Author: admin
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SITE 2006
Clare, Wendy and I are in Orlando, FL to present on GRAIL at an international conference of the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education, SITE2006. In our symposium on Monday, Clare introduced the background and conceptual framework for the project, and Wendy and I presented our questionnaire paper on students’ understandings of their graduate…
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Deterring spam on my weblog
Recently, I started getting spam on my weblog, and I decided to take some measures to deter their senders while still enabling comments from legitimate commenters. First, I banned the IP address that left 79 unwelcome comments over 2 days on the entry Tagging life goals . Second, I changed my weblog config preferences so…
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Positioning Yourself for a Career in Academia
While GRAIL designers and software engineers met in the lab, I headed off to a workshop for women graduate students and postdocs offered by the Career Centre called Positioning Yourself for a Career in Academia with Kim and Latika. (left to right: Chris Teplovs, Mark Hume, Wendy Freeman & Clare Brett) The workshop was in…
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A Cautionary Tale
Early in my data collection, I conscientiously made backup copies of interview tapes, transcriptions, online discourse text, screen captures, survey responses, etc. Unfortunately, as I continued to collect data over the year, I became somewhat less meticulous about getting all the discourse out of the Knowledge Forum 4.5.3 database. Mostly, it was time consuming. I…
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Working with ideas
Following Clare’s suggestion, I’ve been analyzing data in a less linear, and perhaps more unconventional way. I printed out a week’s worth of whole-group discussion notes in small font, cut them up by note, and grouped them into clusters. Each cluster focuses on a problem or sub-problem that the students identified. My goal was to…
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Reading for Methodology
To guide content analysis of my thesis data, I’ve been reading research articles with increased attention to methodology that the authors used. The article by Barab, Hay & Yamagata-Lynch (2001) on Action-Relevant Episodes (AREs), is a reference I followed up on from a manuscript accepted for publication that a postdoctoral scholar emailed me (thanks Jianwei).…
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Finding and Connecting
Wendy’s thoughts on finding things vs. making connections reminds me of something Earl casually said about graduate students in relation to my thesis research at a research group meeting. At the graduate level, he suggested that students are dealing with not so much with finding new things, but more so with the linking up of…
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Deadlines
I spent about 48 hours writing two conference proceedings papers using Writely. Blood shot eyes, wild hair, articles stacked all over my office. And for a moment there, I thought I couldn’t upload the files onto the conference website! Wendy and I were co-authors on one paper in Writely, and we also gave each other…
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Why Blog?
I had an inauspicious beginning for a blogger. I’m generally quite skeptical about new technologies–simply introducing new technology doesn’t transform educational practice–and I tend to adopt new technologies later than some in my field. Further, I didn’t think blogs afforded a better kind of collaborative online discourse. I think a discourse database like Knowledge Forum…
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Knitting Olympics
P1210001.JPG Originally uploaded by nfujita. I’ve decided to enter the Knitting Olympics. I’m going to complete the lovely rabbit in Joelle Hoverson’s Last-Minute Knitted Gifts in 16 days, casting on on Feb. 10th and completing by Feb. 26th. This project wouldn’t be so challenging if I could just knit, but I have to squeeze in…