A small lit review

I’m starting in on a lit review that I’ve had pieces of in my bibliography for a long time, but now should put together into a cohesive document. It will take a few weeks, I think, to get all in place, but it will be good.

There is a smattering of literature regarding little robots in the classroom–in CS educational literature, engineering ed., the AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence), and a host of other nooks and crannies. From my ad-hoc knowledge of the domain, my work typically has a very different character from many, if not all, of the individuals I know of working with little robots in terms of our guiding principles and how they are borne out in practice.

Needless to say, the review will be interesting. And, I find the exercise is interesting as well. Being in a technical domain, I can generally rely on authors having placed their work on-line. So, my process involves:

  • A text editor,
  • A web browser,
  • A view of my bookmarks, and
  • A view of the filesystem.

WIth two monitors, I can arrange these things across the two, and follow a nice simple path to get the initial reading list populated.

  1. Take a paper, and copy it’s bibliography into the text editor.
  2. Look up each reference using Google; copy-and-pasting the title tends to get the document on a first try, or at least get an author’s publication list.
  3. Download the article, and file it in the filesystem under it’s appropriate category.
  4. Download and file any additional resources that seem pertinent.
  5. If there seems to be value in revisiting the site, file the bookmark.

These steps are repeated for each paper in the seed set. This is a shotgun, ad-hoc approach to populating my reading list, but it actually moves quite quickly. In very little time, I had the full text (and full citations) of ten papers, all of which will eventually serve as potential seeds for additional levels of search.

Of course, this only explores a small part of the space; there are papers, theses, books, and other documents I’m not positive I’ll see in this level of the search, as the citations would be rather broad considering the papers I’ve started with. However, it is an easy protocol to implement, it gets me moving quickly, and lets me begin thinking about how the review will be structured as new information comes in. That structure will change as I come back to it time and again, which is something I like.

Mostly, I was just surprised how quickly things were falling on to the harddrive. I’m sure things will slow down as soon as I head off to the library…

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DC 2003 Feedback

I believe there are two overriding themes to my thoughts on the doctoral consortium at this SIGCSE: content and debriefing.

Content
My first comment is with respect to content. There was a relatively large amount of dead time this DC, particularly in the form of unstructured breaks. We would finish several presentations, and then have a 10-15 minute break. I personally think overload is a perfectly good goal for a one day doctoral consortium like this one. Instead of 10 minutes of shuffling around, I’d prefer a 5 minute break, and 10 or 15 minutes of structured discussion on the job search process, Ph.D. “survival skills,” techniques for writing (short papers vs. dissertation length works, for example), etc… yes, they are all things “we should be getting from our supervisors,” but they are all things you can never hear too often or too much.

Debriefing
I have both a definition (the second applies) and a crisis-centric view of the debriefing process available; neither entirely satisfies me, but both together will have to do. We had more than one free-form discussion during the day on various topics, and several activities, but at no point did we pause and reflect on how these things played out in our personal or collective walks along the Ph.D. path. In working as a camp counselor, I learned that it is not the activity that matters so much as what the campers take away from it; furthermore, it is often the case that what they take away is defined by how you analyze the process and product afterwards. I’ve seen brilliant camp activities that take 5, 10 minutes to run with 30 kids, and over an hour to debrief—during which time the campers are challenged to rethink some of their most basic assumptions about how they interact with and treat others.

The Ph.D. process is laden with opportunities for misguided assumptions; in our daily practice, interactions with our supervisors and peers, how we structure and carry out our research… all of these things can be explored and examined through simple activities, but the real value comes in the dissection thereof. More importantly, by discussing these things as a group, we learn that we all share, in common, many of the same problems, regardless of the stage we are at in the process. Establishing these commonalities, or perhaps more importantly, establishing who has stumbled over these hurdles in the past, skinned their knees, and continued, can be very enlightening and valuable for students just beginning down the path.

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