Learning by reading
I've reconnected with my old friend John Klippenstein, with whom I went to high school in the early 1970s in Vancouver. We both did well there, and he went on to an academic career in the UK. Several years ago his family literally undertook a seachange, returning to live in a coastal community north of Vancouver. He is now a software architect for Kodak.
We've been having a discussion about my difficulty in reading the Handbook of Research on Educational Communication and Technology (2nd ed), 2004, edited by D. H. Jonassen. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), which is the text from which our readings have come for one of my courses. (It costs over $400 here in Oz, although I see the publisher has now discounted it to US$95; luckily we have been supplied photocopies). I don't have the introduction to this work, but surely it was not intended as a source of learning. Rather it is a reference for those who are already familiar with the subject matter.
I suggested to John that perhaps we were being subjected to baptism by fire.
That said, I have to improve my ability to read academic works, a skill which you have obviously nurtured. What I try to do is the usual active reading approach of asking questions while I read, stopping and reflecting or just sitting on it for a day or two. I use a text highlighter and I draw concept maps occasionally. What is this about, why is it stated here, what is missing, what does it relate to, etc. This works for most writing, but there is a threshold of literary complexity beyond which I am unable to penetrate. The problem with these is not the concepts so much as the folded language. I have to read sentences over and over again before all the clauses actually coalesce. By the time they do, I'm exhausted (as if having young children and paid work isn't enough on my mind). Our second-half class assignment in my difficult unit is to do a project about the semantic net.... Getting an overall picture of this domain and where it is heading is again going to be a case of extracting meaning pixel by pixel.John is better at reading texts and in our further discussions we have explored how we continue to learn by reading.
Category: Masters degree
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