Category Archives: Reflections
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 [...]
Offering professional learning opportunities in response to teachers’ needs
This is one of my favourite video clips to share with people as they begin to explore using ICTs for learning and teaching Languages (and people who’ve been exploring for a while, too!). One of the messages it really drives home for me is the importance of having a variety of accessible professional learning opportunities [...]
Wordle for November
I generated this Word Cloud at http://www.wordle.net with the tags currently being used in my research database. This does not account for the frequency of use of those tags in the database itself, but rather the frequency of the words in the list of tags as a whole. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry [...]
Fun in/and Learning
I am currently (still!) analysing data collected during fieldwork for this research project. I now have renewed respect for those in the transcription business, and very much wishing I had been more organised during data collection. That would certainly help a lot now when I’m trudging through, categorising and clumping data (I’m sure there’s more [...]