Activity 3.1 - Selecting a topic and title

1. Read the Initial conference call  for the H818 conference.
2. Decide on a topic that will form the focus for your H818 activity.
   Remember that this should be a topic which is of interest to an audience at the conference and relates to one of the three themes. It should also hold your interest across several weeks of activity.
   Your selection could be informed by your current work or research interests, or it could be something that you have previously worked on, e.g. as a past assignment which you now wish to spend time developing further or updating.
3. Choose a provisional title that makes clear what the topic and the theme are. This will help you to direct your search and craft the title of your final presentation.
4. Spend up to four hours conducting an online literature search. Include the OU Library and the Ready to Research websites mentioned above.
   Note the sources of information that you can draw on for your topic and recent relevant work that you need to read. You could use the Library Information Literacy (LIL) site which supports learning about activities such as using an Open Access Repository, or finding information on the ‘invisible’ or ‘deep’ web.
   You may find it useful to set up a systematic way of doing this, e.g. using a bibliographic management system.
5. Use your tutor forum, or any other professional networks, to help identify what information people may already know, or assume, about your topic. What might they expect from a presentation with your chosen title?

2. Topic Idea

After some discussion in the tutor group forum, where we discussed the extent to which the project has to be truly 'open', I think I'm going to go with the development of an eILP (electronic Individual Learning Plan) on our Virtual Learning Environment. This is something that I will be doing at work anyway, and it should fit the time frame of H818 quite nicely. We already use ILPs but they are currently paper-based. What I want is something interactive, that links targets to the calendar and where evidence of progress can be uploaded.

3. Provisional Title

Recognising And Recording Progress and Achievement: the development of an electronic Interactive Learning Plan (eILP).

4. Literature Search

I haven't finished this yet but I have made a start. The only problem is, I have given some of them author file names and others title file names. I definitely need to organise them better.