Coping with mountains of material!

As mentioned in my previous post, there is so much literature available on my topic that knowing when to stop reading is a real challenge. Interestingly, researchers such as Kukulska-Hulme & Shield (2008) have commented that there is a lack of research in some areas of mobile learning. Going by the results of my initial searches via google scholar (see below) this does not however seem to be the case:

Search Term	Results	Results (since 2012)
technology enhanced learning	1,130,000	23,500
computer assisted language learning	312,000	23,500
computer assisted language learning + vocabulary	49,200	4,240
mobile learning	2,150,000	42,800
mobile assisted language learning	81,000	10,200
mobile assisted language learning + vocabulary	18,400	1,800
mobile assisted language learning + vocabulary + sms	1,250	180

 
Figure 1: google scholar search results - as of 1 December 2012.


The results returned by google scholar are however not just academic papers. It also includes presentations available online, websites, theses, books and abstracts. Interestingly enough, although "technology enhanced learning" is consider by many to be the generic term for any kind of learning using technology and mobile learning is a subset of this, more results are returned for mobile learning than for technology enhanced learning. Becoming more specific, the search term "computer assisted language learning" returned 312,000 results, whereas,as expected, the newer, more specialised area, "mobile assisted language learning" returned only 81,000 results. Adding "vocabulary" as an additional search term returns a more manageable total of 18,400 results with 1,800 from 2012. Becoming even more specific, adding "sms" as another additional term returns only 1,250 results in total and only 180 for 2012. This is a much more manageable amount but it would still not be possible to read all of them. This is where the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff, as discussed in my last post, really begins.

Turning to the academic databases available through the Napier library, the ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) database returns only 68 results for "mobile assisted language learning" and only thirteen with the additional term "vocabulary". Adding the final search expression used above "sms" brings the results down to only two! The British Education Index database returned a similar amount of results, only 36 for "mobile assisted language learning" which goes down to only 8 with the addition of the search term "vocabulary". When "sms" is added as a final search term there are again only two results!

This huge discrepancy between the results returned by google scholar and by these two educational databases leads me to wonder exactly where to start. The huge amount of results returned by google are definitely somewhat overwhelming whereas the results from ERIC and the British Education Index are definitely underwhelming. I think my technique of combining both sets of resources is probably the best approach. There are so many interesting pieces of research appearing everyday (handily emailed straight to me by a google scholar alert) that a literature review could definitely go on forever. Self-control seems to be the most important skill to have in coping with mountains of material!

Sources.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Shield,L. (2008). An overview of mobile assisted language learning:
From content delivery to supported collaboration and interaction. ReCALL, 20(3), pp. 271–289.