Author: admin
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Seeing the forest AND the trees
In the past year or so, I’ve been intensely focused on analyzing my online discourse data. At first, to be honest, I could barely stand to look at it. Once I did get some detachment from the data, I really immersed myself in it. I conducted in-depth content analyses, trained an alternate coder, and calculated…
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Teachers in Facebook
What do you do when a student invites you to join a social networking site like Facebook? This happened to me recently. A former preservice student “tagged” me in one of these sites, and I received an email notification urging me to join: “Please respond or [student’s name] may think you said no :(” I…
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AERA 2007 – Part 2
Well, they sure don’t call Chicago “The Windy City” for nothing! The following snapshots (taken after my presentation on Friday) really are deceptive. We only had a couple of sunny days during AERA. This is the view from the hotel where Wendy and I stayed. Fans of Wilco’s (2001) album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will recognize…
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AERA 2007 – Part 1
Wendy, Hedieh and I from the Clare’s research group are in Chicago this week to present our papers and attend inspiring sessions. There are about 14,000 people registered for this conference, so it is a little overwhelming, to put it lightly. There are so many great sessions going on concurrently at various hotels! The three…
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Social Network Applet
I’ve been busy writing, but recently played around with the Social Network Applet in Knowledge Forum that I blogged about in August 2006. Paul, one of the KF programmers who created this java applet, sent me documentation on the different functionality and helped explain some questions I had. I still have much to learn about…
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Research group meeting in KITL
It’s been snowing steadily all day here, so I decided to attend today’s research group meeting virtually. Scott wanted to troubleshoot Macromedia Breeze in the Knowledge Innovation and Technology Lab (KITL) today, which worked pretty well. Four of us–Celynn, Julie, Gerald, and I–from various locations throughout Ontario connected by video online to the rest of…
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A process filled with doubt
While waiting for my committee members’ feedback on a particular analysis, I’ve been working on another thesis chapter. In retrospect, I realize I could have written up this section on the first iteration of my design research study long ago. Those preliminary analyses actually were on the right track and do logically lead to the…
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Gaming as designed experiences
I saw the first part of a documentary called Gamer Revolution on CBC last night. I haven’t delved too far into the educational application of videogames, but this documentary did make a compelling case for the digital technologies that make it possible now to construct, investigate, and interrogate virtual worlds that are increasingly becoming a…
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Fly too high, pay the price
One characteristic that many graduate students have, and people tend to use to describe me, is compulsiveness. I’m often compelled to delve deep into the literature, analyze data, or write on regardless of the rationality of the motivation. This characteristic is not constrained to academic work. Rather, it infects other arenas of my life. For…
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More on Activity Theory
While I waited for some feedback from Clare and Wendy on an episode of progressive discourse that I had drafted up (thank you), I finally got around to writing about Activity Theory. I’ve blogged about Activity Theory before, and I’ve been meaning to write up a section for my thesis since at least mid-November. It…