Planning and Panicking

Now we start the important part of planning for the book. This book both scares me but intrigues me. I am the first person to hold my hands up and say that me and books don't have the best relationship but it will be good for me to really push myself outside my comfort zone and try to learn and progress in this field. Being a good academic writer and being able to accurately look for information is a huge skill and one I would love to have. Hopefully after a few weeks of these tasks I will feel more comfortable and ready to take on the different tasks associated with this part of the module.

What I found really helpful was the library session with Lindsay Dowling. There was a lot of information given and I will have to rewatch a few times to fully grasp all the things the library and online sources can do but as I move on with my learning I feel it will make more sense and I will become a pro at all the sources online. Also the 'cheat sheet' provided was really handy to get to different things easier and faster. It was great to be shown the online reading sources available to us as well as how to check if the college library has a book available for loan.  Lindsay gave us a run through on Refworks and how to use the site to accurately reference your work (Harvard Style) as well as showed us annotated bibliographies. This is a section I will be rewatching to make sure I fully grasp the extent of it. Also we were introduced to the Matrix system. As it currently stands this scares me but I think I am making it more complicated then it needs to be. It's a good method to keep the reading findings we gather together and to be able to go back and look at all the information we have been gathering. I will need to brush up on how to properly use this system. It was a really helpful exercise and for all the information that was given it was still kept interesting and useful which was a major benefit for my wondering mind.

Moving forward from this planning session I narrowed down my ideas for a book chapter. I decided to go with The evolution/ history of gamified learning - When did gamified learning start/ gain popularity?. I found this topic quite interesting as its not something I am entirely sure about and it is something I want to learn more on. Im someone who can struggle with conventional learning methods and I think diving deeper into this could be beneficial for me and also really interesting to see the evolution and where this topic is going. I looked at individual words I could take further with my searches. Some including;

1. Gamified Learning

2. Education

3. Gamification 

4. eLearning

5. Classroom

6. Progress

7. Future

Going further I will touch base with my other topic teammates and begin to dive into research for this topic while discussing my findings with them. I think this will be an interesting collaborative project as much as its an individual chapter. This week was very much getting used to the tools and what has to happen to progress and trying not to panic!