Rebecca's Research Blog

Here we are at Anesa’s presentation at CAL, and Gill and I are sitting side by side, blogging her presentation, which is going well. See Gill’s blog here http://conclave.open.ac.uk/acablog/

She’s got her newly revised presentation up on screen, and she’s using the script as discussed at 1am last night!

People are paying attention – all the laptops are being used to write about her presentation – I can’t see any email reading going on.

Ooh, there I am on screen. I’m fed up with this clip of me trying out black box probability software. I seem to do the weidest things with my mouse.

Someone asked about visiting the participants yourself. He seems very keen on doing this. But, as Anesa says, it’s going to be difficult to visit 36 students spread all over the country and maybe all over the world.
Someone else asked about stimulated recall – asking students to watch the videos and to comment on them as an alternative to the think-aloud protocol.
The chair asked about the experience of not wanting to get in the way, but wanting to get as much information as possible.

https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/r.m.ferguson/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/gillc.jpg
Hey, I’m blogging Gill while she’s giving her talk. It was a tad complicated getting my laptop to take the photo, then getting it cropped and here via iphoto, but it does work.
Gill’s talking about ehr data analysis, and she’s got some images up that were taken with the pda. They come up very well on screen, particularly the lower one which has become quite Monet-esque.
Lots of people in the session taking notes. Those with laptops have them closed except for a couple of people – but they seem to be concentrating on the talk even so, so I reckon it’s going pretty well. Gill has got the room with her – they all laughed together at ‘The Mushroom Challenge’.
I think it’s distracting for Gill to have her talk up on a computer screen in front of her, because she looks at it a lot, which she wouldn’t if it were on the screen behind her. It’s also keeping her in one place, she’s always by the computer terminal, whereas I think otherwise she’d move around more. When she’s not looking at the screen she Gill is using arm gestures, and I think this sort of expression works well in a talk, because it seems more naturalistic and it keeps you talking at normal talking speed rather than speeding up as you are tempted to do in a talk.
Phebe asked if anything would motivate participants. Money? Chocolate biscuits? Gill thinks a deeper engagement with the subject matter.
What would your top tip be? Don’t use Caerus! Quitte frustrating to make the trail with Caerus. Creatascape might be a better option.
Smiling at the audience and laughing along with the audience obviously works well.

I’ve finished one entire interview!

Epistolary interviews do take a long time – this one took three and a half weeks, but there’s lots of very good and thoughtful data coming in, so I’m happy about that.

Must sort out my data collection in a bit more detail, though. I have several groups in which all the students have agreed to be archived, and a few where all the students and one tutor have agreed, but only one group where everyone has signed up. I’m going to chase seven groups and hope I get a few extra responses.

I also need to decide exactly who I’m going to interview and how and start getting in touch with absolutely everyone. Oh, and I need to contact the course manager to sort out more about archiving.

Hmm. This bit of code from Flickr doesn’t seem to work in my blog (my attempt with YouTube didn’t work either). However, it does work nicely on my website http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.m.ferguson/index.cfm

Karen Susan Littleton

University of York 1991

The representation of depth in children’s drawings

Denise Mary Whitelock

Institute of Education 1990

Commonsense understanding of causes of motion

I’ve been off for a week with flu, and I’m really up against the deadlines. So, what do I spend an hour or so doing? Shifting furniture around the office with Gill and Anesa. We’ve now got a very airy office with a large ‘junk’ corner. And my conference paper is still nowhere.

I’ve started my epistolary interviews. I have two tutor groups on which all the students and at least one tutor have agreed to me archiving their FirstClass conference, so I’m now interviewing all members of those groups who agreed to an epistolary interview. I got my first response in less than an hour, and I now have two responses. Hoorah!

Just been to http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/rssjnllist.html and I’ve set up RSS feeds for all the jornals I receive Zetoc alerts for. A lot of them have no items in their feed but some (eg JCAL) have a list of all the articles in the current issue and you can click to get authors, and then drill down to more information.

My grasp of probability is rudimentary (as Anesa knows), but I knew it was going to be tough to get a group of 5-8 students all to consent to have their data archived, when I was contacting 634 students divided into 110 groups. Despite a response rate of about 33% yesterday, I hadn’t managed it – but today members of one of the smaller groups have all consented. Hooray!

Of course, now I have to get their two tutors to agree – but I’m moving in the right direction.

My computer is full of tools for planning the structure of my academic article. I’ve tried it in different Word modes. I’ve tried it on Powerpoint slides. I’ve (halfheartedly) used some concept mapping software. So why is the current plan currently scribbled on the back of a large envelope?