As part of our module in Semester 2, our class group will be working on an open-source academic textbook on Game Design and Development. This is a continuation of our reading and writing tasks from last year and serves as good practice and preparation to dissect academic articles and write in a formal style. I do feel uncertain as to whether I will able to meet the the level of writing standard required. On top of that, from last year's reading experience I did find areas of academic reading overwhelming. 😓 Despite that we're bound to start somewhere, right?
First order of business was choosing a topic. I had a little trouble with this part as most people were quick to snag the 'fun' topics (RIP Character Creation).😔 I ended up switching a few times to make sure my topic wouldn't overlap with anyone else's as well as checking to see if there was enough reading material available in our library's database. I ended up sticking with the topic on Serious Games. Using the concept of games in education and real-world scenarios seems interesting and I'm curious to see what direction it will take me.
This week, a member of the library staff, Lindsay, generously gave us a tour of the library tools and resources which will help us when doing our research. She gave us tips on how to limit our searches to gather more relevant material, such as using quotation marks (" ") for keywords and phrase and taking advantage of Boolean operators ('AND', 'NOT', other). The biggest takeaway was using RefWorks to store all our research material and it also generates the citations for you.
Following the task instructions I went ahead and made a document outlining a few questions based on the 4 W's (Who, What, Where, Why?). This served as a little brainstorm to see what areas I could potentially discuss in my writing. https://drive.google.com/file/d/11hwyJx11h0ipVOWdRY2XzBGPu03HzmSe/view?usp=sharing
Next, I came up with roughly 13 search keywords that relate to topic (although I haven't tried them all out yet).
Finally I decided to download the Matrix Review spreadsheet and included 4 sources I found from the library database. The spreadsheet does look a bit overwhelming but I figured I'd give it a try and alter some sections to suit me as I go along. Here is a link to the working document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yw4aq4BtQHtcPtB4P0qG-t_CojexoDZe/view?usp=sharing
Now getting into the actual planning...
1. I'd try to stick the following strategy when looking up material:
3. When scanning through the material, I plan to use a word frequency website where it will find the most common used words in the article. Here's an example: http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp I'm still looking for one that can sift through documents/pdf's.
This will give me a general idea of the main theme/keywords of the article and I can re-use the keywords to look up other material.
4. Finally after reading/skimming through the material I'll start to fill in the Review Matrix. I plan to also use Diigo, to highlight annotate on the actual document copy. Diigo is a chrome extension which allows you organize bookmarked websites and also add your notes and comments.
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