Category Archives: Reflections
Fishing for clues vs fishing for answers
I’ve been revisiting a lot of interview data recently in working on my analysis and trying to figure out how all of this will come together. By ‘this’ I refer to THE BIG MAMMOTH OVERWHELMING THING THEY CALL A THESIS but that’s another rant for another day. I conducted these interviews in the second half [...]
The perpetual beta of CALL
I’ve been reading a bit about the hype cycle lately as I’ve been putting together my literature review for my dissertation. And since my research is all about the ‘hype’ and the ‘hyper’ of language learning and teaching with technology (in the middle-school context) it seems only fitting to have a look at the hype [...]
Anytime anywhere learning and anytime anywhere teaching
I went to the Apple University Consortium Mobility Seminar at ECU today and enjoyed the presentation by Stephen Atherton and team in which they gave a good overview of recent going-ons with Apple in higher education. The focus was on mobile learning and in particular the “magical and revolutionary” iPad and associated apps/iTunesU. Links and [...]
Wikipedia as style guide?
I’ve blogged previously (and here privately) about the trouble I’ve been having with citing sources in online writing in terms of style: Whether to use print conventions or hypertext conventions. The benefit of using print conventions, i.e. APA style, is that there is a style guide, and a strict one at that, standard in the [...]
Wordle for June
Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it’s June – I’m still getting used to writing “2010″ instead of “2009″! Below is a Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) generated from the beginning section of my “Methodology/Methods” chapter. As I’ve blogged before, Wordle works by generating a “word cloud” based on the frequency of words in a given text – [...]
The Penelope Syndrome
I was recently reading Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker, rather than actually writing my dissertation, and her discussion of “the Penelope syndrome” made me smile: I have named a more extreme version of this problem [inefficient writing] “the Penelope Syndrome.” Penelope, you probably remember, spent the days of Odysseus’s [...]
My PLN and those “Aha!” moments
Mid-2008, I submitted my research proposal for review and gave a panel presentation about it (nerve-wracking stuff!). In my proposal, I outlined the literature and rationale behind the study, the proposed methodology and methods, ethical considerations, research instruments, intended analysis (and analytical framework), and so on – everything you’d expect to see in a qualitative [...]
Hypertext style conventions
I’m facing the decision of whether to hyperlink to the original source or to my end-text referencing in my online writing. Becky pointed out that hyperlinking to the end text reference means that I’d be following print-text conventions whereas hyperlinking to the original source means following hypertext conventions (although these don’t seem to be written [...]
Exploring Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Download a print friendly(er) version of this essay here When I first pitched the idea to develop my doctoral dissertation as a hypertext in website form, I had no idea that this request would be considered unusual. I also had no idea that it had not been done before at my institution (that we know [...]
Big work, and lots of it
I had this conversation with students from Yarridale Senior High School during a focus group interview and it has really stayed with me: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Penny: So when you think of “ICTs”, what do you think of? What comes to mind? Christy: Computers. Penny: Computers? What else? Alistair: A lot [...]
Recent Comments