Category: My Research

All in all, CSSE/SCÉÉ 2006 at York University was a success! I participated in my first preconference workshop and presented two papers, both of which prompted much-appreciated, helpful feedback from a stunningly high-calibre audience 🙂 The preconference was for the special interest group (SIG), Technology for Teacher Education (TATE). Activity Theory (Engestrom, 1985) provided the…

Shifting my thinking from one paper to another, all based on my dissertation, is somewhat challenging! I’m shifting between ideas that are more cognitive to those that are more teacher education, but they are inevitably intertwined. To help me transition between papers, I read a number of articles relevant to the papers I’m writing this…

Thanks Wendy for referring me to Zoomclouds. I now have 30 tags of all my entries to date on my weblog. Clicking on a semantic cloud tag, e.g. graduate students displays the entries that used the tag: My thoughts on a PhD; Positioning yourself for a career in academia; and Finding and connecting. As a…

Lately, I have been absorbed with coding data in NVivo 7. I’m using different kinds of coding–topical, descriptive, analytical–at different levels of organization (free nodes, tree nodes). Preparing documents to enable auto-coding for topical coding was tedious and took a long time, but I think it is beginning to pay off. In terms of descriptive…

P4140003.JPG Originally uploaded by nfujita. I’m still trying to get my head around tag clouds that Chris suggests I could use instead of Nvivo:) While I read about semantic tagging, social bookmarking, collaborative tagging, etc., I’ve also been making progress on other analyses for my dissertation. The tagging seems to me potentially useful for following…

Chris’ cool visualizations of Knowledge Forum data–my thesis data–are really exciting! The web of interconnections between the notes graphed over time are promising, and tagging and clever use of color might be revealing. Looking forward to more:) Meanwhile, I’m going to play around with NVivo to code the discourse. I’ve used it previously to code…

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…

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…

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).…