monika’s w e b l o g

In the last days I started to collect the empirical data still needed for my research project: 1-hour guided interviews with blogging students – on (possible) learning effects through blogging in informal contexts.

Similar to my former experience with interviewees 2 years ago, I had again some very interesting and insightful discussions with students. ( At this point I’d like to thank to all of you guys for your time, and your efforts to reflect on the issues and respond to the questions! It is your contributions that make this project possible…)

The interviews were preceded by a quite long time of preparation and research. I used it to prepare a “context of justification” about why I would concentrate on informal blogging, when there is so much research out there about blogs in course settings. Besides this, I needed to come to a definition of learning, and a model of learning on which to base the empirical research. (See also my presentation slides with some of the issues).

However, I finally think that the model of experiential learning, including a lot of questions for self-reflection, by Lloyd Davies (2008) comes close to my view on learning through blogging.

Where models of informal learning describe in my view a context for learning, models of experiential learning descirbe the process. In this sense, the go well hand in hand – and help to describe learning through blogging in informal contexts.

Based on Davies’ model and questions, I have developed my interviews. I do not agree with all points and elements of Davies’ model. I had many discussions with my supervisors when setting up the questionnaire, and found it sometimes difficult to stick with the use of terms by Davies (for instance, what is an event in comparison to an experience; or how does he confine informal learning from expereintial learning, etc). However, his mulit-dimensional view on learning, paired with suggestions for questions in all these dimensions, helped me a lot to get down from theory to a concrete view on the empirical study.

June 27th, 2009. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: e-learning and weblogs, research methodology. .

Found on bildungstechnologie.net: the link to Visual Literacy, a collective project of four universities which provides
“an online leveling course as well as a blended skill-building course for students of fourteen different university courses (…) . With the Visual-Literacy.org online tutorial, professors and teachers can flexibly revert to an important resource whenever a course relies on conceptual visualization competence.”

Since I have not found yet many resources of visual representation in research contexts, I appreciate the approach of this project. I like the exercises, although I put to discussion whether they provide enough freedom for developing new ideas and concepts of representation (do you have to break out into different contexts to open up for new inputs etc.).

Anyway, immersing myself into studying this site, I have found the visualisation method of the decision tree diagram, with links to various images which drew back the line to my actual data analysis – ethnographic decision tree modeling:

“There are two distinctive features about the method (…): its reliance on ethnographic fieldwork techniques to elicit the decision criteria, and its insistence on a formal, testable, computerbased model of the decision process which is hierarchical or treelike in nature.”
Gladwin, C.H. (1989) Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling. SAGE Publications. p.8.

(this one is called venn|euler diagram )

October 22nd, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology, visualisation|presentation. .

I’ve just joined the Grounded Theory research group on facebook after an invitation of Andrea Gorra from Leeds Metropolitan University.
I am happy about this because
- I get in contact with other researchers facing (probably) similar questions and problems about there empirical study than I do
- it gives me the chance to be more involved in research activities at LeedsMet (a network densifying?)
- it is a good opportunity to experiment with facebook’s community features.
Thanks Janet and Andrea.

June 22nd, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology, social software. .

In search of a literature administration tool, my search results can be divided into 4 categories:
- commercial tools
- free|open source tools for local use
- free|open source tools for remote use
- social software tools

Decision making is a compromise between the do-able and the wish-able:

I like the idea of a social bookmarking system most. Examples include CiteULike, Connotea, or Bibsonomy:
Connotea describes the easy 3 steps of using the service: “Find a reference, save it on connotea, add your own keywords for easy retieval”.
The major weekness of using such a system are the online library catalogues in their current configuration, as discussed in log.netbib.de/tag/tagging:
“Tatsache ist jedoch, daß die Ausgabeschnittstellen der heute in Deutschland verbreiteten OPACs und Dokumentenserver diese Entwicklung so gut wie nirgends wiederspiegeln, ganz zu schweigen von Bemühungen, Dienste wie Connotea in die Oberfläche der eigenen Systeme zu integrieren.”
How to integrate analog literature in my system if I can not bookmark library resources? This includes library items but also resources that I have laying around on my (analog) desktop…

Free|open source tools for remote use would be my next choice. RefWorks and Litw3 are such tools, where I prefer the 2nd one just because the website is more informative. But- too bad- I have not taken into account that I have to upgrade my provider contract in order to install this system.

As free|open source tool for local use, I test Citavi which wins various tests, but in its free version it allows just 100 entries per database.
Lit-link is a free software product with quite good reviews. It sounds promising at first. The problem is that I cannot figure out how to import library items from my mostly visited online library catalogue, nor if/how to use the program for citing when writing a paper.

At this point I have spent many hours with searching, installing, testing without a result that does really convince me. (To all developers of the above described products: maybe it is just me who has not figured out the functions; in this case it might help to provide descriptions of your products which target people with no experience in digital literature administration).
I decide with a heavy heart to buy a commercial product. Good decision? I don’t know. Time will show.
Anyway – I give the warm advice to every newbie that starts a research project to set up some kind of literature adminstration on their very first day of research.

October 12th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: administrational things, research methodology. .

While I’m busy reading about research methods, the article “Who Writes Wikipedia” by Aaron Swartz is catching my interest in two points:
- measuring methods crucially influence the research result with possibly far reaching consequences
- the concepts of community and crowd are discussed as opposing ideas

In short, Aaron Swartz measures (in a sample) the amount of letters added to articles in each edit by individual users, while Jimbo Wales in his so far concluded studies has counted the amount of edits individual users did.
“Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.”

[via Martin Roell]

Thoughts on measuring methods:
Both start with the objective to get insight into how many editors add how much content to Wikipedia.
And, while counting the number of edits gives just insight into the amount of activity of editors, counting the added letters (which could be extended to counting subtracted and corrected letters, etc.) is purely referring to the content itself.

Thoughts on communities and crowds:
Thinking over the article of Swartz, writing Wikipedia would possibly follow a swarm behaviour, after Jimmy Wales turned away from this idea – starting initally from the same thought – towards his conclusion that a rather small community is writing most of the content.
What is the difference between a community and a crowd/swarm?
Is it – as the article with citations of Wales implies – the number of members, and them knowing each other or not?
Or is the amount of power the difference, as Martin Röll suggests in a chart “ants vs community”?
Most important for me at the moment: Does a community follow different laws than a swarm (Pareto distribution, or other), and what are those?
The concept of Lave and Wenger on communities of practice shows analogies to Wikipedia: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, shared repertoire (http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm). Is Wikipedia a community project in the first place, or can a swarm engage in a joint enterprise-mutual engagement-shared repertoire thing?

I am sure this has been discussed extensively elsewhere; hoping to find some clues.

September 12th, 2006. von Administrator. (7) Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology, social software. .

I am struggling with the formulation of my hypothesis. My supervisor suspects it is too complex and difficult to investigate, and I think he is totally right about that. Therefore, some definition of what a hypothesis is might help:

“A hypothesis is a suggested explanation of a phenomenon or reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis, accessed 06. Sept. 2006)

“A hypothesis has to be testable experimentally in order to falsify or support it.” (http://www.lv.psu.edu/jxm57/irp/hypothes.html)

Types of hypotheses include:
- correlational hypotheses (when A changes, so does B)
- causal hypotheses (A causes B)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis, accessed 06. Sept. 2006)

One of my problems in formulating the hypothesis is that I have two fields which I would like to investigate (about benefit and extent of weblog usage), but they are not connected through correlation, cause and effect, or some other dependency.
This is where I am stuck at the moment

September 5th, 2006. von Administrator. (2) Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology. .

Bell, J. (2005) Doing your research project. Maidenhead, Open University Press

Content I:
Approaches to research:
- action research
- case study
- survey
- experimental style
- ethnographic style of research
- grounded theory
- narrative inquiry and stories

Thoughts:
It is too early to make a final decision about the approach. The narrative inquiry, building up stories, might correspond well to my data: “It involves the collection and development of stories, either as a form of data collection or as a means of structuring a research project.” (Gray, J. (1998) Narrative Inquiry. Unpublished paper, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia).

Content II:
Ethics in research:
Research contracts, protocols, the principle of informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity

Thoughts.:
Definitely useful to make myself aware continually to treat data with the necessary respect. Following the example descibed in the book, I will outline a “personal code of practice” (in accordance with my own understanding of ethics) in order to set a frame for myself, for possible respondents, for collaborating institutions, for the university committee.

Content III:
Methods of data collection:
- documents: “The proper selection of documents is particularly important in what is termed ‘content analysis’ “ (p.128). A list of questions is introduced to ensure that a document is analysed applying external and internal criticism.
- questionnaires: “All data-gathering instruments should be piloted to test how long it takes recipients to complete them, to check that all questions and instructions are clear and to enable you to remove any items which do not yield usable data” (p.147).
- interviews: “Make sure official channels have been cleared (e.g. agreement of supervisors), and let interviewees see any protocol documents beforehead (on informed consent)” (p.170).
- diaries logs and critical incidents: “In research, diaries are not personal records of engagements or journals of thoughts and activities, but records or logs of professional activities” (p.173).
- observation studies

Thoughts:
Definitions made it clear that if I analyse content of weblogs, that falls into document analysis and not diaries logs.

Content IV:
The chapter on “Interpreting the evidence” gives examples on how to summarise findings (summary sheet, coding techniques) and representing them (table, bar chart, compound diagram, scattergram. etc). “Coding allows you to ‘cluster’ key issues in your data and allows you to take steps towards ‘drawing conclusions’ “ (p.214)

Thoughts:
The various illustrations of this chapter give a first insight into data representation possibilities. This does definitely need some experimentation, as I found out with my first set of data: how to set variables in relation to each other, how to sort a row of data,  where is the verification (or falsification) of the research question, etc.

July 21st, 2006. von Administrator. (2) Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology. .

A definition of Power Laws is given by Newman, M.E.J. (2005) Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. In: Contemporary Physics 46, 323-351.
” When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf’s law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities, earthquakes, solar flares, moon craters, wars and people’s personal fortunes all appear to follow power laws.”
(source: http://aps.arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0412004/, via http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/cheesy/stories/17515/)

The connection to weblog popularity (through inbound links) is drawn by Clay Shirky (2003) in his article “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”:
” In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”
(source: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html, via http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/medkom/mk/fraas/Fraas_Barczok_06.pdf)

Also other virtual communities seem to follow this law, as described by ufasold in the clever-linking-weblog, investigating Forum-entries.

Thoughts:
Where to go from this? Are weblogs really suited for a large number of students if – as Shirky describes – “most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers”? Are other online-learning-tools of any kind following the same law? Are there always the same “power-users” arising?
How to calculate if there exists a power law distribution with a given set of data? How much deflection is “allowed”?
Many questions to reflect on for me.
Appendix (2006-07-20):
Interactive graph to visualise Pareto-distribution by the University of Konstanz

Appendix (2006-08-12):
What is the 1% rule?
The article finds power-law-like distributions in many Social Software Services. like YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo Goups.
(via randgaenge.net)

Appendix (2007-05-24):
The Long Tail
Pareto Distribution:
“describes the statistical phenomenon, when a small amount with high values adds more to the whole than the high amount of small values of this crowd… This leads to the Pareto-Principle, or 80-20-distribution…”
(freely translated from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto-Verteilung)

Appendix (2008-02-23):
Uwe-Gernot Fasold and Frank von Heyden write about Soziale Netzwerkanalyse zur Optimierung der Content-Bereitstellung (Social Network analysis for optimising content provision), where they refer to an empirical study done by A.-L. Barabási, Z. Dezs, E. Almaas, A. Lukács, B. Rácz, I. Szakadáat: “Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web”; 12.05.2005

July 17th, 2006. von Administrator. (3) Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology. .

Kromrey, H. (1994) Empirische Sozialforschung. Modelle und Methoden der Datenerhebung und Datenauswertung. 6th ed. Opladen, Leske+Budrich

Content:
The book focusses on quantitative research methods in social sciences (in particular, critical rationalism), reaching from formulating the research question, the design of the research, choice of indicators and operationalisation through to data collection and statistical description. Still, in the beginning the author draws some differences between quantitative and qualitative approaches (analytisch-nomologisch versus interpretative Sozialwissenschaft).

Critique:
Without trying to set too many preferences for quantitative or qualitative methods (yet), the following themes raised ar of particular interest for me:

- A large chapter on empirical content analysis (empirische Inhaltsanalyse), this time on a mainly quantitative basis in comparison to the “ethogenic approach” of Cohen:
How to develop a good category system
requierements of a category system
phases of the research process
various types of content analysis approaches

- a remark on qualitative research, pointing out the importance of knowing the living context (pointed out and described also by C.Schachtner) of the researched with their subjective views and thinking patterns

May 10th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology. .

Cohen, L., Manion, L. (1989) Research Methods in Education. 3d ed. London, Routledge.

I am particularly interested in two of the presented research methods, because they might integrate well with my research project (as far as defineable at the current state):

Developmental research: cross-sectional study (e.g. a comparison of informal weblogging and institutionalised weblogging)

Accounts-ethogenic approach: “The contents of an episode which interest the ethogenic researcher include not only the perceived behaviour such as gesture and speech, but also the thoughts, the feelings and the intentions of those taking part. And the “speech” that accounts for those thoughts, feelings and intentions must be conceived of in the widest connotation of the word. Thus, accounts may be personal records of the events we experience in our day-to-day lives, our conversations with neighbours, our letters to friends, our entries in diaries”, p.244

Appendix (20.September 2006)
My supervisor Janet points out one more time the two-folded approach of ethogenic research. I have found a document on crowds which gives another detailed description of the ethogenic method:
“1.Intensive design > detailed study of a few typical cases
2.Collection of accounts
3.Collection of objective recordings (e.g. videotape)
4.Investigator’s interpretation of actors’ interpretations and objective recordings negotiated.”
(“Lecture 9: Crowds 1: the ethogenic approach. a summary”. I guess the author is Paul Webley).

May 10th, 2006. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: research methodology. .