i’m sorry, i just don’t know

AACE has pulled together a pretty good repository of journals and conference proceedings.  Some, I hear, are freely available.  I haven’t found one yet, but should be able to get to them if I VPN in through my university’s library.

This last week, I submitted a brief proposal to the Knight Foundation, and one to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Start-up Grant.  For the Knight Foundation, I answered 3 questions and filled out contact information.  After we came up with a relatively interesting idea, the writing took me a few hours and the submission took 5 minutes.  For NEH the writing took days, and the submission process just about gave me a heart attack, and I’m pretty sure I had a panic attack.

Regardless, I think we have some pretty good proposals in- both for Facebook applications.  For the Knight Foundation, its a local news aggregator that allows users to add news items for their local news feed.  For NEH, we’re proposing to integrate an existing web sequencing tool with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s digital repository.  Fingers crossed… I hope to keep some form of employment

I presented at AERA this week. It was the SIG IT online learning session. I talked about OLS (a discussion environment) compared to Ozmozr (a social information filtering system). The point: over 2 years, OLS users (4093 of them) shared 509 resources with one another. In 3 months, 273 users shared 411 resources with each other. I thought that was pretty cool. I got one thoughtful question regarding how carefully we considered the context of our learners. The other question I got was how we moderate these shares “Who makes sure these are quality resources that are being shared?” Um… the community. Of all of the people I talk to about this, I think it makes the least sense to professors.

There was one guy that talked about social presence as connected to the expertise of users in a CMC environment. He was interesting. More social presence seems to correlate with perceived expertise.

The other papers talked about things like learning/thinking in online discussions. When will our field stop doing research on just how to tweak discussion environments to hopefully encourage more critical thinking and/or learning? Do facilitators make a difference? Nope, but maybe it was our instrument. If students label things as “hey this is an extrapolation of your idea”, or “this is a disagreement with the previous post” does it make a difference? Yes, well, maybe. If we tell the students that they’ll be evaluated by our fancy rubric, does the magic happen? Yes, but what we’re ignoring is that our students really don’t give a hoot about our content, and our system doesn’t help them care more about it, it just teaches them how to play us better.

I sat in a roundtable session on Tuesday. There were 55 tables, all people talking about their research (i.e. stuff they made up to get a grant that they need to get tenure). I became a bit nauseated, actually (and no, Mom, I’m not pregnant). How much of this is actually adopted or used after these papers are published? How much of it makes an impact for more than the 16 kids they had in their study (assuming there was any effect of their treatment)? Of course, every student is worth a million dollars in grant money, but I just wish that some of these folks would look beyond their tiny samples and see what kind of impact they could make on a larger scale.

So there.

Our discussant actually used a comic strip to ridicule the writing style of my paper. He said there was too much math? I don’t recall using any math, actually. I do have a table in there that adds resources. Perhaps that was what he was talking about. But, it’s good feedback, I suppose… time to revise the writing style again. He also suggested that Ozmozr may be a solution searching for a problem.

Last.fm has loads of free tunes. I’ve been introduced to some great new artists. Maybe one day I’ll do some sort of folksonomic study on tagging in different environments- music (last.fm), photos (flickr) and bookmarks (del.icio.us). I wonder if I’d find anything useful.