Readings for E19.3311- Week of April 14th

Hi, Ricki has asked me to post the readings for this week.

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Please note that the last one, the Ed Researcher article, is actually for next week, but Ricki says we will start discussing the issue related to it this week…

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1. Roth, W. (2004). Autobiography as scientific text: a dialectical approach to the role of experience, Volume 5, No. 1, Art. 9. (A review of Harry Wolcott (2002). Sneaky kid and its aftermath. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press).

Link: roth_review_wolcottsneakykid

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2. Margaret A. Eisenhart, The Ethnographic Research Tradition and Mathematics Education Research, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Mar., 1988), pp. 99-114.

LInk: eisenhart_ethnoresearchtradition

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3. Frankel, R. M. and Devers, K. J. (2000). Study Design in Qualitative Research – 1: Developing Questions and Assessing Resource Needs, Education for Health, 13:2, 251 – 261.

Link: frankel_studydesign1

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4. Johnson, R. B. (2004). Mixed Methods Research: A Research Paradigm Whose Time Has Come, Educational Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 7, 14-26.

Link: mixedmethodsresearch-paradigmtimecome

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Trinh Minh-Ha on ‘New Ways of Seeing’ & the ‘Witnessing Self’

Trinh Minh-Ha was part of a panel at MOMA last night (April 11), talking about women and film, with Laura Mulvey (moderator) and Chantal Ackerman.

“Soliciting A New Seeing”

Trinh talked about digital film and the new kinds of seeing that it opens up. The politics of form that she is interested in has to do with a ‘form of witnessing’, with reflexive forms that allow for a ‘witnessing of the self’, or a ’science of the self’…

——>>>When Trinh talks, the sense comes from not just the words themselves but from their entwinement and the melodic flow of their sounds rising and falling…

Anyway, this science of the self (quote: “a science of the self, if I can call it that…”) is exactly what Ricki and I are trying to locate within the practice of educational research, but there isn’t a clear language for that yet, instead we have to make up words like ’selfother’ following Lous Heshusius.

“Witnessing the Self”

Witnessing has to do with awareness and seeing; or seeing with awareness. This kind of seeing is the middle way between subjectivity and objectivity, between dualistic categories of knowing, and to quote: “practicing the middle way doesn’t mean half-way, the middle is where there is no duality, hence there are no foreclosures, what comes to our senses is already on go”… The middle way is the passage, it is the journey, life is what takes place in the ‘middles’, life is the movement and unfolding of passages, middles, or (another term) intervals:  “Life is the unfolding of intervals within intervals.”

Buddhism also talks about  the ‘middle way’, and also about the middles, the intervals, the gaps where consciousness is free to manifest in any direction, any form. The sanskrit (?) is ‘bardo’, meaning a space in between, where life emerges but cannot be grasped or fixed by words. And yet there are words, and yet we use categories, words, terms, forms to speak of the invisible. Trinh: “form is attained to address the formless”.

Trinh invoked traditional Asian arts several times as examples of a seeing that is a form of witnessing, a seeing that arises in the middle. For example, painters in ancient China spent lifetimes painting the same landscape, the same objects. And the reason for this was not for the accumulation of expertise of knowing about the object, but in order to develop their capacity for seeing. The instance of seeing the object was an enactment of awareness, of witnessing, of a certain kind of seeing.

Well, I’m obviously a fan of Trinh’s.  We approached her after the talk to say hi and how much we llllove her writing. She was incredibly gracious.

tactile alphabet- Florence et al. (2004)

Florence et al. (2004) examined the effect of using the modality of touch (haptic modality) for teaching young children to read.

Reading acquisition is thought to depend upon acquiring knowledge of phonological and orthographic representations and making connections between the two. But the authors believe that learning the letter-sound correspondences is not ‘implicit’, and that the connection needs in some cases to be highlighted and augmented through other sensory modalities such as touch. The authors use a teaching technique developed by Fernald (1943) called the ‘multisensory trace’ which involves tracing a written word with an index finger while pronouncing the word and looking at it.

The study tested 3 treatments: letters were explored visually and haptically (by tracing foam letter forms in the context of words, so the letters were traced in the order of their spelling), or letters were explored only visually, or letters were explored visually but in a sequential manner. Results showed significant increase in performance measures (pseudoword decoding test and letter recognition test) for the visual and haptic group.

Definition of orthography from wikipedia:

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós (“correct”) and γράφειν gráphein (“to write”). Orthography is distinct from typography.

Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization.

Readings for E19.3311

Readings for April 9, 2008:

Chapters 30 and 31 from Handbook of Qualitative Research
Click here to download Chapter 30
Click here to download Chapter 31

Patti Lather, on Validity
Click here to download

Ricki Goldman-Segall on Configurational Validity
Click Here to download

Donald Norman- The Design of Everyday Things…

Donald Norman- The Design of Everyday Things

I read chapters from this classic book many years ago, and I remembered Norman’s indictment of the VCR for its hard to read controls and widgets.  The VCR’s design doesn’t make its uses and functions “visible”, its “affordances” are not clear.  One of the most important principles of design, according to Norman, is “visibility”- visibility refers to the mapping between the design of an object and its operation, so that the design communicates cues and feedback about how to use and operate the object.

Mapping is another important idea. The user will have a mental model of how to use the object, and the object also yields a conceptual model (usually a product of the designer’s intentions) for how it can be used. When the two models coincide, then there is a close “mapping”. Norman writes that the designer usually expects the user’s model to follow the designer’s mental model- but this is obviously not always the case. The designer needs to better understand the user, the design itself must be user-centered.

Norman made the notion of “affordances” famous through this book, and though he didn’t invent the term, it seems he popularized it so that it entered the stream of standard design thinking.

The difference from Norman’s discussions in this book and his later book on ‘emotional design’ is in his de-emphasis here on aesthetics. Norman’s user-centered approach here is really more about functionality where aesthetics doesn’t really contribute a benefit. But clearly, Norman does move on to acknowledge the importance of aesthetics in the user’s relationship to the everyday things that support his or her functioning in the world, and also primarily to the processing of information about the world- that emotions play an undeniable role in the cognition and the forming of mental models.

Saffer- Interaction Design, Chapts. 1, 2, 3

Saffer gives a rationale for, an understanding of, and a brief history of the field of Interaction Design in the first chapter. In the 2nd chapter, Saffer’s analysis of the four approaches to interaction design is very helpful, including: User-centered, Systems-centered, Activity-centered, and Genius Design. Of these, I notice that I gravitate towards user and activity centered approaches because it seems it’s primarily about what the user needs and how to facilitate that into happening.

The 3rd chapter considers the “basic elements” of interface design, and I really appreciate Saffer’s consideration of the element of “space”, that even though many interfaces are on screens and thus 2-dimensional surfaces, the interactions happen over time and can be understood as creating a kind of space. What the interface can give you is a visual representation of the space for interactions, and at best, it would be a kind of representation of 3-dimensional space.

The 3rd chapter also describes some “laws” of interaction design, which are principles that have emerged through practitioners and people in the field such as Moore’s Law, the Poka Yoke principle and so on. And this chapter concludes with Saffer’s roundup of the “characteristics of good interaction design” which I find to be pretty comprehensive, if not hard to design for:

The characteristics of good interaction design:  Trustworthy, Appropriate, Smart, Responsive, Clever, Ludic, and Pleasurable.

Obviously the arena of video games has influenced a new generation of educational designers to think about how to design educational applications that are in particular, more “ludic and pleasurable”.  But it is still yet to be defined how to best tie the ludic and pleasurable aspects of game interactions to the goals of learning educational content.  Good interaction design for education would be “ludic, pleasurable, and… educational?”

Saffer- Interface Design, Chapt. 6

Saffer examines aspects of interface design- which he makes the note, works almost hand-to-glove with interaction design. The interface is there because users cannot manipulate (thus interact) the application in any other humanly possible way. Interface design has a primarily visual component, and he considers various pieces such as the layout, visual flow, typography and color. Then Saffer also lays out how the visual design can support interaction design through forms such as widgets, buttons, icons and so on.

The section I find particularly interesting is the speculation about new forms of interfaces that take embodied human input such as gestures and one’s very physical presence… Saffer calls this “Interfaces without Faces”, but I’d rather call it, “Interfaces with New Faces”.

Schnotz & Bannert: Structure Mapping Hypothesis

Schnotz, W., & Bannert, M. (2003). Construction and interference in learning from multiple representation. Learning and Instruction, 13, 141–156.

Summary:

The authors present the “structure mapping hypothesis” which makes a subtler connection (compared to the dual coding hypothesis) between the relationship between visual and verbal representations and their processing through internal mental model constructions. Essentially, the authors are saying that the dual coding hypothesis assumes that there is a univalent relationship between kind of presentation and kind of tasks. But the structure mapping hypothesis is saying that the effects of different pictures will be different depending on the type of tasks. This hypothesis thus makes a distinction between how texts and pictures function. Texts and pictures are 2 different sign systems. The authors state that texts are “descriptive representations”- they describe their objects through relational information. Pictures or physical models are “depictive representations” and they function as iconic signs. Furthermore, descriptions are more powerful in representing forms of subject matter, but depictive are better for drawing inferences. The research that the authors set up seems to back up the authors’ hypothesis. Their results showed that presenting task-appropriate graphics helped learner comprehension, and task-inappropriate graphics interfered with comprehension.

 

My comments:

The authors make a good point for splicing the model more finely. And I’m especially interested in what they have to say about the construction of internal mental representations because it is on the one hand, all speculation- because mental processes lack material form though maybe neural research is getting better at mapping neuronal activity as a material trace. And also because I’m interested in how mental models can be formed through non-visual forms of perception- the authors mention auditive and kinaesthetic:

“Mental models, on the contrary, are not sensorically specific. A mental model of a spatial configuration, for example, can be constructed not only by visual perception, but also by auditive or by kinaesthetic or by haptic perception.” (143).

Schneiderman & Plaisant: Designing the User Interface, chapt. 14

Shneiderman, B., & Plaisant, C. (2005). Designing the User Interface. Chapter 14.5: Information Visualization (pp. 580–603). Boston: Pearson.

Schneiderman & Plaisant (SP) write that it was the success of “direct-manipulation interfaces” that enabled users to work with the computer in a more visual way. And pictures can convey a multitude of meaning and may be the representational mode (rather than text) that is preferred by many for processing information. “Information visualization” thus emerged through computational technology as a term for how we use “interactive visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition” (SP citing Card, Mackinlay and Schnedierman, 1999).  Interestingly, SP mention that information visualization is an abstraction of reality (590) but, like pure mathematics, the intention is to find the deeper patterns in phenomena, or the mess of relationships that is the real world.

Another great point that SP make is when they state that humans have fine-tuned perceptual abilities that aren’t accessed in most interface designs- and the examples SP give are visual perception related, but I believe we can extend the range of untapped abilities to the other sensory perceptions- touch, proprioception…. 

Anyway, the overview of the language and practice of information-visualization is laid out by SP.  They state the basic principle, or “mantra” of information-visualization to be:

“Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand…”

This mantra of information visualization invokes the basic activities or tasks involved. And SP provide a useful TAXONOMY that sorts information visualization then into a set of 7 tasks (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history and extract) with 7 data types:

1. Linear data: 1-dimensional, including texts, dictionaries, alphabetical lists…

2. 2D map data: maps, plans and layouts with domain and interface attributes…

3. 3D World: include real world objects which have volume and complex relationships to each other, sometimes in the form of dimensional representations such as 3D maps- related to 3D computer graphical imaging & design, virtual reality design… “information-visualization in three dimensions is still controversial” (585)

4. Multidimensional data: Statistical and relational database contents that can be manipulated as multidimensional data…

5. Temporal data: Data that needs to be viewed temporally- as a time series…

6. Tree data:  Hierarchical or tree structured data

7. Network data: When a tree structure is not enough, relationships conveyed through linking as a network…

SP go on to describe the 7 tasks of information visualization in greater detail with examples, and then conclude the chapter with notes about “challenges” to information visualization. The most important one for me is: 1) the challenge of collaboration, that “support for social processes is  critical to information visualization”… a software design challenge and also theoretical challenge

Dickey- Engaging By Design: How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design

Dickey points out how computer and video games excel at engaging players, and that there are a number of strategies that seem to be employed to keep players engaged in the gameplay. In the field of education, there is a growing movement now to try to bring gameplay strategies into educational applications, to motivate and engage students in learning to the same degree that they are engaged in playing video/computer games. Dickey identifies then several strategies and methods that foster engagement in games and discusses how such strategies and methods can inform instructional design. The key strategies are: Player positioning, or point of view; the use of narratives; and methods employed to make interactions interesting such as action and time hooks.

Obviously in the design of our Microarray learning modules, we are interested in making the learning interactive and game-like. It has been hard though to take the fairly abstract scientific concepts which Microarrays deal with and import game strategies into their presentation. The use of narrative doesn’t really make sense given that this is a pretty specialized laboratory procedure and any kind of lab-based narrative seemed both artificial and cartoonish. So we could only think about some of the kind of “hooks” that might be employed in playing more visually abstract games like Tetris- which actually can look a lot like a microarray sometimes. Still we have been constrained by needing the game- even the microarray rearranging type game to adhere to scientific accuracy so a row of squares has to retain its meaning as a microarry, and so we can only allow a certain amount of manipulation of the variables… We haven’t quite figured this out.