Posts
Automated bank statement filing with Hazel
13 years ago
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Prezi
I came across an alternative to PowerPoint that I wanted to share here. It's called prezi and it has an interesting non-linear format so that you may create presentations that begin with a large idea and move through components of that idea in various ways. I've tried it out just a bit, but I really like it. Click on this link to see tutorials on how to use prezi and some examples (at the bottom) of what the presentations look like.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Blogs for teaching and learning
I have the quarter off from teaching this course, so things have been a little slow. However, I am in a class right now (EPL 823) on issues in technology and education. This week, we are to present a Web 2.0 technology and discuss it's issues to teaching and learning. I chose blogging, in particular blogger, since that's what I'm using for this blog. And I chose to post it here because I think it has some relevance to this course.
1) First, a definition: Blog is short for weblog and is essentially an online journal. There are many free, formulaic blog applications (blogger, wordpress, livejournal, etc.) that make blogging today simple for anyone who wants to put content on the web in this form (no HTML experience needed). The tools are simple... sign up, fill in your profile information, click "new post" and start entering text, links, photos, videos, etc. If you want to get fancy, all of the blog applications have various widgets that can be added to your site (like a blogroll, tag cloud, news feed, etc.).
2) Issues related to using blogs in teaching and learning?
Good "issues"-
For the most part, blogs can allow students to display work for a large interactive audience. Blogs can have multiple authors, so it could be used as a collaborative space among students on a project or to discuss their understanding of some concept over time. The public nature drives motivation because the content is no longer limited to a teacher and because they also have the opportunity to get feedback from others interested in their content. Blogging also has the potential to allow students and teachers to reflect on learning, identity, society, etc. and participate in a community of practice. This could lend itself to transferring formal learning to more authentic informal learning or vice versa (if a student had a blog at home to begin with). Teachers could also use blogs as a class website, pointing students to resources, summarizing lectures, sending out timely reminders about homework, creating dialogue with students about the content or the management of the class, etc.
Bad issues-
The main negative within teaching and learning for blogs is the very issue that is a positive, the public nature. Blogs can elicit feedback, but it can also elicit unwanted contact or attention. For young students this is dangerous (though I am skeptical about the odds of this happening) and for teachers it could be career damaging depending on how reflective/honest a teacher is about their practice or feedback to other students. This moves "teacher talk" from the lounge and private comments written in red ink on paper to a persistent, searchable and copyable (to use danah boyd's terms) world. The same could be said for students, who are still forming their identity, and may regret their words years later.
3) As it relates to qualitative research-
Since this blog is on a qualitative research, a method where much learning takes place, I thing blogs are also a useful tool in this arena. A blog could be a space to document field notes, maintain a reflective journal, or dialogue with participants about issues related to research. Depending on the nature of the project, a blog could be kept private or it could be used as a means of member checking or as a way to have others in your field offer up opinions as the work occurs. Since blogs are intended to be used regularly, this could be a motivation to stay on top of data analysis and reflection as it happens rather than putting it off only to try weeks or months later to recall what exactly your thoughts were that day.
1) First, a definition: Blog is short for weblog and is essentially an online journal. There are many free, formulaic blog applications (blogger, wordpress, livejournal, etc.) that make blogging today simple for anyone who wants to put content on the web in this form (no HTML experience needed). The tools are simple... sign up, fill in your profile information, click "new post" and start entering text, links, photos, videos, etc. If you want to get fancy, all of the blog applications have various widgets that can be added to your site (like a blogroll, tag cloud, news feed, etc.).
2) Issues related to using blogs in teaching and learning?
Good "issues"-
For the most part, blogs can allow students to display work for a large interactive audience. Blogs can have multiple authors, so it could be used as a collaborative space among students on a project or to discuss their understanding of some concept over time. The public nature drives motivation because the content is no longer limited to a teacher and because they also have the opportunity to get feedback from others interested in their content. Blogging also has the potential to allow students and teachers to reflect on learning, identity, society, etc. and participate in a community of practice. This could lend itself to transferring formal learning to more authentic informal learning or vice versa (if a student had a blog at home to begin with). Teachers could also use blogs as a class website, pointing students to resources, summarizing lectures, sending out timely reminders about homework, creating dialogue with students about the content or the management of the class, etc.
Bad issues-
The main negative within teaching and learning for blogs is the very issue that is a positive, the public nature. Blogs can elicit feedback, but it can also elicit unwanted contact or attention. For young students this is dangerous (though I am skeptical about the odds of this happening) and for teachers it could be career damaging depending on how reflective/honest a teacher is about their practice or feedback to other students. This moves "teacher talk" from the lounge and private comments written in red ink on paper to a persistent, searchable and copyable (to use danah boyd's terms) world. The same could be said for students, who are still forming their identity, and may regret their words years later.
3) As it relates to qualitative research-
Since this blog is on a qualitative research, a method where much learning takes place, I thing blogs are also a useful tool in this arena. A blog could be a space to document field notes, maintain a reflective journal, or dialogue with participants about issues related to research. Depending on the nature of the project, a blog could be kept private or it could be used as a means of member checking or as a way to have others in your field offer up opinions as the work occurs. Since blogs are intended to be used regularly, this could be a motivation to stay on top of data analysis and reflection as it happens rather than putting it off only to try weeks or months later to recall what exactly your thoughts were that day.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Another Word Cloud Creator
I found another tag/word cloud creator. This one is called wordle.net and I like it because each time the cloud has a different look. Here are two that I got after hitting "randomize" (using the same interview).
Plus a benefit of this one is that you can just copy and paste text, so you don't need to save your word doc as .txt.
Plus a benefit of this one is that you can just copy and paste text, so you don't need to save your word doc as .txt.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Another Tag Cloud
I wanted to try another tag cloud with my own real data to see what happened, so here it is. Very interesting indeed.
able (7) ah (23) anything (6) anyways (7) attention (5) based (5) basically (6) beginning (5) book (5) city (9) class (15) classroom (13) computer (13) control (5) couple (9) course (5) critical (4) critique (7) days (5) demo (13) design (16) develop (5) different (8) download (5) enough (4) everything (5) forget (7) free (7) games (45) getting (7) give (7) going (22) gotta (5) grad (4) hear (5) helps (4) historical (7) history (23) interested (11) issue (6) kids (26) laughs (9) learning (18) lesson (4) link (6) lot (10) major (6) making (4) mind (4) model (5) name (5) oh (7) okay (8) paper (5) parents (5) particular (6) past (6) paying (5) people (16) period (4) playing (14) point (5) political (4) project (4) read (9) real (6) really (21) research (5) resources (6) roman (6) rome (8) saying (5) school (21) simulation (25) someone (5) something (11) sort (25) sources (9) start (6) students (10) study (4) sure (7) systems (5) table (5) talking (7) taught (5) teach (9) teacher (5) things (33) think (37) total (8) uh (42) um (69) usually (4) video (10) war (8) ways (4) working (10) yeah (28) years (5)
created at TagCrowd.com
Friday, April 3, 2009
Tag Clouds
In my new qualitative research class tonight, the topic of tag clouds (for some nice examples, see this wikipedia article) came up as a means of visualizing qualitative research data. I hadn't thought about using them in this way, but I can most definitely see their usefulness. I searched google and found a program free online called TagCrowd that is easy to use and generates nice-looking tag clouds. You can either import a plain text document (of say an interview or observation) or you can point it to a website (like a blog or a wiki) and it then takes the most frequently used words (ignoring common words like "the" and "of") and makes a tag cloud showing the which words were used more frequently by corresponding text size. It also give you the html code of the cloud so that you can add your tag cloud to your web site (which I have done below on a practice interview about learning to read) or you could just take a screenshot and add it to a word doc or leave it as is to save locally. There are a few other features such as being able to rearrange the words in the cloud which seem handy as well. This may be a good way to get over the hump and start finding codes.
able actual ah anything bible books chair children church dad describe else er experience front golden help home house laughs learning living looking lot memories mom music okay pause piano pictures play preschool process read really remember room specific stories sure teacher think uh um understanding used voice whatever yeah
created at TagCrowd.com
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Thinkful and Uses for Digital Data in Research
I have come across a new resource called Thinkful. I found out about it through the AERA listserv. Here's the email I received explaining what it is:
Hello fellow grad students,
My name is June Ahn and I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California. I've been working on a personal project called thinkful.info (www.thinkful.info) to help me find new articles and books on my research interests. The website takes your keywords, and once a week searches hundreds of top academic journals and Amazon. You get a weekly email of the latest research and books that might be relevant to your areas of interest.... hopefully it will be a simple way to keep abreast of the latest work that is being published, which I find to be one challenge of academia.
I thought that this seemed relevant to our digital tools class, so I wanted to post it here. In addition, as I was reading an article for my social foundations course this week, I was directed to this website: http://www.talkinglongterm.co.uk/database/index.php
It, too, seemed relevant to this course as it shows how digital data can be used as part of a research project (in this case narrative accounts of people's experiences with health care). This is an excerpt from the site:
"The need to place first hand accounts of peoples’ experiences of health and social care at the centre of practice development, research, education and training agendas is widely acknowledged. Narrative interviews attempt to create a space where people can tell their stories as they wish with a minimum of direction. New digital multi-media technologies now provide a powerful way to capture both audio and visual histories, and permits users to search through material relevant to their own interests easily and quickly."
Maybe this is an area where digital data will be relevant (rather than in hypertext dissertations). Thoughts?
Hello fellow grad students,
My name is June Ahn and I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California. I've been working on a personal project called thinkful.info (www.thinkful.info) to help me find new articles and books on my research interests. The website takes your keywords, and once a week searches hundreds of top academic journals and Amazon. You get a weekly email of the latest research and books that might be relevant to your areas of interest.... hopefully it will be a simple way to keep abreast of the latest work that is being published, which I find to be one challenge of academia.
I thought that this seemed relevant to our digital tools class, so I wanted to post it here. In addition, as I was reading an article for my social foundations course this week, I was directed to this website: http://www.talkinglongterm.co.uk/database/index.php
It, too, seemed relevant to this course as it shows how digital data can be used as part of a research project (in this case narrative accounts of people's experiences with health care). This is an excerpt from the site:
"The need to place first hand accounts of peoples’ experiences of health and social care at the centre of practice development, research, education and training agendas is widely acknowledged. Narrative interviews attempt to create a space where people can tell their stories as they wish with a minimum of direction. New digital multi-media technologies now provide a powerful way to capture both audio and visual histories, and permits users to search through material relevant to their own interests easily and quickly."
Maybe this is an area where digital data will be relevant (rather than in hypertext dissertations). Thoughts?
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Online Surveys
If you are conducting interviews or survey in your qualitative research, you may want to consider using the many (and free) survey tools available. I am familiar with surveymonkey, which is simple to use and includes analytic tools, but if you have the free version, you are limited to ten questions. If you search google for "free online surveys" there are many more to explore! Please let me know if you have found any that are useful in qualitative research.
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