Author: admin
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GRAIL v1.0
I’ve been focusing on episodes as building blocks in constructing a particular trajectory of progressive discourse. The various student practices, conceptual understandings, resources, and student-generated artefacts I trace historically in this emergent network of activity are co-constitutive, so it is a challenge for me to keep all the bits logically organized, let alone to tell…
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Theory
What theory is and what it’s good for are things that a lot of students seem to struggle with. When I was a master’s student, I found it intimidating when advanced doctoral students littered their speech with references to arcane theorists I was only beginning to read. I’m afraid I’ve become somewhat like those doctoral…
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Blogging vs. Writing
I’ve been mulling over distinctions that Will Richardson makes between blogging and writing in his chapter on weblog pedagogy and practice (pp. 29ff). He suggests that blogs can facilitate a new form of genre called “connective writing” that encourages bloggers to read carefully and critically, write clearly and cogently, and link to the sources of…
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Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, etc. in schools
I’m about halfway through Will Richardson’s (2006) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and enjoying reading about how educators can use these new tools in creative ways to motivate students to learn more deeply. This book provides some context to Web 2.0 technologies, challenges teachers to reconsider how they think about…
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Statz 4 Life
Another conference proposal done. I still have to set it aside for a while so I can get some distance from it in order to edit and proofread more objectively. Meanwhile, via Klaas is a link to a video that anyone who has taken, taught, or used statistics in their research would enjoy:
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Content analysis & sundry thoughts on writing
Previously, I’ve blogged on interrater reliability and percentage agreement. More recently, my rater and I achieved 87.5% agreement on segmentation of units of analysis, which gave me enough confidence to proceed in asking my rater to code the instances of online discourse data I selected to calculate interrater reliability for my thesis. This is nerve-wracking…
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Impediments to research
Betwixt the hours of three and five in the afternoon, two rather bothersome goblins appear under my desk, impeding my research progress. Witness this latest intrusion: Happy Hallowe’en!
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Norms & knitting blogs
A while back, Torill Mortensen noted that someone needs to write an article on knitting weblogs because there are many good ones out there that share information, create a community, and use photography and other graphics. There is at least one article that I know of on knitting blogs: Wei, C. (2004) Formation of norms…
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Grad school as you always imagined it
Yesterday was a welcome reprieve from my data analysis and writing isolation. I connected with people in this field, both old and new, and doing so reminded me of how I always imagined my graduate school experience would be like. Over the past three years or so, Wendy and I’ve had many insightful conversations about…
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Rater training, percent agreement, & importance of context
Through a cough syrup-induced haze, I saw “23” in an Excel spreadsheet cell and panicked thinking it as the percentage agreement value. I’d been dreading calculating inter-rater reliability between my alternate rater’s and my own coding for practice notes all weekend day today for the fear of just such a result. Such is the anxiety…