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Qualitative Research – Week 10 – Group Meeting

Met with Ana and James at the Starbucks in down town Palo Alto to talk about our propositions and main hypothesis of what we observed in terms of Tech Adoption and iHub.

Here are some of the updates:

Abstract (Ana):

Problem statement:

  • How do third party organizations facilitate productive technology adoption practices between schools and education technology companies?
  • How does iHub facilitate education technology innovation?
  • How does iHub facilitate collaboration between educators and entrepreneurs to promote education technology innovation?

Propositions:

  1. (Lucas): iHub’s activities revolve mainly around teachers
    1. iHub’s emphasis is on supporting teachers
    2. iHub focuses mainly on supporting teachers
    3. iHub primarily focuses on supporting teachers more so than other stakeholders
    4. iHub focuses on supporting teachers rather than entrepreneurs
  2. (James): Having a focus on teachers grants organizations access into schools
    1. Fostering relationships with teachers facilitates technology innovation
    2. iHub’s relationships with teachers facilitate startups’ access to schools
    3. iHub’s relationships with teachers grant startups classroom access
  3. (Ana): iHub feels they have to do more than #1 and #2 room for improvement

 

Context (Lucas):

  • What are SVEF and iHub?

Methods (James):

  • No literature review/research of topic
  • 1-hour observation
  • Field notes
  • Interview guide peer-reviewed by classmates
  • Two 1-hour interviews
    • Together with observation = methodology triangulation
  • Transcriptions
  • Coding and propositions

Limitations (Lucas):

  • Interview and observations had little correlation
  • Limited previous knowledge of what the company did
  • Findings (everyone):

Conclusion:

iHub successfully brings together educators and entrepreneurs, but we don’t know if this is actually having a positive impact on ______

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A note on method

Thought I’d might state that I alter the post dates to match the day of the subject matter, not the day I actually create the post…

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Day with Matt and Liv

Got my bike, hopped on the CalTrain to SF and spent the day biking around with Matt and his 7 year old daughter – what a cyclist! We even had an incident with an old lady cutting us off because we did not stop at the cross walk.

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Karaoke

After the EdClub pot luck dinner, went to Karaoke with Saya, Matt, Sherry and Marc.

What happens in Karaoke stays in Karaoke… kkk

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LDT Seminar – Week 9 – Class Notes

Who Am I? Talk this week:

mccandliss

Second half, Stanford’s Dr. Bruce McCandiss, PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, talks about a new field of Educational Neuroscience that can do three important things:  

  1. providing a new view on understanding how experts are wired up,  
  2. a new view on how children come to a new learning challenge (i.e. reading) with a diverse set of resources and individual differences that matter, and
  3. a way of understanding the mechanisms by which learning experiences can drive changes in mental abilities and brain connections.  

Response:

With ever-evolging realtime, detailed 3D moving images of the brain working, we start to see where learning happens and most importantly, how it happens. Going off the far end first: will we be able to record learning and then play it back to other learners? What will be the ethical issues of cloning thought processes? Will it be possible to create human drones controlled by a central brain?

On a more practical level, being able to see absence of learning is one major potential application. Imagine if we could assess if a student has learned about a subject or not – without actually testing them – just by talking about the subject. With that, we can then look at their learning profile and attempt to teach about the subject in a way that is more adapted that brain. Formative assessment based on brain visualizations. Just another skill teachers will have to cope with 🙂

The question that remains for me is: how does an adult brain look like when it is learning? How much brain plasticity still remains? How can we improve it? Is the brain really like a muscle that when exercised, it has potential for making more connections?

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Oh yes – while we were responding to the lecture, Collin sung a little for us in class:

https://youtu.be/B4VM-L7E4Bk

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Tech 4 Learners – Week 9 – Class Notes

Talked about the Horizon Reports in the ‘traditional’ group discussion separated by report read then whole class shout out sharing of findings.

We then went over the final presentation videos and some other more administrative stuff.

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Qualitative Research – Week 9 – Class Notes

Did a Fishbowl group activity where we were presented with two ethical dilemmas.

  1. You are running a study with students about cheating. One child talks to their parents about it. The parent calls the dean concerned about ‘cheating’. The dean asks you to provide all the research notes  or else the parent will remove their child from the study. What do you do? Surrender the notes? Talk to the parent about it? Group: remove student from study. not surrender notes.
  2. You are running a study on how students fall behind in the college application process. During an interview, a student clearly is going to miss the deadline since they are not aware of it. Do you tell them about the upcoming deadlines and interfere in the quality of the data of your research?

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We also talked about our final papers as well as our propositions. Got our feedback from Denise the day after.

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Qualitative Research – Week 9 – Reading Notes

Reading Assignment

  • Altork, K. (1998). You Never Know When You Might Want to Be a Redhead in Belize. In K. deMarrais (Ed.) Inside Stories: Qualitative Research Reflections. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 111-125.
  • Lincoln, Y. (2000). Narrative Authority vs. Perjured Testimony: Courage, Vulnerability and Truth. Qualitative Studies in Education 13(2), pp. 131-138.
  • Page, R., Samson, Y., and Crockett, M. (1998). Reporting Ethnography to informants. Harvard Educational Review, 68 (3), 299-332. (review)

Notes

“You Never Know When You Might Want to Be a Redhead in Belize”

  • Goldie: the ‘depressed and alcoholic’ friend
  • Putting words in the mouth of – there was no red hair die – transcribing error?
  • Morality of exposing
  • Unfunded guilts

“Narrative Authority vs. Perjured Testimony: Courage, Vulnerability and Truth”

  • Historical facts are all narrated
  • Must tell audience what is it that they are reading – fiction or fact
  • Great job in disguising opinion about subject until the end of the paper

“Reporting Ethnography to informants”

  • Problems in sharing findings with participants, when and how should you do it?