Things to do in week 1

Things to do
Download and read the Overview of 7021EDN Tri 1 2020 document available on L@G in week 1. Make note of any questions you have and be sure to post them on the Slack site. There is a channel called course_questions. Don't think your question is not worth asking. if you are confused or concerned about something you can be sure other students will be also.

If you have not had a good look around the Slack site, now is the time to do it. There will be channels to join. There is a channel for each week of the course. You could also say hello to other students who have signed on.

Read the introduction to research options (top menu or via the link). Follow the link to planning the research.

Browse the top links from the Planning a research project page on this site. They are designed to help you begin to think about the question you want to eventually opt for. At this stage, it's fine to have a lot of questions but you probably need to limit the broad areas of interest you may have (topics) to one.

When you have settled on your topic, you can then go about generating your question. It's useful to have a lot of questions to begin with. Pop them into your 1st notebook and annotate them. Why are you asking the question? What is puzzling you? Why are you curious?

This week we will map course structure and what it will mean in terms of your participation. We will also begin to think about getting to your research question.

Weekly discussion
We will be working together for the next twelve weeks. Good research work is rarely a solitary exercise. You may not think so but you all have something to offer as your colleagues in this course begin to think through what they will do for their research. It's difficult to help people if you know not much about them or what they are planning to work on. You have two things to contribute to the Slack site this week:

This contribution goes into the week-1 channel

  • introduce yourself. The more you share the easier it will be for others to relate to you.
  • jot down your early thinking about your research project. It can be quite general but try and jot down some of the options you think you have. Write a little about why the topic matters to you. You might also have some background in the topic, that would be good to jot down as well.

Notebooks
By now you should have your notebooks to hand and have made some initial entries. If you only ever make entries in the notebooks they will have been a waste of time. Their value derives from you being able to go back and read over your ideas from previous weeks and use them to inform your current thinking. We can't hold everything in our memory. A notebook is an invaluable support for any research work. This is where you make you do you initial writing about your topic and from which you can draft that part of your contribution to the week_1 channel.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License