“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This quote is the first line of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. It’s also kinda how I feel about doing academic research again after 23 years.
The last time I did university research, using the micro fiche was not an uncommon practice, so you can imagine how excited I was to start online courses with really great access to the UVic library. It was like walking into a bookstore for the first time and seeing (and smelling) all the paper. Everything was at my fingertips! Until I realized that my fingertips didn’t know what words to type into the search bar.
Thankfully, with a brief workshop from Justin Harrison, I was soon off to the races. I learned how to set up my Zotero account and I began filling it with all the articles- more about those in a minute- my little heart desired. But then I had to do something with them. So I did what I’d been taught, I bought a coil bound notebook and some Flair Pens! I’d print off each article and make notes in my notebook, carefully selecting the main ideas or quotes I felt added clarity to my research. I highlighted, I underlines, I wrote notes in the margins! I even added sticky notes to mark my pages in my ever growing binder.
If you want to give it a try, here are some suggestions.
In retrospect, this practice, though soothing, is not the most efficient way to annotate notes or highlight important information. I was constantly flipping through for information I knew I’d tagged and then recording it digitally somewhere else when I needed it.
It took two Zotero workshops and two meetings with Michael before I figured out how to make Zotero work for me. Additionally, I also found this shorter video that helped make Zotero make sense. You really can’t get lost or zone out in 6 minutes, which would be my only critique of the longer videos.
So, about those articles I mentioned earlier. My Zotero account started as a dumping group for everything I found related to course content or my individual research. I then added folders to categorize my articles. I have my general library, a folder for 570/571 readings, a folder for experiential learning articles, a folder for the articles my group looked at for our project, and a folder for articles related to e-portfolios.
Moving forward, I will probably also look to adding some folders within my digital portfolios folder if that’s possible. I’ve noticed that my research has had a few distinct categories that can be separated out: general e-portfolios, competency-based education, and portfolios for data collection. These are distinct categories that have come up because the e-portfolio system that I use – SpacesEdu- is brilliant for many different reasons and I haven’t yet figured out which area is most significant to me yet.
So, here are my takeaways so far about doing and organizing research:
- I like to read articles printed off on paper. I like to highlight.
- I am comfortable taking my colour-coded highlights and adding them into my Zotero articles.
- I can probably ditch the coil bound notebook for most notes because I know know how to use the notes aspect of Zotero.
- My coil bound will now be used for transformative thinking.
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