Kicking off the lit-review (2.0)

With the summer here, and all of my doctoral coursework behind me, we are firmly in the self-determination area of the game-board.  No external pressures, no external timelines (although there is a statute of limitations on the degree), and interim assignments.  The dissertation proposal is it! That's the next target (which I am hoping to meet by December 2017).

I already have a literature review done, but I was really eclectic in putting it together.  The lit-review (albeit incomplete and in need of some tightening) does present facets of what might be happening underneath it all when it comes to collaboration amongst self-formed groups in open educational experiences, but it doesn't work all that well when providing a grounding for collaboration amongst learners. In other words, I skipped to the chase even though I haven't formally collected data or spoken to other my study participants yet. I am just theorizing from past observations.

In any case, that old lit-review is currently scrapped. It may come in handy later, but I need to focus on the foundational stuff first.  That said, I did a few searches in databases, looking for full-text, peer-reviewed, materials on collaboration in educational contexts. I ended up finding around 200 articles that may be of use (out of several thousand results for my key terms). I also looked for relevant articles on MOOC demographics (to get a sense of who's who in terms of the people involved on the learner side of things in MOOCs).  Finally, I raided my stash of articles that I've been compiling (hoarding for future reading...whenever there is time) since 2011 when I first got involved with MOOCs. This stockpile also contained articles that were of relevance mostly to a previous (dropped) dissertation ideas, but have relevant to the one I am working now.

All things said, I have around 420 peer reviewed articles that look promising, plus 6 or 8 books on collaboration.  That's a lot of reading.  It's also highly likely that I will find stuff in the references section of those articles that I will need to track down because those articles seem of interest.  So, there are two questions that come to mind:

1. Is this overkill?  Now, not all of the articles will prove to be useful and they will go on my reject pile, but even assuming a 20% relevancy of references (80 articles) and a 10% relevancy from those reference's references, that's 588 articles to shift through, which makes for a potentially huge literature review.

2. What is the best way to track your readings (beyond Mendeley, RefWorks, and the like)? Whenever I read there are tons of marginalia, underlined text, and highlighted text. Things that may come in handy later...but may just as well be left on the cutting room floor.  Neither the PDF format, nor the paper format really satisfied me. I feel like I am either putting a ton of work into copy/pasting all of my notes into Google docs but a lot of times I end up using at most 20% (at most 40%)  of that stuff.  It's great note taking, but not sure it is good use of my time.  Then again with articles (especially digital ones!)  I fear that my thoughts in my marginalia are invisible to me because they are simply not collated in one place.

3. (OK I lied, there are 3 things):  How likely is it that I am experiencing academic FOMO with regard to item #2?


I guess rubber meets road this weekend.  I think I'll kick off by re-doing my introduction.  Most introductions I've seen are about twice as long as my draft intro, so it's time to go back, see what I wrote, and provide a little more focus and depth to my intro.  My goal for this time next week: have a new introduction.