October Monthly Review

Vince Commented on Group 2 (Spiritual Learning) and Group 4 (Indigenous Learning).


This last month has seemed like a whole semesters worth of learning rolled into one month. First with the program reviews at the very beginning of the month and then writing the Program Design paper. During the course of events our team experienced some real challenges and even some difficult conflict to work through. But we focused on the task before us and spent some time working through all if it with Dr. Chang and we are really proud of what we were able to accomplish. We thought we'd share with you some of what we experienced and what came out of it. We know some of it occurred in the last days of September, but felt it would be good to share where we came from at the beginning of the month.

 

In General Terms What Happened

During the course of the program review, as we were hoping to be in the wrapping up stage of our work, we discovered a few areas that needed to be addressed that put some real strain on our team and made our projects fall short of what they needed to be. So we stopped and spent some time in dialogue. Should we submit them as they were and hope they slipped by or that maybe not everything would be caught or chance that one or both of us would take the fall for what was in our group project, or do we come forward and talk with Dr Chang to figure out a strategy to get to what would be in our whole groups best interest? We decided to ask Dr Chang to help us figure out what we needed to address to fix these problems.

Both members of the group learned from each other and despite some initial friction, the overall goal of helping each other learn was accomplished. The intent of each person was realized after the initial friction and in the end, both members learned a lot on several levels.

We didn't fix everything before we submitted our work, but we did tackle the biggest problems and figured out a strategy for handling others moving forward. What follows are paragraphs rewritten from our email dialogues with one another and Dr, Chang that summarize our outcomes.

About Program Investigation

This requires students to review a program, not to review a paper that introduced a program. If you find a published paper which introduced a good program, you can Google this program, interview the people who are responsible for this program, and collect the first-hand resources about this program. In a published paper, the author usually collected data about this program based on his/her research agenda. He/she may neglect some important features about this program that you are looking for. But you can use this published article to supplement your review of the program.

We were able to address some of the issues in this area, but what remained caused us to have to redo work when it came time for our Program Design, You'll see some comments in our Program Design paper about this when reading it.

About Citations

It is not easy for us to know all the details about APA. However, we must take APA seriously. It is not acceptable to write whole sentences and parts of paragraphs used verbatim without quotes, citations, or references in the paper. This is a problem of principal and ethics. It is also one of the criteria used for judging whether the work is professional or not. We are going to put our papers out there live on the internet. Think about this scenario on a personal level: Maybe there is someone who wants to check out what we have done—the good, the bad, and the ugly—from novice to professional. So they check our work on internet. They could use a tool like http://www.plagspotter.com/ and put in the url of our work, and can easily find out if we commit plagiarism or not due to improper citation or not giving citation at all.

About How to Synthesize a Variety of Resources

 
Sometimes students use one source as their primary source and cite a huge amount of ideas from it, which can be problematic. When the majority of the thoughts are someone elses, even if it is paraphrased, why would anyone write it and not just hand in the source instead? When you quote some ideas, you should quote according to your own research purpose and add your own original thoughts. When I wrote my program introduction, I looked at the web site, read tons of interviews and blog posts, looked at news articles, and landed on three primary sources for my background that I could use, that way I wasn't using only one source to generate my paraphrases. I had enough ideas floating in my head for original expression about what I was writing about. If I had time, there was a lot better stuff to draw from than I even was able to put into the paper.

About Commitment

 
Our academic work needs our commitment. We need to invest our time on it in order to gain as much as we can within one semester. School can't be done in our spare time. In fact nothing in life, not even rest or play can be done in our spare time. We either actively engage in life or passively respond to it. When we passively respond to it, we always take the easy way, the shortcut, and the route that gets us through what we are doing.

On the same lines of commitment, if you’ve committed something, such as a family vacation, then you have to do two things. Be prepared to work ahead on school work and projects and deadlines as well as communicate effectively to the rest of the team. These two things were learned the hard way when one of the team members went to Florida (primarily Disney World) during the first week of October. He didn’t plan ahead nor did he communicate to other team members or Dr. Chang his vacation plans, which effected the group project.

Summary

Our team knew that avoiding all of this would have been the easy way out, but we also knew we wanted to learn all we could from the class, so we made the decision to address these mid-course. It wasn't easy, and it did take a lot of time, but we feel proud of the results. We know that there is still great room for improvement, but the improvements that no one else my see are the greatest improvements. So when we did the Program Design, we were in much better shape to build on our previous work, and we understood better what we needed to focus on moving forward. Much of our Project Design summary ended up in the text of the paper as we described how we sorted through our past work to make decisions about what was important to our design.

Thanks for reading! Hope there is something helpful here for others! 

Troy and Vince