There is a great deal of informed disagreement surrounding the use of information and communications technologies in schools. Often, even well-done research cannot resolve these disagreements. Throughout your career as an educator, you will need to inform yourself about current issues, developments and controversies in the area of educational technology, in order to make wise and defensible decisions. This assignment is intended to prepare you for this part of your job, as well as give you the opportunity to "go deep" into some issue or question that concerns you in your teaching specialty.
In the Position Paper you will define an issue or question, develop an understanding of the various positions that are held on it, and refine your own personal stance. Your paper must:
The paper is to be no more than five pages long, double-spaced, in 12 point Times font. Marks will be deducted for extra pages.
The Draft
Because many people have never been asked to write this type of paper before, they find it difficult to write well on the first try. This is why you are given the opportunity to submit a draft for feedback, well before the final paper comes due. To maximize your change of producing a quality paper, you should make your draft as complete as possible. Many of the marks for the paper are based on how persuasive your argument is, and it is very difficult to judge persuasiveness from an outline alone.
To give you an idea of how important the draft is, and how important it can be to getting a good mark, we provide you with a sample of a draft paper, with feedback. This paper would have earned a C at best, but after the comments and revisions it became an A paper.
Here is another sample paper from a previous semester Adobe Acrobat format for you to review. The grading criteria and weighting have changed somewhat, but you will get the general idea.
References
Your paper must incorporate at least five references as part of the support for your position. At least one of your references should be to an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Other references can include newspaper and magazine article or web sites, though please stay away from fluffy editorial pieces. (If you look hard enough you can find an editorialist ready to support just about any crazy opinion you can think of!) If appropriate to the subject of your paper, you can also reference software that you have reviewed, and/or personal communications with teachers or others who have helped inform your position.
All references should be properly cited in APA format and should have a meaningful place in your argument. (Here is a useful summary of the APA format, with examples.)
Getting Started
Do some background reading and identify an issue that you can use as the focus of your position paper. This is not easy to do, and may take several attempts; so start early and feel free to consult your instructor once you have come up with 2 or 3 possible ideas. The issue you choose must be one which can be discussed from more than one informed perspective. If you pick a very straightforward or one-sided issue, you will have a hard time getting an interesting paper out of it. For example, while "yes/no" issues are tempting (e.g. "should computers be used for mathematics instruction?"), they are often too broad to be dealt with well in the required five pages. Ideally you want a meaty issue with three or four possible positions that have been studied, such as "Why do so few women enter careers in high technology? Should schools try to change this, and if so how could it be done?"
Next, figure out what the major positions are that people hold on your issue. Consider them with an open mind, then choose a position that you think you can personally stand by and defend.
A great place to find authoritative resources on your topic
ERIC
"ERIC is the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), a US federally-funded information system that contains more than one million abstracts of documents and journal articles on education research and practice." You can search ERIC through the SFU library, and get free access to full-text articles from many publications.
Getting to ERIC is easy:
- Go to www.lib.sfu.ca
- Under the "Find" menu, click "Journal articles and databases."
- Choose Education from the subject area pop-up menu.
If you use the EBSCO interface to search ERIC, you can quickly locate articles from peer-reviewed journals by checking the "full text" and "peer reviewed" checkboxes on the search page.
Logistics
Evaluation