voyeurism

the wisdom of Disraeli #2

okie had that follow-up meeting with john today.

it lasted about two hours, during which we basically fumbled and stumbled our way around SPSS.

here's what i learned:
- how to copy and paste tables generated by SPSS into Word
- how to use SPSS's 'recode' function (eg, to recode 'gender' from a text string to a numeric value)
- how to use SPSS's 'select cases' function (eg, to select only those cases from a certain school)

john still needs to check whether the analyses of covariance which we conducted (for the pre- and post-test data) are statistically valid procedures.

in the meantime, i have to run t-tests on the discourse types and output the results as one big table, rather than as many small tables.

the wisdom of Disraeli

have been spending the past three days addressing the issues which john raised during our meeting last week.

over the weekend, i toiled to come up with the chapter which simply describes the results. i'm not sure if 'toiled' is the most appropriate word (on balance i think it is) because the results had been processed around March this year (we're just talking about the results from the pilot study) and all i had to do was to draw a few (actually, nearly a hundred) tables in Word and plonk the data generated by SPSS in. very very tedious work.

today i got john's reaction to my weekend labour, and he thinks (hardly surprisingly) that there are too many tables.

:-P

so i told him that he has to teach me how to consolidate the tables.

an appointment has been made, for later this week.

in the meantime, i have more homework. i have to add additional fields into my FileMaker database to reflect whether or not each of the pupils was successful in the orienteering task. also, i have to add fields to reflect all the discourse types.

thank God the raw discourse-type data from the pilot was tallied earlier this year too. all i have to do is to create the fields and populate them. seems to be a fairly mindless job.

all this number-crunching has been something which i have been putting off for the longest time. i remember that i was one of the few in my class who actually enjoyed the compulsory statistics courses back in England. but that was a long time ago (nearly twenty years, in fact) and i honestly cannot remember much.

on a not-unrelated note, i finally managed to suss out how to export data from FileMaker into SPSS. it turns out i have to use Excel as an intermediary. it's actually quite painless, and it's a relief to see the data from the entire study in an SPSS table, all the better to spin with.

ivy's big day

i'm sitting in my friend and colleague ivy's oral defence right now.

her research was on the effect of the cooperative learning strategy known as Group Investigations might have on learners of different academic abilities.

it is quite an eye-opening experience for me (as i thought it would :-P ).

the last time i was in attendance in anything quite as similar was back at the MIT in '98. that was a very different experience, in many ways. first, today's defence is a real viva, with four members of the viva team seated around a table. it's also a quasi-closed-door session, conducted in a meeting room, with only the viva team being allowed to ask questions (note that the viva team are distinct from the examiners - i didn't know that either :-P ).

wow... as i was typing those words, all the students seated behind were asked to leave the room. ivy too needed to leave.

as for the questions asked by the examiners, they were definitely not beyond what ivy could handle.

looking at her draft copy of her submission, i can see it came up to just over 200 pages.

eeks.

Technorati Tags: viva

first anniversary

had a meeting with john today on the first of the annual progress report which i have to submit, in order that my doctoral candidature might be confirmed.

thank God the draft of the report seems fundamentally sound. the main thing john wanted was to have a chapter purely focussing on the presentation (as opposed to the analysis) of the results of the pilot data (secondary issues included the suggestion to put in more sub-headings).

we also wondered who to invite to sit on the review committee.

gosh, i had no idea there was to be a review committee :-P

evolution

it's been just over fifteen months since i started this blog, as a way of documenting my journey as i progress through my research.

i have found it a very valuable tool for reflection and learning.

back in May last year, i had only a very vague idea what blogs were, and i was not at all convinced that there was merit in them, let alone in starting one of my own - after all, i already have a homepage :-)

it was around that time that MacWorld magazine ran a feature on blogs, and from that i gleaned that the simplest (and most Mac-like) way to start experimenting with one was through iBlog.

iBlog offers a terrific feature set for its price, but today, i am most pleased to announce voyeurism's first major facelift, and it is in association with its move from being authored with iBlog to being both authored with, and hosted by, TypePad.

TypePad was awarded the 'Editor's Choice' by PC Magazine in its December 2003 review of blog hosting services (as well as 'Best of the Year' in the category 'Productivity Software'), and it's easy to see why. TypePad is a service of SixApart, which also produces the critically-reviewed Movable Type publishing platform.

i'm including here a screenshot of the first iteration of voyeurism, for posterity's sake :-)

the practical inquiry model

a theoretical structure which kept being mentioned over and over again in various keynotes and sessions during the recent ICET conference was that of Lipman's 'community of inquiry' framework, within which Garrison et al situate 'social presence', 'teaching presence' and 'cognitive presence'. the latter is defined as the extent to which learners are able to contruct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse. cognitive presence therefore reflects higher-order thinking processes.

"constructing and confirming meaning through sustained reflection and discourse"... sound familiar? it should, because essentially that's the crux of much of what my present research is looking at too.

it was only yesterday, and especially today, that i first realised how useful this structure might be to inform my research data. thanks to Judi Baron's presentation yesterday, on the evaluation of what she termed the 'Mekong e-sim', used in her work at the University of Adelaide, i began to realise that the phases of the practical inquiry model, which (according to Garrison et al) "operationalises" cognitive presence, mirror quite closely what the students were doing during in the field during their Structured Academic Controversy activity - namely, a triggering event, exploration, integration and resolution.

Garrison et al applied this model of practical inquiry to analyse the higher order critical thinking - that is, the cognitive presence - that takes place during computer-mediated communication (CMC). they were looking at asynchronous text-based discourse which results from online conferencing. their basic unit of analysis was the message, though later writers (such as Fahy) make a case for looking at the sub-unit of the sentence. either way, in the case of SMS, message and sentence are more often than not the same :-)

i am very relieved to have been made aware, in His perfect timing, about the work of Garrison and others in this area. it has plugged a real gap in my data analysis :-)

Technorati Tags: cognition, constructivism, discourse, ICET2004, learning, semiotics

EcoRangers® at ICET 2004

over the past two days i have been attending the inaugural International Conference on Educational Technology, here at the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre.

the quality of the papers and panel sessions has generally been very high, and the conference was very well attended. in fact, i met several of my former students (from various cohorts) at the conference - many of them are currently trainees at the NIE.

earlier this morning i had the privilege of conducting a twenty-minute sharing session on EcoRangers®. my paper was one of five on the theme of Emerging Technologies in education. the speaker immediately after my presentation was one of Jason's teachers at Ngee Ann - he shared on some of the wireless initiatives that the campus has been implementing.

Technorati Tags: EcoRangers®, games, ICET2004, technology

an open door

woo hoo :-)

just got the news that for 2005, i will be on half-time secondment to the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, here at the NIE :-)

this will give me the much-needed time to concentrate on my data analysis and get the writing done up :-)

thank God for his mighty provision :-)