reflection
Power of software to bring system to data-chaos
Saturday, April 4th, 2009 | learning, reflection, tools | No Comments
I am in a very interesting place in my research right now. A very frustrating one as well - but mostly wildly exciting. I’m starting to bring together my data and investigate what actually happened - or at least what actually happened according to me, since I subscribe to the view that analysis = story telling (to some extent at least).
So there I’ve been sitting for the last few weeks, attempting to find a loose end in the bundle of data, which I could grab hold of and start unraveling this mess. My problem was that I had too many ends which I was trying to hold in my hands simultaneously - half-formed understandings, hunches, ideas, frustrations, scraps of old feelings about things. Now that’s all good for story-telling, but how about analysis? In my view, the actual analysis part of analysis (the part that’s not story-telling) - is about bringing some system to the data, and making the story transparent enough to be credible.
After tip-toeing around the issue for weeks, I finally decided that maybe, after all, doing some coding wouldn’t be such a bad idea (yes, I know, the thought should have occurred to me much earlier, and it did, but I was frightened of disaggregating my lovely complex picture into little bits of meaningless junk - untill I realised that my complex picture, so far frighteningly resembled meaningless junk itself).
And yesterday I finally found a tool to do it with - on a Mac! I once did an interview with a Masters student for a project I worked on - and she talked about how using one particular tool - Excel instead of only Word - completely changed her outlook on research, data, and even herself. Suddenly she thought in tables instead of extended text and felt more ’scientific’ in her thinking. While we can probably all agree that Excel does not equal scientific approach to anything at all, I had the same feeling yesterday when I finally started coding. I got myself HyperResearch which does the job remarkably well and is easier to use that some of the large CAQDAS systems that run exclusively (!!!) on Windows. With very little fuss it puts at your fingertips the power of categorising text and retrieving the categories in various combinations. It may well lack some of the functionality of the larger packages - such as building large hierarchies of codes and modelling the data - but I am ready to question the usefulness of such ‘quantification’ tools for qualitative research any day. And althugh I’ve not explored the software fully yet and may well come ot miss a BIT more sophisticated functions (a bit of hierarchy is always good to put my head in order) - so far it’s managed to calm down a bit my search for a way to bring some system to the madness that is my understanding of my data.
What happens when you wear your researcher-hat while watching YouTube videos
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | e-learning, education, learning, reflection | No Comments
Once in a while it happens that I find some animation on the web that’s actually relevant to my work. Yes, it does happen - rarely. Well, this is one of those instances and this little cartoon rings many bells and raises many questions about children and computers.I hope you’ve got enough steam to read my thoughts once you’ve watched it.
This little movie raises a number of interesting questions. Firstly, how much of a ‘buddy’ does a laptop become? Here it’s given a human form and a very real presence. While this is obviously a work of fiction it’s maybe not so far off reality where we do become somewhat emotionally attached to our gadgets. (Anybody feels uncomfortable to leave home without the laptop? (I do) Anybody a bit sad to turn off your old phone for the last time having replaced it with a new one? (I did)) Even in it’s boxy state it’s a ‘buddy’. Imagine the attachment once we’ve populated the machine with an ‘intelligent agent’ - this work is being done now and although it might take a few years yet, it’s certainly not a fantasy. (And I’m talking about something more complex and less irritating than the paperclip!)
That raises another question: if the computer is a ‘buddy’, to what extent can it be seen as Vygotsky’s ‘more knowledgeable peer’ rather than just a tool for operating on information? Can ‘loving your computer’ lead to learning? Currently, I’d say it’s unlikely. I love my computer. Even though I don’t imbue it with human qualities (at least not enough to talk to in hushed tones in the library), I definitely and perhaps excessively love my computer. Still, ‘I operate it’ rather than ‘we operate together’. It is to me still a machine which provides me a window upon content created by other humans - a window which I choose to point in various directions.
But this line is shifting: take Stumbleupon. How do you think I found this animation? I didn’t search for it. A community of ‘taggers’ and ’stumblers’ enabled by the internet thew the video my way when I pressed that faithful (and oh so time consuming) Stumble button. Having watched the video it made me wonder, reflect and write this blog post. Now, how is that not a ‘more knowledgeable peer’?
The computer is also presented in the cartoon as an extender of the child’s capabilities - in the sense of ‘distributed cognition‘. In that sense it’s a tool, just as a piece of paper where you can write a memo to yourself - it remembers and displays.
Finally I put myself in the shoes of the principal. Is it right to take the computer away from the kid? Or is there some way to reconcile World of Warcraft with maths? I believe there must be and I don’t think prohibition is the way. Yesterday we talked to some parents at a PTA meeting, some of whom had taken quite a radican stance on regulating computers. At the same time these very parents were aware that this tactic might backfire and cause their children to be obsessed with the machines. Surely the balance must lay elsewhere than in severe restriction of access to computers, but rather in negotiating a reasonable position that the child can agree with and in support of the development of the child’s capabilities to regulate their own use.
There you have it. - As spoken by someone without kids.
How to cook a Jackalope - or teaching grandparents to use the internet
Saturday, January 24th, 2009 | learning, leisure, reflection | 1 Comment
Having been neglecting my web-presence for altogether too long, I’m now back with a tale of (almost) first time computer use. For Christmas I gave my grandad my old laptop, which - although it’s not spring chicken - is a jolly decent machine and was mostly written off because I so wanted a Mac instead. The laptop was freshly installed with a Russian version of Windows XP, Outlook express set up to receive mail from grandad’s email address, virus protection installed (all the while trying to keep my grandma from bursting into the room and ruining the surprise), and the whole thing was wrapped up (more or less) neatly and shoved under the Christmas tree along with another couple of thousand presents (in my family it takes hours to get through the whole heap - although we’re not that many - and the oohs and aahs take up most of the night).
It was not their first computer - in fact they’ve been getting family write-offs for a while, and my grandma is quite attached to her own laptop which she uses exclusively for running a vintage version of MultiLex (a German-Russian dictionary). Grandad was quite fond of his email, but due to the fact that they have a modem connection (!!) and that his old machine would benefit from being upgraded with a hand crank, email was not speedy. Especially for receiving photos or other large-ish files. When he came to my mum’s place this Christmas, he brought the sad remains of the old laptop with him lamenting that a visiting toddler had broken it. I was quite grateful to the little terrorist for putting this piece of by now rather brittle plastic out of it’s misery and removing all discussion about whether it could be somehow revitalised.
In other words, my grandad was quite chuffed when he received my old well-loved (read: scratched and missing a couple of keys) machine on Christmas eve. From then on he was hooked. The fast (ish) internet and a computer that actually computes made for a whole new experience for him. Every morning by the time his lazy granddaughter (i.e. me) would get out of bed, he’d have accumulated a list of questions to be asked and problems to be solved. He would read his email from his surprisingly wide (i.e. existant) list of electronic correspondents (granted, his email was quite extensively fed by my mum forwarding him all sort of silly jokes) and surfing the web.
It was interesting to observe what a person who’d never really been on the web would do with it. Conclusion was - mostly nothing unless you show them something. My grandparents could in the beginning simply not imagine what to do with the web. They knew it’s out there, but had no concrete applications for it in mind - apart from email that it. Instant letters - that’s something that’s easy to grasp. So we started feeding them with ideas of what to use this technology for. I showed grandad that he could get the television programme online (oh, happy days for him and less happy for everybody else, since the tv’s on too much of the time already!!) - that was something useful. Then I set him up with an iGoogle front page to his browser where he could get a daily joke and the BBC news in Russian. News in the Russian-speaking-only community who do not have access to the internet is somewhat a lop-sided affair in that you get a very specific angle on everything. Therefore adding a BBC angle to their access to information was quite exciting.
That’s where the Jackalope comes in to the picture. My mum brought a bit of game from a hunt she’d been to - a hare and a pheasant - and my grandma was charged with preparing the hare for human consumption on New Year’s eve. We also (not so gently) hinted that recipes could be found online. And so it came about that for the next 4 days we talked about nothing but cooking hare (we generally don’t do much but eat in the holidays anyway, but this was a special kind of eating, thus requiring more discussion). Eventually mum and I proposed that if we combined the pheasant and the hare and maybe even found a bit of venison that we’d have excellent jackalope stew to wow the guests. Grandma disagreed because the internet had told her otherwise and besides, she’d like to actually taste every ingredient rather than just mix it all up.
Jackalope being dispensed with, how did the older generation fare on the web? Surprisingly well - it is not difficult to understand the basic affordances of the web: quick access to almost limitless amounts of information on almost anything. But there were also some interesting hickups in their web-exploration. Firstly I’ve discovered that it’s not obvious what ‘the internet’ is. I found myself explaining why the email client was not ‘the internet’, how it was just an application that received information through the web. Also it was necessary to explain what a browser is - in terms of a window through which you can look for stuff on the web, again, not ‘the internet’ itself. All these metafors were proving necessary to better be able to explain how certain things happen (for example I confused grandad by logging on to the web-mail client that goes with his email account - why was his post in multiple places and why did the same content look different??) Also, it’s not obvious how it works - as in: clicking on the blue underlined words takes you somewhere. On first seeing a google search result they did not immediately realise that all those items took them through to different pages each containing some information - they were so interested to find all these snippets of information there to be had, that they didn’t even notice that they were incomplete at first. Once we got past that hurdle and they saw how to get to the full items of information we immediately faced a new challenge.
That’s something the Jackalope experience showed very clearly: that we well-wandered-webbies have some extraordinarily strong filters installed in our heads that permit us to disregard most of the rubbish that we’re presented with on the web. With all the talk of information literacy and information overload, it didn’t really permeate into my brain until I saw what a lack of such filters does to people’s internet experience. I imagine it’s a bit like hearing every single conversation in a crowded room or like hearing all the discrete noises in traffic - it’s a pandemonium of impressions. Once we had entered ‘hare recipe’ into Google and got a set of results, she started from the top and proceeded downwards indiscriminately. She had none of the feel for what a good website might look like and what’s definitely rubbish. Already from the result output I could clearly plot my strategy for which sites I’d visit and which ones I’d avoid. They started from the top left corner. Once we’d learned to click through to the actual web-pages behind Google, the problem repeated itself. Random Russian websites do contain a very large proportion of random Russian sheit. Such is life, and we’re used to it. But someone who reads from the top left corner will have to wade through oceans of it before the actual jackalope recipe appears. Inevitably I had to leave them to it to get their skills through practice after having explained the concept of large quantities of unwanted material surrounding the actually useful information - and introduced them to the scroll wheel.
There the (lengthy - sorry!) story ends. I believe it’s only really by practice and gradual understanding or ‘feel’ for the internet that you can acquire these oh-so-necssary filters of ours and start imagining new uses for the technology. I just have this nagging wish that I’d have video-taped it all - it’s not that often that I come across people who have never seen spam - and who patiently try to understand what the internet is all about despite their first meeting with all the rubbish that it throws at them. We did have hare on New Year’s eve in the end - and quite a few teeth were almost broken on all the lead that was still embedded in it. I still think that Jackalope would have been tastier - but there were no recipies on the web for cooking sucha beast.
Inspirational use of technology
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | reflection, tools | No Comments
I just came upon this in David Pogue’s blog - and just wanted to share an inspirational use of technology with my readers. Here’s something that makes you believe that technology is good for something after all. For something really useful and profound (which probably, to my dismay, by definition excludes StumbleUpon). Here’s a pair of people being really creative and seeking alternative solutions to big problems.
My wife and I discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking about 8 years ago, and have been using it successfully ever since– not for dictation, but as a communication aid. My wife is deaf; her hearing loss began about 25 years ago (we are in our late 60’s) and she has become a skillful lip reader to compensate. That works pretty well in face-to-face communication, but is not helpful in many other situations, such as when we are driving; when I drive, I give her a side view, which isn’t clear enough.
I’ve made brackets to hold a laptop both in our car and motor home. I use a lapel mike to speak; NaturallySpeaking transcribes what I say. She reads what I’m saying, and then responds by voice. When we got this working, it was the first time in 15 years that we could converse on the road. We are now using version 9, having upgraded several times, and based on your report, we will watch for version 11!
Well done!
Working by the bell
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 | education, reflection, school life | No Comments
After a long time without posting, I’m back. I apologise for the long break. I’ve just not had the inspiration to put my thoughts down - admittedly there have been few worthy thoughts lately.
But here’s a nice little parody on teacher life, which although it is hilariously exaggerated, rings some bells (sorry for the bad pun - you’ll see when you watch the video) with what I’ve seen of teacher life so far. Teachers seem to be ruled by the bell. They live by it’s merciless calling and have to drop whatever they are doing when it bids them to. In some schools bells even sound more like alarms than the good old school bell, and make you want to grab your nearest and dearest (computer) and run for your life.
Although the bell can sometimes be a welcome sound to us - both teachers and students - in many circumstances the teacher has to fight against it’s shrill power: raising his voice to be heard while struggling to get students to sit still for an extra minute, rushing through the assignment of homework, hastily thanking the students for their work in the lesson. Then the students are released and joyfully (or less so) skip towards next heavily regulated slice of time. The teacher also has to slip in to the next ‘box’ hastily erasing from his mind what just happened in the former lesson and prepare for what awaits in the next. Are teachers really a kind of computers that can perform equally well no matter how many times a day they have to ‘reboot’? I don’t think so. This instant save-and-load mode of school is not conductive to reflection in teachers OR students! So what do the good teachers do? They run faster. Not an enviable position to be in from where I sit!
And here’s the bit of entertainent that sparked this thought.
I apologise for knowing this..
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | leisure, reflection | No Comments
I read something this morning that prompted me to finally write up my thoughts about why I like being in Oxford. A couple of years ago I decided to do a doctorate here after having done a one year Masters degree, primarily because it would allow me to stay in Oxford, and that was an attractive thought. Since then I’ve been trying to get my head round what it is about this place that makes it so attractive to me. Lately I’ve come to the following conclusion…
What realy puts me at ease here, is the ‘knowledge currency’ which is in use here. Because we are all doing something related to furthering knowledge - our own and the discipline’s - knowledge and learning is what we value and what we ‘deal in’ during various encouters, such as the good old conversation in the pub. Here you can be pretty sure that whoever you happen to meet will have something interesting to say, will be happy to impart their knowledge upon you (sometimes all to eagerly!) and will be interested in what you have to say. Pretty often this exchange will contribute something useful to your own thoughts. Now that’s my idea of having a good time!
This was exactly what I was missing in the circles where I found myself in Denmark. There are many factors playing in to this, my own lack of confidence in my conduct being one. Also, I’m by no means saying that I didn’t meet people who shared the same values - I have a few good friends with whom I can do just that - share ideas and develop myself, them and our ideas in conversation. What I’m talking about is the general background that guides our daily interactions, and today I found a good example of this.
I clicked through to an article in the science part of a major Danish newspaper on my RSS feed - it was about the neurobiological roots of ‘female intuition’. From my layman’s point of view, there was nothing partiularly wrong with the article, except for one sentence. In the very first paragraph the author wrote what sounds to me as an excuse for writing about the topic. In translation, it would be something like this: “Maybe this special female ability is not really special and not really female. It is in fact all about something as dry and boring as neurobiology.” That made me stop and stare: why on earth is a science journalist ‘promoting’ his field as something ‘dry and boring’?? Now, I’m not a neurobiologist, but isn’t it something to do with figuring out how our brain works? The most complex structure known to man? The answer to so many tantalising questions - like life.. and death.. and intelligence? Surely it doesn’t take a genius to promote this field as being something important and exciting!
The answer in my eyes is this: it is not ‘cool’ to be clever, to know something that others don’t and to try and impart this knowledge upon interested others. We all know that it is a problem in certain school cultures where kids dumb themselves down to present the ‘right’, socially acceptable image of themselves. Here it seems to me that entire large layers of society are doing the same. It’s as if we need an excuse to say something interesting - it’s really boring, but..; I don’t know how on earth i came to know this, but.. - we have to somehow acknowledge that our knowledge is nothing special, nothing outstanding, nothing ‘cool’. I doubt that the author of the article thought very carefully about this - it was a throw-away remark. But it’s exactly this throw-away fashion of apologising for our knowledge that makes up this ‘background’ that I used to find so stifling, and that I finally feel free from in Oxford. Here it is acceptable to know something interesting, in fact you are expected to. The problem here is not knowing enough, not being able to participate in the really challenging conversations. But I can live with that.
It’s not a specifically Danish thing either - so I apologise for sounding posh.