voyeurism

God's grace :-) #2

WOW.

today, i received the wonderful news that my funding application has been approved _in_it's_entirety_ :-)

woohoo!

the two-month wait has certainly been worth it :-)

the second piece of excellent news is that i am able to today welcome the first school which has agreed to take part in my study - it's Christ Church Secondary School, a mission school in Woodlands.

i would like to put on record my sincere appreciation and gratitude to its Principal - Mr Ang Chee Seng.

i am especially grateful because he and his Vice-Principal made the decision to commit within only a few hours of my extending the invitation to them.

:-)

a clearer focus, while yet fuzzy

after a two-and-a-half-month hiatus, i had my second meeting with my supervisor today.

the meeting lasted just under two hours, and several matters were discussed.

first, we decided that a suitable sample size would be about sixty to eighty pupils.

second, the teams should preferably be of the same gender, especially considering that the intervention is to do with spatial cognition.

third, the final paper should not be longer than 220 pages in length :-P

fourth, after some discussion we decided to split the single task of the intervention into two separate tasks, in order for the pupils to be able to better concentrate on what they were required to do.

so, for the first task, the teams can just concentrate on guiding each other along a pre-determined route (without the baggage of having to adopt multiple perspectives). additionally, the task would require pupils to construct a pictorial representation of the land-use of the route, once they were back in school. both such representations, in turn, would subsequently be amalgamated, through peer negotiation, into one.

for the second task, pupils would more or less mirror the N-Gage task, except for real (without the baggage of having to follow a pre-determined route). in other words, two teams, each comprising two pairs of pupils, would be tasked to explore a given neighbourhood in a specified time period, with the end of gathering pictorial evidence to support non-congruent perspectives. Pupils would then engage in a Structured Academic Controversy, preferably while still in the field, in order to add more value to the existing body of research on SAC.

i'm supposed to have the first couple of chapters ready by mid-December, and to share with the two of them what i have in a fortnight's time.

by the way, i don't think it's a coincidence that it was _also_ today that i found out the name of the person who designed the tests of spatial intelligence i mentioned in my earlier entry 'Escher and friends' - Gaughran wrote me and told me her name is Andrea Meares.

she's apparently been able to maintain a high premium on her privacy - even though i now know her name, i _still_ cannot find anything about her on the web :-P

En garde! :-P

had a meeting with Jason yesterday.

he called the meeting because he felt that his Terms of Reference (which need to be submitted imminently) were still not very well sorted.

one of the things he suggested was for him to write what he termed a 'Multimedia Management System', which would essentially facilitate easy sorting on my part, of the various messages which would be accumulated over time. i thought this was a good idea, if it could indeed be carried out. We were concerned about the tight time frame (considering that i would like to finish beta testing by January), until we realised that this Management System need not be put in place till later in 2004. this meant that Jason could concentrate on developing the other applications first.

another insight i had recently was that since the p800 (and now the p900) both have browsers which can read html, there is really no need for him to code in wml if he does not wish to.

but the most exciting idea of yesterday was this:

we were idly exploring ideas on how to make the game task more challenging, in terms of its programming. i concede that simple quizzes are relatively easy to program. so i casually asked him if there were such things as multi-player games for the phone. in reply, he said, half in jest i suspect, "not unless we use N-Gage".

it did not take me long to realise that this was actually a very good idea.

the Nokia N-Gage is the first phone to truly support multi-player collaborative interaction in real-time. given especially the emphasis that my boss and many of my colleagues place a premium on technologies which support collaborative learning, and the fact that if we could pull this off, it would be quite a feather in Jason's cap.

i won't elaborate further at this point of time, in order to be fair to Jason and his intellectual property. suffice to say that the N-Gage will not replace the Sony Ericssons, as the former will be used only in the pre- and post-tests, whereas the latter will continue to be used (by dint of their superior imaging / recording / playback and storage capabilities) during the actual intervention in the field. in this way, we maximimally tap the affordances of each piece of technology.

:-)

Ericsson Developer Day

jason and i attended the Ericsson Developer Day at the Comcentre today.

unlike last year's event, which focussed on the UIQ framework, which sits atop the Symbian OS, this year emphasised Parlay (which i still don't really understand), and also showcased Borland's suite of IDE for Java and for Symbian.

had a sneak peek (and play) at the Z600 :-)

and the food was good too :-P

God's grace :-)

Got the news today that my boss's request to extend my secondment from the Ministry to my present place of work has been approved, and doubled in duration (till December 2005)!

This means that during the crucial years of my doctoral studies, i will be able to continue my service with the National Institute of Education, without the possible distraction of a change in posting.

Today, i also collected my Student Card! Yay, i'm a student again :-)