okie, just penning this as i rush off to work.
no, i haven't forgotten about this blog, despite appearances.
i've been silent for a month, simply because there haven't been any newsworthy developments in my doctoral journey for a month :-)
but the drought is over, thank God :-)
on the 23rd, during a department sharing, i learned about Structured Academic Controversies as a teaching tool. basically SAC build on the traditional debating format, with the important exception that teams are required to switch sides and try to defend the (formerly) opposing point of view. the final step of SAC is consensus-building.
apparently, SAC is quite a popular teaching method in the States, in Social Studies classrooms. i was very excited to learn about SAC, because that is essentially the format that i had planned to adopt for the research study (with teams of pupils switching sides to defend opposite points of view on issues pertaining to Human Geography), as well as reaching a consensus (what i refer to as the 'composite tableau' in my research proposal.
what's more, i feel that my study will build on SAC because, unlike traditional SAC, the participants will not be co-located. to what extent does the extent of SAC depend on its participants actually engaging face-to-face?
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/classroom/
http://www.cte.duq.edu/resources/onlineresources/structuredcontroversy.html
http://www.eriche.org/publications/reviews/253.html
i had a meeting with John on the 25th. during that meeting, which was punctuated with interruptions (more of which later), John basically suggested that i do a lit review of what boiled down to 'cognitive mapping' - that is, the theory base as to how people make sense of their three-dimensional world from an analysis of a two-dimensional map (and vice-versa). if it sounds suspiciously like map-reading and orienteering, you're absolutely right. cognitive mapping essentially tries to make sense of how our mental maps are different from traditional metric Euclidean maps.
as opposed to more familiar terms such as 'legend' and 'scale', interesting terms associated with cognitive maps are 'naive geography', 'axial lines', 'vista spaces', 'wayfinding', 'locomotional steps', 'routes', 'landmarks', and 'episodic and semantic memory'.
there's not a lot on the web about cognitive maps - most of what i could find are pdfs. if you would like to know more about cognitive maps, please feel free to have a look at the bibliography of my research proposal .
the second thing that John recommended was to try to establish a set of base-line data with which pupil expertise level could subsequently be compared, once they had participated in my study. after much thought, i decided to require the pre- and post-tests to task pupils to draw their mental maps of their neighbourhood. this will enable a comparison of the depth, complexity and accuracy of their drawn maps to be compared.
now to the interruptions. well, there were a few, but the most significant one was when Allan (the dean of CRPP) invited John and i to sit in during a presentation by some colleagues from NTU on a geographic DTD (Document Type Definition) they were developing. they plan to use the DTD as a metastructure for a web portal for geography.
if you're wondering why it took me five days to put these thoughts in this blog, well, if truth be told, i've spent the past three days trying to put my computer in order again after i accidentally erased all my textual documents and presentation files _and_ my mp3 collection, while attempting to install the Developer Preview of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.
it's a reminder to me not to trust technology too much, and that someone else is being gracious to me and providing for me, if only i acknowledge Him.
i've managed to retrieve copies of most of what i had lost.
in something which i cannot ignore, the only text-based file that i did not accidentally erase was the .pdf of my research proposal (even the .doc was erased). that was only because i was prompted (retrospectively, by God) to put the .pdf in a location which i would not normally put it (in this case, on the Finder's desktop).
:-)
