Introduction:
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we started off by looking at how to define and test a research topic. This was almost an extension of last week’s lecture as we went over certain sections again as a reminder. My lecturer began by explaining to us what makes a good piece of descriptive writing and critical writing, outlining the differences between them both. He advised us to treat critical thinking like a criminal investigation, where we would be required to:
- Investigate the problem thoroughly
- Prosecute and defend the ideas
- Cross-examine the witness (literature)
- Sum up and consider the theory
Afterward, our lecturer went through the FMP thesis proposal draft literature review assignment brief, where we were required to write a draft literature review, along with the bibliography and blog link, for our chosen topic. This was due four weeks from now, on the 17th March 2022. Even though this assignment weighed 0%, meaning it has no effect on our overall grade, it was a great opportunity to gain critical feedback which we could implement into the final version of our literature review. Our lecturer then introduced us to four key academic resources that we could use to help us come up with a research topic. We looked through each of them briefly From our first glance, these sources seem incredibly useful as they all provide many great examples of research topics related to animation to use as inspiration. I’ll surely be using these to finalise what topic I would like to conduct research into. Lastly, our lecturer gave us a quick recap of this week’s lecture, highlighting the key points when defining a research topic, structuring a literature review, and creating a literature review outline.
This Week’s Task:
Towards the end of our lecture, our lecturer provided us with a task to find and list at least two relevant sources to our topic, and write down our key insights and how each source contributes to the existing pool of knowledge on its subject. We were also asked to explore how our sources challenge and contract each other and where they agree or expand upon each other.