Term Paper Reflection

I would really like to assign two superlative-degree adjective labels to the term paper assignments, which are “the most challenging” and “the most rewarding”. As I saw this assignment on the rubric list, I just knew that it would not be an easy task, but I never thought it would be this difficult. I used to write about 20 single-spaced pages research papers, but that was because I did have DATA! – data that I was able to expound upon and hence I did not need to worry about the lengthen of the paper. However, this time, I don’t even have a clue how to write a “research” paper without any research data, no matter quantitative or qualitative. Thereby, the process of planning and replanning and then being compelled to come to my laptop because of the time constrain, that was a very tough process, plus reading the literatures was challenged by my constant distraction. However, after I finished writing the paper, I wanted to exclaim not only because I finished the tedious literature review time and finally finished this task, but also because I find the tedious reading and several days of struggling finally gave me something. I have something in mind as how these guys conduct research study in this field and what are good papers and what are bad papers. It was then rewarding.

My paper was about telecommunication in foreign language teaching and learning. When I took a hard evening staring at the assignment description and some suggested topics, I devised an outline that was almost very different from the final paper although about the same topic. The original title was Telecommunication in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: A Evaluation of Several Web-based Language Instructional Tools. The emphasis was about evaluation when I planned the outline. I got to confess one reason that I was about to do evaluation was the naïve notion that evaluation paper was easy to write because you don’t need to read a whole lot of literatures, which could be my worst part. So I just typed in a succinct outline with several web-based tools that I could think of and send it to Dr. Wang, those tools included Moodle, SNS, online Learning Management System (such as WebCT).

I did not imagine, however, how hard it could be to write an evaluation paper about something you only know about the name. Moodle was a name that was mentioned by my former teacher in my undergraduate program in a conversation with him. When I opened Moodle’s site, I found it was way more complex than I had imagined, and what was more, it was actually another learning management system, which should be categorized into LMS. This means if I was to continue to write the evaluation paper, it would be even harder because I had only two categories then, the SNS and the LMS, with one major example that I am not familiar with. And it was not like Ning.com or Tokbox that you can spend one night, get familiar with it, and come up with a report. It’ll probably take you a month, if one wants to evaluate it from an instructional technology and professional perspective. I then changed my mind, went to the lab and downloaded a whole bunch of literature about telecommunication in foreign language teaching and learning, and started the long, long, tedious and tough process of re-gaining my inspiration. I had no choice. As I could expect, I was constantly distracted and could not maintain my interest and focus, but I just had to read these papers to gain some ideas.

It was ironic that some had to come back to do something just because he previously planned to make a detour avoiding doing these things. My first plan to write about evaluation was due to my dreading to read, and finally I found I could not do the evaluation so I had to read.

But anyway, I spent some time struggling with distraction and tried my best to retain some useful information, opened the laptop and shut it down, tried to start and gave up, for times and times again. And finally I finished reading all the literatures and decided to take down the good ideas so that I can comeback and visit whenever I need them. I then changed the structure of the paper; it was based on the literature review, and talked about the underlying theories and current using of telecommunication in the foreign language teaching and learning domain. I was then got the chance to stay in front of the desk and compare different papers, and this really deepened my understanding about what is graduate study life. You just need to read, and think, and write, and research, when you have enough knowledge about a certain field, you’re able to think about ideas to conduct research, and then you find new stuff and develop new theories that could be written into newly published textbooks and then you have contributed to this field.
However, that does not necessarily mean every master’s student should proceed into the doctoral study, does it? I have no idea.

Artifact: Term Reserach Paper: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXF_OPaN9lBEZGN3dnRxY3BfNGQ1bXFjN2N6&hl=en