Some thoughts on research…is it just me?

 Firstly, thank you so much to everyone on Skype yesterday. It is always great to experience a sense of community through our meetings and I always leave feeling more positive and less lost in my own world. We talked a bit about blogging and it made me really think, I wish I had done it more to date as I completely see the relevance and usefulness of us sharing our thoughts through this medium. After talking about it yesterday and after reading Helen’s post last week I realised that on my part it definitely has to do with fear and a lack of confidence in my thoughts. I have a tendancy to get so caught up with regards to what to write and whether it will be suitable that the actual result is my producing precisely nothing.

I did find though that the act of writing and then more recently re-reading my last blog on AoLs really helped cement newly acquired knowledge in my mind, so if for no other reason I thought I’d give it another shot in reference to my latest pitfall! Today I am having a bit of an internal battle with some thoughts regarding research so I thought why not just go for it and let them out, apologies in advance if this turns into a rant, I can feel it building up.

It is of course essential to back up practice with theory and researching in and around a subject aids this excavation of existing knowledge. I love this process; I enjoy drawing parallels between disciplines and finding them in unlikely places, noticing how other practitioners share my methods or agree/disagree with my principles. What I have always struggled with is extracting and selecting what is most relevant, what best backs up what I want to say and what is worthy of use in my writing. I start to see relevance everywhere in the most obscure topics and want to use everything in my work. Whilst I know there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the formulating of opinions there is a question of validity in the referencing of theory and the ‘good student’ part of my brain kicks in and I suddenly become worried about what is acceptable, whether my point is valid or if I have flown off in an unrelated direction.  I then find it almost impossible to stand back and organise my thoughts and findings into some kind of useable format.

This then leads directly into the next issue of when do you call enough, enough when it comes to researching around a particular topic? I am currently looking for theory to back up my AoL titles and I often find that the reading of one article will lead into a related and equally relevant piece of literature, this pattern then repeats exponentially and I honestly believe I could go on forever if I don’t eventually reign it in, but how do you know when?  What if I miss out on the most relevant and informative reading material ever because I stopped too soon. J Is it just me or does this process then turn into a form of academic procrastination? I don’t like to formalise my thoughts by actually beginning to write because I know my opinions might change, or I am concerned about the quality or relevance of my reading material or in all honesty I feel as if I am no clearer about what I want to say than when I started.

So…here I find myself, I’ve read about everything from educational reform in the Punjab to the postmetaphysical thinking of Habermas and Gadamer, from the methods of Laban and Barteneiff to a software developers take on best practices for teaching Python as a programming language. Am I ready yet? Maybe I’ll just read one more book and then I will begin…