarks) be used as an academic tool? How can a template be used for critical reviews? Professionals are unconsciously looking for the names of the authors who are working in the field, and who may have put abstracts of research work on the Web. This paper first reveals this hidden agenda for searching, and shows how to formalize the process. An E-bookmark is a computer record containing minimally the location, date and title of a page found on the Web, intranet or hard drive while following the search agenda. The paper next reveals how E-bookmarks may be annotated, sequenced, structured and used to keep track of all relevant electronic literature. Finally, the paper shows how E-bookmarks can be extended to keep track of relevant printed literature via a record and review template to maintain lifelong learning practices. Both roles require the professional to research.
1.
THE A B C OF DIGITAL RESEARCH
The process here described aims to encourage you to set up your own formal keeping of records in a Web format, locally or globally. The skills obtained from preparing a comprehensive, annotated bookmark file with extensions for printed material prepares you naturally for authoring and rapid publishing of Web pages and becoming part of the global professional engineering and educational community. How can the revelation of the hidden research agenda, the use of E-bookmarks and a critical review template aid the practitioner? We now look in turn at each of the parts of this question.
A. What is the practitioner's hidden search Agenda? Practitioners need to know their resources and how to use them. In this day of rapidly advancing knowledge in every field, it is important for busy engineering and educational practitioners to keep up with new developments in their field. Professionals and practitioners are legally required to know the bestpractice (current) methods and apply their minds in using these best practice methods. Continuing Professional Development programmes allow engineers and educators
The World Wide Web has both advantages and disadvantages: 0
The World Wide Web constitutes the most cost-effective way of accessing up-to-date information. The Web saves us time and costs in accessing material (but is never a substitute for libraries or empirical work). It is the first port-of-call for quickly required information because it contains the current vocabulary and work-in-progress. Practitioners should use the Web to find the current keywords that are being used and to quickly get a feel for current direction of the field. (Subsequently they reuse the best keywords that they have found on CDROM indexes and library indexes.) This way, they may get quick answers without even having to go to a library, or are at least able to approach the CD-ROM indexes and libraries with a good search plan in hand. The disadvantage of the Web is the sheer size of the Web. The size implies that the practitioner is often looking for a needle in a haystack. Now, how should professionals find and manage quality, relevant material in this proverbial haystack called the Web? Practitioners need to
0 2002 The Institution of Electrical Engineers
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take reasonable steps to ensure the authority and authenticity of the information, evaluating what they find. Most people are dealing with the mass of information on the Web very inefficiently. They try to surf through the whole World Wide Web of information for just a few nuggets.
Why does Surfing not work? Surfing involves merely following links. It involves starting somewhere and just following the links, and links to links. The method is the one most novices seem to use when they first begin using the Web. Surfing provides novices with an idea of the sort of information available but is not a reliable method of finding a particular piece of information because no-one may have linked to that information. Sure, you can find a lot by serendipity, but you must get serendipity to work for you. You need a plan for finding what you want to find. This takes a lot of time. You need to have a formal discipline to follow: Set a focussed question, know the tools to use, know where to find them, and keep up with the new tools that are becoming available.
On the Web there is no friendly reference librarian, or even a database of holdings or a card index to help the practitioner. Instead practitioners must use search engines. Hence the need to plan a personal program of work first. The search engines contain records of every word in every page indexed, but none can claim complete coverage. We search for key words that are very likely to be in our target pages. Start with AltaVista Advanced Google Advanced These advanced (or power) search engines allow us to use Boolean operators. But we also need to learn the reserved words and syntax of the different search engines. We learn the reserved words and not:, and, or, and AltaVista's more precise near operator and the short-hand forms ... &, 1, and . This is perhaps best approached by practice in Searching for and Bookmarking important hard-drive and intranet files. You also need to find out what AltaVista's link: can do for followingreferences backwards. We learn the non-trivial art and science of formulating effective search strings. We quickly learn that the formulation of search strings is best approached in an iterative fashion. Research is always an iterative, non-linear process.
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In the academic and business environment, professiona need to make their searches efficient. People in all organizations are confused with how to use this massive tool available to them. The Web has grown so fast that it has taken everybody by surprise. We need to get people "Web-literate'' today, to gain the full benefit in the next few years. We now express the unarticulated agenda of professionals doing research, to help formalize the process that they should follow. Research agendas are twofold:
1.
Which Search engines to use?
There are open research agendas, to find questions and answers to questions that practitioners have posed for research.
2. There are the hidden research agendas. Hidden agendas are, e.g., to find Abstracts and Authors to help answer the research question obliquely or partially. In other words, practitioners are unconsciously looking for the names of the authors who are working in the field, and who may have put abstracts of research work on the Web. It is unlikely that their work will provide the full answer (this is research!) so we are content with partial answers. If the answer is a partial answer, as practitioners, we repeat the process on the unknowns until the research questions are fully answered or decide how to do our empirical work.
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Practitioners should try to quickly find their key sources. These are the key journal articles or authoritative institutions. Finding a key source is a pivotal point in the research process. I use the term key not just to indicate the importance of the source, but also to emphasize the way a single key source can unlock a whole treasurechest of information and other sources. With a key journal article, the practitioner can read the references or follow the hypertext links to previous literature. In the opposite direction, the practitioner can look up more recent writers citing that key research paper (via citation indexes) or in the case of the Web, using AltaVista's link :option. A good search plan formalizes "The Practitioner's Hidden Research Agenda" by deliberately and unsparingly spending time using the advanced search engines, looking for what I call key keywords. For example, if we are looking for a research article, it must be introduced by an abstract, otherwise it is not up to standard. If we take the key keyword and AND it with a keyword from the engineering or educational discipline and submit it to an advanced Web search engine, the engine will only find pages with research
content! For example, a search for Abstract AND "hidden agenda" should find this very page you are now looking at. In this example, the word Abstract is here defined as one example of a key keyword. (The capitalization of the first letter helps AltaVista. to be specific)
scholars of printed material to put their annotations and derivative thoughts about printed passages onto removable, coloured, note-papers. The practitioner must still transcribed the notes on the note-papers and arrange them into a logical order.
With the shift to scholars publishing and reading The box below lists other key keywords, besides for the word Abstract, to help practitioners formally find what otherwise they would only find by chance.
What are the Key Keywords (Kennedy)? Search in turn for these words: 0
0
Abstract Associated disciplines (by name) Authorities (by name) Background Bibliography Bookmarks Conference Contribution Database Definitions Department
Institution
electronic texts, we will show how E-bookmarks allow people to reorder and restructure their annotations to reveal the shape of the field and uncover emerging patterns. Each E-bookmark is a computer record containing minimally the location, date and title of a page found on the Internet, intranet or hard drive. In the annotation of the bookmark you say why the page is relevant to you. You can even E-bookmark your searches so that you can repeat them a year later when the Web will hopefully have twice as many pages available. After collecting E-bookmarks, you get a long list of annotated E-bookmarks in the order that you discovered them. The next step is to make appropriate folders in your bookmark file and to start categorizing the Ebookmarks, putting each into appropriate folder@). Ebookmarks may be categorized, and reordered according to different criteria, searched, structured and nested to any degree, and printed or published to keep track of available literature. (An E-bookmark may appear in more than one folder.) Then you go on to arrange the bookmarks within each folder, and the folders themselves into a logical order. This gives you an HTML file that is a draft review of the Web literature and it only has to be augmented with library research to form a draft review of the field.
Manufacturer In organizing bookmarks into folders, subfolders, and sub-sub-folders, the shape of the field will be revealed. You should get Netscape for this purpose, as it is the only Web browser program that allows annotation. editing and organizing of bookmarks. Netscape is a free, quality Web browser, which allows a practitioner, through the use of bookmarks to document Web references, annotate them, organize them and edit them into a survey of the literature. Although more popular, the Internet Explorer browser does not allow the
S o f tware
The next section looks at the problem of how to document our academic findings.
B. How can electronic Bookmarks be used as an academic tool? The first problem of research (Kennedy 2001) or curriculum design is: How to gather, annotate, structure and organize elements of the existing body of knowledge in the field. Staff and students need an efficient, understandable way of building their literature reviews; lecturers designing new course offerings need a way to structure the field. For printed literature, traditional bookmarks allowed readers to rapidly return to interesting or useful pages. The modem 'Post-It' is a small advance on the traditional bookmark, allowing
E-bookmarks may even be extended to track printec literature via a template presented in the next section.
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C. How can a template be used for Critical reviews? An early problem for the professional doing research is
knowing how to critically review the existing body of knowledge in the field. People tend to review the materials they have found in haphazard and unstructured ways. Professionals have an unarticulated way of critically reviewing material, which needs to be documented and formalized to help "new kids on the block".
Reference #OOOO
What do we mean when we say to students that they should first produce a critical review of the literature? We mean that the students should Zook up all material on the Web and in the libraries that might have some relevance to their topics. They should use their skills to analyse aspects of what they read. Then they should synthesize a summary of what they have found. Sadly, we usually stop short at this point and leave students to their own devices, with no further guidance or hints. We need to give the students a solid frame within which they can work. This means we need first to agree amongst ourselves what we mean by the word "critical", and then tell and remind the students to think in depth about the meaning of the word "critical" as they read material. Well, what is the process that we follow when we review critically? We exclude lesser works from being reviewed and focus on the greater, authoritative works. We base our work only on the."best-practice" references. That is, on material from the authoritative journals, authors, and institutions and schools of thought. (We need to guide "new kids on the block" to these sources.)
ter the title here
In a critical review we deliberately and carefully go about commenting, evaluating analytically,finding faults and making independent judgements. To review critically, we need to verify the credentials of the authors, look at the setting and character of the works and identify any boundaries, biasses and shortcomings in them. As part of the process of reviewing critically we decide which are the crucial and important points that the authors have made. The process includes identifying the parts which are related to our work and which may currently be useful to us. We summarize the state of knowledge that we have found in the selected works of interest to us and highlight the significant gaps and inconsistencies we have found, thereby identifymg suitable starting points for our research.
umber of the publication here
1
ter the International Standard Book or
I give my students my template to help them in their critical reviewing (Kennedy 2001). The template consists of a number of questions that the students (and practitioners) should ask of the article they are reviewing.
nter the finishing page number here
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at point of view does the autho
Viewpoint
3.
REFERENCE
[l] Kennedy, I.G. (2001) How to do Research, In Press. ISBN 0-620-27218-X 4.
AUTHOR CONTACT DETAILS
Ian G. Kennedy, Senior Researcher School of Electrical Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, P 0 Wits, 2050 Johannesburg, South Africa Phone: International +27 (1 1) 717-7228 Send E-mail to i.kennedy @ee.wits.ac.za
P
I
Advance
at advances could or have been e?
5.
APPENDIXA
Part 1 ("Front of the card"):
I
Copyright 01992-2001Dr I. G.Kennedy i.kennedyC3ee.wits.ac.m
AUTHOR1 : INITIAL1:
The template comes in two parts. The first part of the template is for the practitioner to mechanistically record the bibliographic details of the paper. The second part is of intellectual interest. This part is for the practitioner to fill in as part of the process of thinking critically about the paper. In this part, the practitioner is prompted by nine critical prompts to enter nine sentences. Each question on the right can be replaced with a considered answer. Practitioners fill in their answers to all the prompts for one reference being reviewed, then delete the prompts, making a sensible paragraph out of the sentences. This paragraph constitutes an adequate first draft of a critical review of that reference. See Appendix A for an example. The practitioners repeat for all the references, review all their paragraphs and sort them into a logical order of presentation, and summarize their findings in afinal paragraph.
2.
CONCLUSION
Most professionals still perform their research in unstructured ways. This material showed how to formalize the process, using bookmark files as the central repository or Master Documentation List, and how to prepare a critical review of the field. The recommended research process is the formation of a research question, the searching for and acquiring of relevant research publications (on-line and then off-line), organizing them as a pre-write of the review of the literature, for insertion in the research report, and identifymg gaps or inconsistencies for research. Good practitioners formal annotate and structure their research of the World Wide Web and locally.
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AUTHO?U:
INITIAL2: AUTHOR3 : INITIAL3: ETAL : YEAR: MONTH : TITLE:
CITY : PUBLISHER: REbmmCS :
ISBN: VOL : NO : P: PP : ACCESSION #:
Bert sekas D.P. Gafni E.M. Gallager R.G. F 1984 8 Second derivative algorithms for mini" delay distortion in networks
-IEEE This was llry firstentered, but uncited reference
-COM32 8 911 919 1
Part 2 ("Back of the card"): BACKGROUND:
Bertsekas has a PhD in system science from MIT and did research in the area of data communication networks.
VIEWPOINT :
He considers how to best route messages in a communication network.to minimize the average delay per message.
QUOTE :
"The algorithms provide methods for iteratively updating the routing table entries of each node in a way that guarantees convergence to delay routing. a mini"
LIMITATION:
This is a theoretical gaper, covering quasistatic routing where the statistics o f external traffic inputs change slowly.
...
CONTRIBUTE : It provides algorithms based on Gallager's method, which deals with guaranteed convergence to mini" delay routing. RELEVANCE :
The imgortance to the present thesis is that it emphasizes the overall network goal in Packet Networks.
ADVANCE :
A University of the Witwatersrand M.Sc. thesis contains a practical implementation
Exported to my draft literature survey, with all prompts deleted, it appears as follows: Bertsekas has a PhD in system science from MIT and did research in the area of data communication networks. He considers how to best route messages in a communication network to minimize the average delay per message. "The algorithms ... provide methods for iteratively updating the routing table entries of each node in a way that guarantees convergence to a minimum delay routing."[l] This is a theoretical paper, covering quasi-staticrouting where the statistics of external traffic inputs change slowly. It provides algorithms based on Gallager's method, which deals with guaranteed convergence to minimum delay routing. The importance to the present thesis is that it emphasizes the overall network goal in Packet Networks. A University of the Witwatersrand M.Sc. thesis contains a practical implementation of the algorithms.
