The anarchist daisy

I am considering a community informatics topic for my research project; to what extent do DIY online communities offer a viable alternative to ‘capital’ exchange of services/goods/information?  This question needs a lot of work, but it is a beginning.

                                                                                                                             

 

The daisy exercise was interesting – but honestly, it did not show me anything I did not already know, at least at this stage in my planning.  I will continue to imagine how this research project may take shape in the coming weeks.  I suspect my topic may grow in a new direction as I think about it more.

Week 2 blogging question

Hi everyone, my name is Jessica and I am late to join this group.  The research I would like to conduct if I knew I would not fail would be research on how to put an end to war and violence.  That perhaps makes me the beauty queen of academics.  With more realistic aim, I am considering doing another degree in public policy.  My research interests generally concern democratic structures and normative behaviours within them.  I am currently very influenced by Chomsky in my approach to these topics.  Within the information field, I could explore this interest under access to information (ATI) legislation, community informatics, and other established bodies of research TBD.

Petal Power

Handy daisy maker tool needed

I am considering a comparative analysis of the advantages/disadvantages of digital over print academic books for students. The objective would be to possibly come up with recommendations based on situations or contexts in which e-books might be preferable over print books and vice versa.

Drawing the above (bedraggled?) daisy was a useful exercise in helping me determine related areas of interest that could help in formulating my research question, I feel like I still need to refine the orientation of my research interest and maybe, somehow restrict it more or incorporate unknown facets I have not yet considered. I will leave it at this for now while I try to figure out a methodology to conduct my research along with identifying some unknown knowns and unknown unknowns.

So, here is my example of the bedraggled daisy exercise. It is definitely bedraggled, but I am not sure I would call it a daisy. Like it was said in class, it resembles more of a propeller. It looks that way because Microsoft Paint does not seem to allow you to rotate selections in degrees. So I used a shape tool to allow for the angled “leaves” of the daisy. That is why my daisy is so angular.


However, the angular design did give me a benefit. While drawing the daisy, realized another category to fill in. I found that at one point the daisy resembled a cross and I thought of the Christianity category. I am not religious, but I know that my grandmother is, so I am sure that it will be a topical part of the narrative. Since I am not that religiously minded, I may have forgotten this category had it not been for my angular daisy.


Genealogy is something that this project will definitely encompass. A large part of the project is motivated by me wanting to know more about my family's history to better understand myself. I am sure that I will be doing a lot of exploring in my own family's history.


The category “women” refers to my grandmother's experience as a woman. Something that I am sure is relevant to her life, but I am not sure how well I (as a man, and her grandson) will be able to uncover (or understand) some of the details of this category. I have heard some of her stories already, and some of them do relate to her experience as a woman of that era, so it is something I may want to explore.


History is a difficult category to define for this project. I am sure that I will be covering the personal history of my grandmother. But it is the larger history of the era that I am not sure about. I will likely try to draw the two areas together by supplementing my grandmother's oral account with other historical sources, in order to give some context to her stories. This is just an idea.


I am not sure if I am cheating with the “War” category or not. War is simply a fact of the era my grandmother lived in. So it could be said to be part of the broader “History” category...I am beginning to appreciate the plight of catalogers that we discuss in our Knowledge Organization lectures... in any case, I think it is relevant enough to warrant its own category, as war really shapes the history and lives of the period that it occurs in.


Language and Ethnography relates to my grandmother's background, and to the fact that ethnicity was an issue of the era. My grandmother is Polish, so the project will encompass her experience as a Pole during the German occupation, and also the struggles with language during that period, and later on.


I left one petal blank because I was having a tough time coming up with another category before the deadline...I will try to come back to the daisy later to get another category filled in. But I would also appreciate if anyone has a suggestion.

My Daisy

Erasing every wisdom /

            This is my fire /

            No sign remained – My blood is the sign /

            This is my beginning /

-          Adonis, This Is My Name

Adonis is famous for using elaborate brackets, jarring line breaks, and generally unconventional syntax. He joyously played around with the Arabic language. The above quotation was taken from Shawkat M. Toorawa’s seminal English translation of Adonis’s poetry collection, A Time Between Ashes And Roses (2004). Nasser Rabbart wrote the foreword to this text, and notes the following:

“A singular, intense, and profoundly cerebral sculptor of words and images, Adonis represents the epitome of Arab humanism. I stress Arab here not because of his birthplace, Syria, the cradle of Arabism, but because he intimately identifies with the Arabic language as his absolute and only homeland; and I use humanist here because Adonis mines history for some of its most paradoxical universalistic and chauvinistic moments and uses them to punctuate a revolutionary poetry […] In other words, Adonis carves his distinct poetic modernity out of a critical engagement with the past, an engagement that he qualifies as ‘emanation from the past’.” (ibid, xi-i)

Clearly, Adonis’s poetry is concerned with language, history and power. These concepts are closely related to the topics denoted in my “bedraggled daisy” which, in fact, is not a daisy at all (Luker, 2008, 82). In line with my research topic, I chose to work with an abstract flower image, Ya Rabb, done in the classic Arabic calligraphy style, ‘Khat-e-Diwani’ (arabic-artwork.blogspot.ca/2012_10_01_archive.html). My alterations included adding some of the colours historically associated with Arab humanism broadly; red, black, and green. 

References

Adonis. (2004). A Time Between Ashes And Roses. Trans. Shawkat M. Toorawa. Syracus, NY:

Syracuse University Press.

Luker, Kristin. (2010). Salsa Dancing in the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-Glut.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

The Invisible Daisy

The Invisible Daisy  From Cynthia Dempster

I agree with everyone.  There are so many interesting subjects.  I have a problem. My home computer isn't working. I am now at the local library and the computer here won't let me upload my image from my camera. Due to the 5 p.m. deadline, I am going to tell you about my research interest and describe the petals.

I am interested in researching the process of reading music and playing music.  Do drawing(painting) and story telling enhance learning to read and play music? I am a piano teacher and I have found art and storytelling can greatly increase a student's capacity to read and play well. This is particularly true with students who have a problem focusing.  I would like to research this more formally. 

Here are my invisible daisy petals:  reading music,  playing music, storytelling, art, imagination, spatial perception, spatial sense, touch, sight, sound, kinesthetics, education, psychology,  neurology,  fear, trust,  feelings, feelings, FEELINGS!

I regret that I couldn't post my drawing. In it's stead, I am adding a photo of a painting of a flower that I did that is already up on the computer.  I will add the other drawing next week at the ischool if I can. 

 

Cynthia Dempster

 

 

Here is the daisy drawing added Monday September 30. Cynthia

 

Biases against and for audiobooks

Like a few other people in the class, I have completely changed the topic for my research proposal; more specifically, I want to focus on library members' perceptions about the value of audiobooks compared to the researched and speculated value of audiobooks. However, this focus does not really seem focused at all the more that I think about it. I'm having trouble narrowing in on what the most interesting aspects of audiobooks are probably because I personally think that there are some many interesting aspects of them. Thus, for now, my daisy is truly bedraggled and in need of some tidying.

Nevertheless, I will try to articulate what the facets of my frame are, and how these facets relate to my broad area of interest, which is trying to understand what different peoples' perceptions of the value of audiobooks are.

• libraries
• A couple of perspectives that I would like to look at are library members and employees, which are of particular interest to me because of the very limited research done with the subject audiobooks by librarians (Moyer, 2012)
• audiobooks
• learning styles
• Auditory learners seem like people who many benefit from audiobooks (Rubery, 2008)
• literacy
• the effects of audiobooks on literacy (Winn, et al., 2006)
• voice acting
• how people feel about actors v. lay people recording audiobooks (Rubery, 2008)
• group reading
• book clubs as places where people could really benefit from audiobooks e.g. can pause for discussion during a session
• Victorian reading
• hearth reading, the phonograph, and Victorian narrative: how the audiobook stems from and exceeds the expectations of Victorian ideas about listening to books (Rubery, 2008)
• poetry
• some poetry is meant to be heard rather than read (Rubery, 2008)
• disabilities
• rich history of audiobooks being used by people with disabilities (Rubery, 2008)
• reading methods
• active v. passive reading: is it possible to actively listen to an audiobook in the way that people actively read (Moyer, 2012)

Although I have yet to narrow down my research interest into a research question, I am leaning toward a descriptive or narrative question because I want to articulate what different peoples' opinions about audiobooks are and I want to speculate as to why those opinions are what they are. More specifically, I want to know why many people seem to have a negative bias toward audiobooks--a speculation that I have made based on some statistics and anecdotal evidence--and how librarians can change that bias because there seems to be so many positive aspects of audiobooks--e.g. they support non-traditional learning styles and allow for multitasking. Any help to try and narrow my focus and find my "hook" would be really appreciated! 

Thank you : )

 

References

Moyer, J. E. (2012, Summer; 2013/9). Audiobooks and e-books: A literature review.51, 340+. 

Rubery, M. (2008). Play it again, sam weller: New digital audiobooks and old ways of reading. Journal of Victorian Culture, 13(1), 58-79. doi: 10.3366/E1355550208000088 

Winn, B. D., Skinner, C. H., Oliver, R., Hale, A. D., & Ziegler, M. (2006). The effects of listening while reading and repeated reading on the reading fluency of adult learners. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(3), 196-205. 

The Future of Online Education

So here's my attempt at the 'bedraggled' daisy exercise. Went old school with the notebook sketch.

I've tried my hand at a number of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), the smaller scale (often paid but really affordable) crash courses (like the iOS, Android development ones on Udemy) and read widely about the explosion of these across the globe. They could definitely game-changing and a potential disruptive force to the conventional educational model that we have come to take for granted.

What I've been fascinated by, for sometime now, is what kind of course (definitely didn't intend that pun haha) these kinds of platforms will take, what obstacles and impeding forces they would have to overcome and finally, if our world would necessarily be transformed for the better, the more mainstream these become.

Getting through these courses/programs on one's own is difficult without the lack of a peer group to study and interact with physically. This engagement/motivation issue is one that might need to be addressed. And for online education to gain further traction, some degree of legitimacy needs to be established in terms of the actually learning and skills obtained and if these are transferable to real work scenarios (from the point of view of employers and hiring practices).

It's also interesting to analyze why people take such courses in the first place. Is it just passive, casual education similar to reading a book or watching a documentary OR to obtain tangible skills to develop a competitive advantage at work OR even just to find work in the first place.

And finally what the large scale adoption of online education means for the future. Will it foster a culture of curiosity, awareness, learning and sharing? Will it empower those who do not have the means and access (financially or otherwise) to what is now a privilege but really should be a right? Or will it ultimately fizzle out without having the kind of impact that it could?

All questions I'd like think about and maybe incorporate into some kind of research study :)

Not-So-Bedraggled Daisy

As I began the assignment for this blog posting, the word ‘bedraggled’ began to frustrate me a bit.  I realized that imagining a bedraggled daisy had already begun to make me feel rather uninspired about the project as a whole.  So instead, I went in search of a perfectly healthy-looking daisy, to start the process off on a slightly more encouraging note. 

It was an interesting exercise, mainly because it allowed me to plot out some search terms that proved fruitful in sifting through online databases for relevant articles.  I actually found it difficult to stop at just 8 daisy petals!  It also allowed me to situate my research topic among theoretical frameworks, both to align myself with, and others I hope to subvert.

I’m still having difficulty narrowing my research interest down into a specific question, but hopefully this more streamlined approach to the literature review will facilitate this process.

Daisy Image Source: 

DeHaven, D. (Photoshop). (Year Unknown). Retrieved September 26, 2013, from: http://hosted.wwell.net/debdehaven/pi7/toledaisies/