Just one more class
I couldn't help myself from signing up for another class this term. Technically I don't need to take any more classes, but by the time one reaches a PhD program, is one really taking classes because she needs to? I think not.
So, what class could I not resist? Video Ethnography! We had our first session on Tuesday, and I am so glad I decided to enroll. I’ve found a room full of people (I think) who want to start with hunches that something interesting is happening rather than with some abstracted research question. To you, this may sound insignificant or even backwards, but I AM SO EXCITED! I would love to start from “hm, that’s interesting” rather than, “I hypothesize that,” and now I’m not alone. Yes, I realize I’ve probably not been alone all along, but that’s not the issue right now.
Curtis LeBaron is teaching the class and visiting at Michigan for I think just this term. Normally, you can find him at BYU.
Taking the video ethnography class allows me to learn a new method, hopefully one that I can use for my own research, and to spend some serious quality time with other qualitative researchers. Especially after two days surrounded by computer scientists, that will be a welcome change. The "scientific method" slide I saw yesterday made me sad. It perpetuates the myths that science is a straightforward endeavor and that there is one best way to go about "doing science." You know better.
Rethinking failure
I took a class taught by Karl Weick during the Fall 2006 term. I can't remember the title of the class, but I know it was MO 700. I'll call it "MO." MO and I were instant friends. The reading list was interesting; the course discussions were, for the most part, thoughtful. And Karl was there. Nikhil Sharma and Jude Yew, the students who recommended MO to me, were absolutely right. Karl Weick is a wonderful instructor who provides amazing amounts of constructive feedback both in discussion and about our papers.
The paper I'm thinking about now was the last one I wrote for the class. I called it something like Collaboratories through a Sensemaking Lens. Writing that paper was a tough task. At that time in the course, we were reading Managing the Unexpected, and I was struggling with the way the book used the word "failure." In the book, "failures" are more like "unexpected events" or "events that don't go as planned" than they are the terribly negative outcomes that come to mind when I hear the word. Sure, some failures in the book are monumental - I'm thinking nuclear reactors behaving badly. Not all failures need to be life-or-death in order to benefit from the characterization Weick and Sutcliffe give them though. Weick and Sutcliffe ask us to think of failures as opportunities to learn and adjust.
It's pretty easy for me to recognize a nuclear reactor melting down as a failure. What's harder is thinking about what would count as a failure in an academic research setting. I've been living by the mantra, "It's all data to me!" Does that mean that I don't have failures? When things don't go according to plan, I see unexpected results in my data. Unexpected data, or data that runs counter to one's hypotheses, certainly provides opportunities to learn. I may even want failures in this sense so that I can easily develop new research topics. Life wouldn't be very interesting if all my hypotheses were correct. I bet I'd get a "great" academic job if that were true though. More on job stuff later.
So why does it matter that Weick, Sutcliffe, and I think about failure differently? Well, for starters, I'm trying to write a paper about collaboratories using the language provided by sensemaking and high reliability literature. In collaboratory world, we're not used to talking about sense or failure or reliability. We talk about coordination, bench science, email, cyberinfrastructure. We might benefit from trying to describe what we see in social studies of collaboratories in the unfamiliar terms of sensemaking and high reliability. I'll give it a shot and let you know how it goes.
Last summer after my field prelim exam, Michael Cohen encouraged me to get in touch with my picky inner critic. He's sure that my inner critic will be more demanding of me than I have been without him/her. For example, my inner critic is likely to make me explain what I mean by "failure" rather than to assume my readers know what I mean. I look at this Collaboratories through a Sensemaking Lens paper as an opportunity to consult my inner critic and to get his/her help in becoming a more careful and precise academic writer.
Poetry in Motion goes to Paris (nope)
UPDATE: Paris in the summer is beyond this grad student's budget. Oh well, at least I got in. Maybe next time.
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I'll be presenting about my Poetry in Motion study at the 5th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in July 2007. You can read the abstract here.
Poetry in Motion is a study around kinetic typography and its use in poetry teaching. My pilot study showed a great deal of promise for animated text helping students get over their initial hesistance to engage with a poem, and I'll be running experiments in the next few weeks to test those preliminary results. Come to Paris next summer (or check back on the blog) for results!
Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience – Class 4/17
Where are we now? (Byrnes and Fox was 1998, what's happened since)
Priti - kids learning grammar; phonological process deficit, some research shows what parts of the brain are involved; example of identifying neural problem, developing a tool that addresses those problems (almost cures 'em)
Value of neuroscience - cost of doing that kind of research may outweigh the benefit; it's not that neuroscience doesn't have any benefits but that it is really expensive and may get at answers that could be found in another method for less; maybe used to justify rather than to figure something out
Discovering errors - cognitive tutors, distributed cognitive systems
Colleen - molded by experience and how that changes you; you're not the same after an experience as you were before you had it
A little history -
learning - how are they changed by what they experience
Post-doc with Ed Hutchins was first work outside the lab
Notes from Bransford’s Talk
John Bransford's Learning Sciences Guest Lecture
Book/research recommendations:
The Mind at Work by Mike Rose
Anders Ericsson (expert performance, experts resist automaticity)
Quality of Life issues -
health care, nutrition, finances, local environmental conditions (research within the LIFE Center)
Themes -
- adaptive expertise - recognizing adaptability (when do my schemas apply?)
- innovation
- efficiency
- schemas (i.e. SAT problem types)
- constructive nature of knowing - we build knowledge out of what we already know
- people knowledge - figure out what we need people to share to identify with and learn from
"Innovation is the sudden cessation of stupidity." (Bransford quoted someone else)
Learning from Others
people learn better from people they know
Thoughts
Research in the LIFE center seems really interesting; I should go explore that area some more to see if there are "informal learning environment" ties or analogies to what I'm working on.
memo about memo
Wrote a memo about the Poetry in Motion study last night; it seems that when you care about your work, it gets a lot harder. I'm frustrated by the secondary activities that are taking my energy, whether it's doing my dishes or writing a backup routine for my laptop. I don't normally have that "not enough time in the day" problem, but lately life's a bit overwhelming.
I still haven't figured out how to manage all my personal information, from class notes to research project data to personal email. One would think that a degree from the School of Info would indicate an ability to manage information, but I must have missed that. Or, maybe I got too much exposure to info management, and now I'm paralyzed by the number of options available. At any rate, I finally came around and got my external storage running properly. Now the data gathering can commence since I'm pretty sure I won't lose it.
Seminar notes 2/6/06
Guests: John Laird (EECS), Chris Quintana (Ed)
John: 7 principles of game design
Games - rules + goal (default goal, not just one you make up; i.e. winning at basketball)
Addictive nature - from intermediate goals; short-term, long-term, overarching goals
Interactivity - concentrate on activity rather than story, character, artwork, etc.
Sidenote: gaming and surgeons; surgeons who played a lot of game (something like Smash Brothers) were better (faster, fewer errors)
Feedback - players need to know what goals they need to achieve, where they are in the goals, etc.
Variety
Limit meaningless repetition - skip parts already seen, goal-oriented repetition OK
Consistency - know what to expect, visible reason for failure
Fairness & balance - no single dominant strategy (rock/paper/scissors)
John's editorial - games don't really teach you anything about the real world; some exceptions
1. training - second-language learning example; game where you have to speak Arabic to achieve goals in the game; inflexibility of the game important in helping you pronounce appropriately
Chris - asks about Schank's case simulation stuff
Note: John's making distinction between training and education, skills vs. concepts
Do games help us learn? Priti and John - maybe games help with component skills (expanding working memory and visual attention) but not domain knowledge development
John - good game design and learning at odds - good games don't allow time for reflection; good games move to new goal quickly
Gender and games - maybe these are design principles for "games for boys"
Jude - maybe role playing's involved some how
LINK: purple moon - games for girls, different goals
Design vs. design research
John - generalization, taking findings from one place and using them elsewhere makes it research
Chris - James Paul Gee's group at Wisconsin
John - 1/10 games makes money; we don't have a science of entertainment (movies, games don't always make money)Priti - John, are you a learning scientist?
John - no, I'm not a learning scientist; interested in how people learn, but it's too difficult in how to understand that; not interested in sociological aspects of learning
Priti - we'd probably claim that's learning sciences research
Qual Methods Class Notes 1/31/06
Interviewing
context: in qualitative methods class, talking about our experiences piloting interviews
choosing recording, transcription, etc. should be methodological - can't really do qualitative coding on interviewing notes; best way for those is transcription from recording
question order - make sure you ask everyone a small set and whatever else you get to
audio recording and transcribing -
navigating community - think about how you present yourself to the interviewee; if you're part of their community, will they leave out some info assuming you already know it?
sensitivity - cultural, genderPoetry in Motion notes
thinking about what i'm trying to do with this study -
physicists - experts think in patterns, same with chess; novices think in surface features
is something analogous true in poetry? experts think in tone, voice, rhythm where novices think in words?
expertise = about levels of analysis, level of engagement, patterns of perception?
some literature on history educaton - critical thinking skills, analysis of evidence, perspective, voice; getting at more than comprehension
am I really asking if poetry readers become expert poetry readers?
K-12? expert readers; Ann Brown reciprocal teaching
from 701 - Bolter's language splits (pictoral, verbal); contrasts visual culture vs. verbal culture - Ekphrasis
unprounceable guy (chksmyhali something), research in 70's about art students' production (problem finders)
{ break }
participant observation
line btw PO and informal interviewing sort of blurred (from readings)
trouble note-taking after the informal interview
contant comparison
ala Glaser and Strauss - constantly comparing methods, results, protocols
For next week
skip transcriber instructions
memo - notes to yourself about future interviews
coded interview - Beth's going to post one coded in Word (probably using comment feature)
build up a code list, think about the coding process (let the data lead you)
Stuff I missed
Atlas TI
Research Methods (LS class)
Guests: Judy Olson, some other guy in a green fleece
Notes about PIM research: Forks poetry faculty
Ann Brown article in learning sciences
Cobb Ed Researcher 2003
Intervention for psych like treatment
Erics question: isnt this like HCI? Barrys answer: yeah, pretty much
Priti: figuring out what counts as a small theory
Barry: how would you test it? falsifiability is key
Frameworks, theories, models
Judy: frameworks are early, say what the variables might be; models and theories are predictable and formal, models more mathematical;
Priti: same in cogsci, models are just more specific
Barry: model of teaching built on theories
Question: how does this fit with 722? Theories inform models, etc.
Priti: for Anderson, ACT-R is the theory
Conjecture
Maybe the why of hypotheses (conjecture: why A leads to B, where A leads to B is your hypothesis)
For Barab the scheme or mechanism of how things are going to relate
Ex. Chis article
Hypothesis: self-explanation improves learning
Conjectures: when and how self-explanation would lead to learning
Question: how do conjecture, model, formalism, coding scheme, design study fit together?
First pass: conjecture and model tell you what aspects you think are important and how they fit together, formalism is boxes for coding scheme that fit that model
Appropriate comparisons not did they learn but would they have learned more in some other way?
Design vs. design-based research
{diagrams on the board}
design-based research has a lot of variables, a lot of interactions, explanations for all of those, iterations on those variables and interactions
design variables but not necessarily explanations of interactions
question: how is design-based research different from other kinds of research?
Answers: iteration, less control over variables (design-based research makes explanations but doesnt necessarily control variables so much as report them)
How DBR is different
More akin to engineering, turn theory and understanding into a difference in the world
Dont just describe the world but perturb it
Question: where do design-based research studies get published, and what do those publications look like?
Answers:
ijCSCL
question is who cares about this topic
Cognitive Science Society emerging learning sciences theme this year (implicit and explicit learning)
Ed Research
Epidemiological get a lot of data, just grab a lot of data (lots of variables) from all over, large statistical methods (public v. parochial)
Small-scale intervention tardy slips, points for detention, reduce class size; small single change and examine what changes occur
History Dewey lost, Benet won (psychological testing, quantifying educational success)
Judy:
Anderson automatic post office study
State transition diagrams about design meeting size of bubble corresponds to total time in discussion
Go research (replicate Chase & Simon chess memory stuff)
Recall orders reconstruct patterns name your family members, play Go or chess, give someone a place to start, regularities in the recall order indicate a tree structure
Acquiring structure of a field
Design-based research in collaboratories go in thinking somethings going to work, try it out, tweak it, then see what happens and iterate
DBR and the field dont have to be in the field to be doing DBR
Barry asks Judy, how do you relate to learning sciences?
Judy: nope, I dont study learning; maybe adoption
Barry: isnt improving group performance a learning task?