Category Archives: ITP Core II

SRCD and AERA

A sentence or two for the conference, one sentence for the city:

I know it sounds dry, but I went to the session on ‘New IRB Policies and the Ethical Conduct of Child and Adolescent Research’, and it was exciting and terrifying to hear that the experts were somewhat unsure about the IRB protocols for research using social technologies like Facebook, Twiiter, and blogs. I also had some good conversations about my poster and am somewhat inspired to rewrite my paper and finally find it a home.

Though wet as expected, Seattle surprised me with some delectable eats, like fresh oysters and juicy salmon burgers at the Pike Place Market.
pike street market

At AERA Michael Olivas gave an engaging speech titled Immigrant DREAMS Deferred, and the professional development session, Narrative Inquiry in Education, delivered by Colette Daiute and myself went well too.

It was wonderful to see all my old friends in San Francisco, and it was even sunny for a couple days to boot!

Life in Academia, Open Access Psychology Journals and Indices

repost from ITP Core II:

“Publish or perish” is a popular maxim in academia. Recently, in a well publicized case (where I posted a similar comment), the fight for open access truly was a life or death battle.

In less dramatic circumstances I too have grappled with the implications of access to information. While writing my second qualifying exam and sketching my dissertation proposal I experienced the stifling impact of the traditional journal system and the importance of open access. Two journals that begin their titles with the word “Cyberpsychology” serve as a case in point for the debate over open access journals.

Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networkingformerly known as Cyberpsychology and Behavior is not open access. Fortunately, people at the Graduate Center (CUNY), and likely at other institutions, can access this journals publications from 2000 to one year ago through library databases. I cited one article from this journal (Ko & Kuo, 2009) in a paper for my second qualifying exam. However, I cannot view articles published in the past year. This is somewhat frustrating because I would like to review the most recent articles as I conduct my literature review for my fast approaching dissertation proposal.

In comparison I cited three articles from Cyberpsychology, an open access journal, and one of these articles was published in the last year (Bane, Cornish, Erspamer, & Kampman, 2012). The current system for dissemination of scientific journals could clearly be improved. Much scientific research is federally funded, shouldn’t the public be able to read the reports they helped support?

My experience may be indicative of a larger trend. If academics cite open access journals more – these journals may gain greater influence and perhaps this will pressure more journals to transition to the open-access model.

On a related note I found these two indexes of open access journals:

DOAJ

Bentham Science

Baker, J. R. & Moore, S. (2008a). Distress, coping, and blogging: Comparing new  Myspace users by their intention to blog. Cyberpsychology 11(1), 81-85.

Baker, J. R. & Moore, S. (2008b). Distress, coping, and blogging: Comparing new  Myspace users by their intention to blog. Cyberpsychology 11(6), 747-749.

Bane, C. M., Cornish, M., Erspamer, N., & Kampman, L. (2012). Self-disclosure through weblogs and perceptions of online and ‘real-life’ friendships among female  bloggers.Cyberpsychology, Behavior, & Social Networking, 13, 131-9.

Ko, H. C., & Kuo, F. Y. (2009). Can blogging enhance subjective well-being through self   disclosure? Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 12: 75-9.

 

Why Use Google Calendar

repost from ITP Core II:

Erin, I enjoyed reading your brief history of project management, especially that “chair planner”! Google Calendar is one tool that has really helped me organize my personal projects, like part time ed jobs, adjuncting and my research. It does seem a little banal to be talking calendars, but I think there are a few key affordances to the calendar in the cloud.

Relating to Julie’s post, unlike a pocket planner I never misplace my G Calendar (though sometimes I do enter things in the wrong date like March 2030 instead of next week).

In addition, I much appreciate being able to update my calendar from nearly anywhere, and then it sends me an email, a day or an hour before, depending on the setting. Often I don’t need that email reminder because the act of entering in an appointment into the calendar is a way of enforcing the memory in itself. In addition, having entered the info allows me to ‘feel’ more organized and then I am able to focus on the task at hand in a more productive way.

Finally, I don’t use my G Calendar for collaborative purposes but have occasionally been sent invites that show up there and have friends who report they share a calendar with their partner, and then have a calendar that is their own too. So I imagine this could work for research projects too.

My New Media Lab Blurb and Icon and a Critique Using WebNotes

Icon fin kreniske
My Icon

I recently joined the New Media Lab (NML) at the CUNY Graduate Center. The lab coordinators asked me to create an icon and write a blurb about my project that will be posted on the NML website. Here’s the blurb and click on the link at the bottom of the page to see my critique of my project icon and blurb.

Title: Is Blogging Good For Your Health?

Research indicates that writing about college experiences in a private context can lead to positive health and academic outcomes for college students (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996).  Recently Finkel et al. (2013) showed how a writing intervention had a positive influence on married couples happiness. Daiute et al. (2003) and Cohen and Riel (1989) demonstrated how audience is a key component of writing. Do the positive benefits of writing persist when that audience is the general public, as is the case when blogging. Or must the audience be specifically chosen by the writer in order to contribute to positive health outcomes?

Currently I am exploring a variety of platforms including blogger, wordpress, and edublogs to determine which will work best for this project. Following the initial phase of selecting a platform I plan to create and pilot test at least three blogging templates. During the research project participants will be able to select one of the three templates to use for their blog. The final research project will analyze how participants write in the blog setting as compared to a more private MS Word setting.

Who will the participants be?

What will the writing prompts be?

On my blog you can follow the progress as I develop these tools and concretize my method.

Brief Note on my WebNotes Critique:

I wanted to use WebNotes to critique the real NML page, however, it will not be posted for another couple of weeks and this assignment for ITP Core II is due by Tuesday. So I have pasted the blurb and icon on my blog above. Then I used WebNotes to comment on this icon and blurb. I found it a bit overwhelming when I looked at the WebNotes; to ameliorate this I suggest minimizing all of the stickies and then going through and maximizing and minimizing as you please.

Ideas on Digital Assignments in response to June 2009 Academic Commons

repost from Core II ITP blog:

I recently got lost in time as I perused the June 2009 issue of Academic Commons.  For years I thought peruse meant to leisurely browse, but then I learned it means to read deeply or scrutinize. I still think of the word peruse in a playful way.

These articles seemed to reinforce many of the ideas we talked about last semester, and continue to discuss in the current ITP term. One of the main framing points for these papers is that in the current era students need to practice analysis of material not content regurgitation (Wesch, 2009).

Each article is quite rich so I’ll just pull a few of the parts that struck me and maybe people can add their perspectives on what they found most intriguing, whether from my post or otherwise.

Bass et al. (2009) quote Davidson saying “The whole system of credentialing, grading, evaluating, writing recommendations, all of that, is antithetical to true participatory learning formats and learning communities. Higher education has never figured out if its primary goal is learning or if its primary goal is training citizens for elite positions of class power and leadership. The whole system of ranking (among institutions and among students) is based on “distinctions,” as Bourdieu would say. Participatory learning, especially when it is anonymous, contests the bases and even the sanctity of many of those distinctions”.

I’m puzzled; Higher ed is both, is neither, is both but shouldn’t be either? Agree, disagree?

The Yancey article on E-portfolios was intriguing and is perhaps especially relevant to Humanities or creative writing and digital art programs. I wonder how relevant an e-portfolio is for social science or hard science students? I guess this comes down to the question of what is valued. In my field, psych, the value seems to be placed on tight impersonal writing. I wonder what a student would gain by developing an E-portfolio of their research reports. Okay they would gain knowledge about digital tools, but how does this help them if their goal is to be a biologist? Wouldn’t their time be best spent crafting their writing and reading about their content area?

If pressed, I might say that one activity for a psych student could be to do a ds106 type creation of their research project. Perhaps film the data collection, a few interview clips, and then share this. As an instructor I would be a little concerned about the department giving me a hard time for having undergrads film their participants and not following all of the necessary ethical procedures for recruitment. I guess that would push me to be better versed on these procedures, so it could be a good thing.

Finally, I find assessment is one of the most challenging parts of teaching a course. I use a research paper rubric and a presentation rubric. Even with a rubric I find it really challenging to grade student presentations. Perhaps it comes from an inner contradiction about who I am as an instructor; I want my students to work hard and earn their grades. But how do I measure ‘hard work’. I don’t want to be a dream crusher nor do I want to be a pushover, and striking the balance is a great challenge. I like what Rhodes is doing in creating a broad interdisciplinary rubric. One shortcoming of the Rhodes rubric is there is no section for basic writing mechanics.

Any interesting ideas for integrating digital assignments into the courses you teach or participate in? Any assessment ideas? Other thoughts?