Week 12 Blogging Question: The Long And Winding Road

To be honest, my research question hasn't quite "evolved" since my first SSHRC Outline Assignment (oops). What the rest of the course material and blog posts did provide however, were various opportunities for me to prepare for the five sections of my Final Research Proposal. It really helped in this final stretch when I had to hammer everything down and make sure I met all the requirements, that some of my blog posts and comments had all the answers I needed and something of a roadmap for the rest of paper.

I also found myself enjoying the idea of using the participant observation approach  - really embedding yourself into a culture in order to find the answers you're looking for. It feels like such an honest research method which really gets to the heart of things. You're not simply a passive observer or reading various papers to figure out what's going on, you're actually in the "line of fire" so to speak (especially in relation to my research topic). I am grateful that this course has given me the opportunity to explore this method further.

Unfortunately, I decided to stop wrestling with my research question a while back, in an effort to get a jump start on the final assignment. But my blogmates should know, that our blog was truly treasure trove of useful information and ideas that really helped pave the way to the finish line. Thanks guys! 

Week 12

My research question has remained more or less the same since the beginning of the course, but it's final incarnation was: "I am interested in exploring the ways that girls and young women are now publishing, sharing, and remixing content on the Internet, and using these outlets as a means of creative self-expression and sociopolitical engagement comparable to feminist zinemaking
practices from the early 1990s to the present."

I have found myself becoming more and more interested in arts informed research and visual methodologies. Because I am hoping to study zine-making by young women and its relation to content creation on the internet, my methodology is largely textual based. However, in a larger scope I think it would be really interesting to study the imagery from both of these mediums, the use of collage principles. I'm still unsure of the best way to do this, especially since I feel like I would be better qualified to this with a Fine Arts background, but mine is in English Literature. 

At the present, however, I am also fairly interested in finding more about this study: http://the-toast.net/2016/03/28/grant-proposal-i-would-like-to-study-the-effects-of-extreme-chill-on-my-body/

Week 12

My research question(s) have not changed since my SSHRC proposal.  Because of my background in social work, I am hardwired to recognize inequalities and work towards social justice.  I felt that if I were to move forward with this research proposal in real life, it would have to sit comfortably with the same values and practices I hold as a (former) social worker.

What became more obvious as I worked through this proposal are the many similarities between librarianship and social work.  This realization led me to grounding my research within the social work paradigm of Anti-Oppressive theory even though I could not find any literature applying this framework to librarianship.  This led me to proposing the fairly unorthodox method of participatory research as a layer to the qualitative survey and questionnaire design of my SSHRC proposal.
While participatory research is uncommon (possibly non-existent) in information science, my literature review as well as the principles of Anti-Oppressive social work research both pointed to the need for ground up involvement of people living with autism and other disabilities.

Although I have no intention of moving forward with research in my professional career, the importance of research is not lost on me.  Research shapes our lives in seemingly invisible ways and I'm confident that my classmates who move forward with research professionally will find new ways to expand our knowledge and improve the world around us.

Cheers INF1240!  It's been a slice :)

Week 12: The Long and Winding Road (Althea)

My research question has mostly stayed the same from when I did the outline. It's only been modified to include a focus on the kinds of information sources that my research will be studying. I feel like the idea of narrowing and focusing my scope but also bringing in more details was what I found most difficult during the process. I realized that more research directions/questions sprung up as I dug deeper and I had to keep telling myself to keep to the research topic and not deviate from the original.

I also realized writing out my research methodology really helped me think through my research methodology and identify little details that I would not have otherwise. For example, it would be quite difficult to narrow my scope to focus only on individual travelers because they would not be alone if I were around to participate.

Week 12

I've broadened my research question in order to better understand the library as a whole before I try and move in to look at any single sub group. I've also learned more about different methods of mapping, including the idea of mental mapping (asking participants to draw an area, or their pathway through an area, by memory). I’ve also thought more about the ethics process, and I’ve realized that I find research ethics very interesting (as sad as that may seem). I’m also more interested in the research that is happening at the library I work at, and I’m thinking about getting involved.

Week 12

I find that my research question has become a lot more focussed. I am interested in what barrier (invisible or otherwise) exist to keep vulnerable populations, particularly "Newcomers" to Canada, from using the sources available to them. The more I read up on it, the deeper the understanding was. For instance, TPL does not do much in the way of public advertising. If resources are not advertised, then how will they be known? TPL relies on word-of-mouth, so it's not what you know, but rather whom.

Can any of you think of any barriers that keep those who need social programs the most from getting the assistance readily available to them?

Week 12

Generally, I have a hard time narrowing my focus. I appreciate knowing the big picture, the grand scheme of things, the overarching goal. However, sometimes it gets difficult to focus on the smaller individual tasks that are needed to achieve the larger goal. I would argue that as a society, we all share in this problem. At the intersection of social media and social justice, you'll often find folks pointing out large systemic issues (racism, ableism, sexism). Yet I find it much less common to see posts about the smaller tasks that need to be taken to try and combat these issues.

My tendency to make my focus too broad is one that was apparent in my original research question. I want to know about information seeking behaviour in university students - I want to know why they look for answers in certain places, why websites are hard to use, and I want to know how to fix it. What I've realized over the course of this semester is that I can't answer all of these questions with one study. As a result, my research question has become increasingly narrow. I've chosen less methods to use, I've specified a location for the study to be conducted (at a specific university campus), and I've limited what data I'm hoping to collect from the study. For this preliminary study, I'm focusing on figuring out why students under-utilize official university websites when they're looking for academic information. And even though this scope feels too small, I know that it has to be done this way - one step at a time.

Week 12: the long and winding road

My research question has mostly stayed the same, but has been refined in terms of methods and theoretical approach. As a result of there not being a lot of previous research on my specific topic, I have turned to information studies for theories/methodological approaches on how to conduct my research. I have come to find that this approach has given my research a stronger foundation to base my study.

 

I have looked at scholars such as Star, using her "Ethnography of Infrastructure" to establish the information structure that exists on anti-doping in the Canadian Sport System, and Sonnenwald's method of "Information Horizon" to establish athletes' information resources. Instead of focusing on anti-doping articles, I have looked at how I can use information scholars and theories as a base for my research. Focusing on my research  as informational has helped develop it, and has made me excited to hopefully pursue this study in the near future. 

Week 12 Eleni Pallotta

My research questions has evolved several times during the course.  My original question was a completely different one than the research question I am using now.  After meeting with Alan, we concluded that it was too simplistic of a question to use as a research question for SSHRC.  Therefore, I decided to focus my research on the Toronto Public Library (TPL) system since that is the library system I am currently working for and would like to continue working for as a librarian once I graduate.  What I found when doing some secondary research is that LGBTQ-related books for children are often rare to find in libraries and, therefore, children of LGBTQ parents and their families are underrepresented in many library collections.  I decided to see if this research was true in relation to TPL’s picture book collection.  What I found was that it was difficult to find books through general subject searches such as “gay couples,” and “LGBT families” because many LGBTQ-related pictures books do not have any subject searchable words attached to them.  It is only when I typed in exact titles of books that they came up in the online catalogue. 

When I discussed this with Alan via email, he agreed that this information could make a good research question but also said to consider interviewing staff at TPL responsible for collection development (for qualitative data).  This would be a second method of data collection on top of my quantitative data collection where I plan to use an Excel sheet to document how many books show up through subject search vs. exact title and how spread out they are across the branches.  Therefore, my current research question is: Is the Toronto Public Library system’s LGBTQ-related picture books easily accessible to communities across all 100 branches through equal distribution of materials in branches and through subject searches using their website’s online catalogue.

The two questions I am still wrestling with is: what LGBTQ-related subject search words (such as “gay couples” and "lgbt families”) should I use?  Also, how many subject search words should I use to ensure I have a big enough sample size?  I would love your opinion on this, fellow bloggers!

Week 8 - Open Topic

A lot of the topics that I find myself interested in are related to youth or children, and after learning a bit more about the ethics protocols related to research I am interested in finding out about what ethical ways there are for working with children, since they are considered a vulnerable population. I am also very interested in exploring methods of visual data, and thus I think that examining drawings by children is an extremely interesting and valuable research tool.
My boyfriend found a book at a thrift store a few years ago that presented fascinating drawings created by children held in Nazi concentration camps. There were frank depictions of death and suffering, but also hallmarks of typical children's drawings such as flowers and rainbows. I always enjoy children's art, but these were especially fascinating because of the context they were created in.
Clearly, all the children who created the drawings were in a stressful and vulnerable situation at the time the drawings were created, and they would now also be adults or even deceased, so the value in this book is studying the art works as artifacts. Thus the question still remains about how to conduct research with children in the present.

(via: https://kurioso.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/everyone-was-hungry.jpg)

Week 11

Since I am doing an LIS and ARM double concentration, this issue has come up in many of my courses. Archivists are still trying to figure out the implications of storing so much data on the internet, and I even wrote a term paper last semester about using Facebook and Instagram as informal personal archives, and the challenges of its preservation. In the end, I had very few viable ideas for the preservation of this type of information, and there was not a whole lot of literature available to provide guidance.

Because my research for my project will be mainly through observation of online communities, this is still a big issue for me. In terms of documenting that observation, I may be taking a lot of notes, as well as screen shots. But in order to ensure that the data is made available for future use, the best solution that I can think of at this point is the print it out onto paper, and store it under the proper archival protocols. This is not, however, an especially helpful solution to the larger problem we have as a society with digital records. There is simply too much information out there to think about printing it all out and finding places to store it all. 

Week 11

Swimming (more like drowning...) in documents is an issue that I think crosses into most professions and is something that we can all understand.

It just so happens that my neurofeedback experience comes to mind this week again, as I was a key player in the documentation preservation process.  When I wasn't with clients, you could find me going through boxes of old files and inputting their contents into an excel spreadsheet.   Legally we are required to keep full client records on site for 10 years, at which point myself and other staff members would input the old file data into our computer and the files would be taken off site.

While all staff members were not required to, I would also keep a notebook of session notes for my personal reference.   Keeping a hardcopy notebook of sessions is best practice for social workers and it is something I try to keep up in my professional and academic activities.  

(Pro tip: you should all do it too.  It makes you look super professional and your memory is not as good as you think it is.)

I don't expect to produce anything as meaningful or interesting as Alexander Graham Bell, but on the off chance I do - those notebooks would be available for future generations to explore and admire. The more likely outcome will be the burning of those useless notebooks as they will contain no useful information at all.  

In my research proposal I'm looking at services and accessibility of TPL to the autistic community.  If I were actually conducting this research, I would keep a notebook of the process and I would input this data into a spreadsheet and/or other digital formats.  This would include notes on any interviews and phone calls to autism organizations in Toronto,  questionnaires/surveys (possibly even drafts), this blog and of course the data collected.  

I do think it's very important to preserve information, notes and data.  Obviously making them digital is a step in the right direction, but I don't think digital records/documents are a stable, stand alone resource.  That's because the technological future (as well as the future in general) is so uncertain. The best way to ensure preservation is to keep copies of documents and data in multiple formats and locations - including hard copies.

In my lifetime I have seen many forms of technology emerge and become obsolete (and I'm only 31). If the information contained in the documents/data is important enough, it will be updated to new formats for use with new technologies.   Additionally, I have learned that technology can be unreliable and is no substitute for actual papers and books.  Am I pessimistic Luddite?  Almost definitely, yes.  But I stand by my methods because when the power is out, my information is still accessible.

Week 11: Documentation and Experience (Althea)

I have decided to use ethnographic research as the method to study how information glut may affect the traveler's experience. Some kinds of records and data that I can foresee producing include voice recordings of interviews and webpages/social media from which my participants collect travel information from.

If I had the time and resources, I would get the interviews transcribed so that I can have hard copies of the interviews. However, voice recordings are usually deleted once the project is completed, especially since it's stipulated in the consent form we sign with participants before beginning fieldwork, so there will not be a question of how I'll have to preserve them. I know there is doubt about whether deleted files really get deleted, and studies have shown that they are still retrievable, but I believe the ethics protocol expects us to take reasonable care for such issues. I do not know if it's reasonable to expect that someone would use a software to comb through my computer for the files after I have deleted them. Besides, this is why we should always place a password lock on our computer, and if we were to keep soft-copy of research related documents on the computer, to always keep a computer by our sides (at least, that's what I'm taught to do).

Since the web pages and social media are publicly accessible, these will probably not have to be deleted. If I choose to keep and preserve them, I will probably make screenshots and put them in a folder, both on my computer and in the cloud, and print them out as hard copies to be kept safely. My ideas about the preservation of research materials are largely influenced by what I have been taught in anthropology research courses. My professor then had always emphasized that we should make hard copies if we ever want to keep anything permanently because digital objects and formats become obsolete.

However, I have also discussed the issue of digital obsolescence with a friend who firmly believes in the prowess of technology. He told me that people will be able to create technology that will allow us to convert file formats or read older file formats just like they did before, just like how we can now convert VHS into DVDs.

Week 11

What struck me about this week's blog post is the "theoretical tension here between experience, memory, and the sharing of knowledge". Too often, research places the greatest value on data - anything that is measurable and quantifiable. However, this is often done at the expense of preserving stories, and the breadth of knowledge that can be derived from them. I very strongly believe that there is invaluable knowledge that can be derived from experiences. Experiences, taken holistically, provide insight and information that no amount of quantitative data, surveys, or charts, could ever hope to provide.

While some research methods,  ethnography in particular, do leave space for stories, there is more often than not a reduction of the knowledge that is truly available. There are, as always, challenges that come from studies that produce stories as their results, and use these stories to communicate messages. A recent example that comes to mind is a study that was run by a university - the intention was to gather stories from folks who live in the surrounding neighborhood. However, only clips of long interviews were made available, and it is arguable that specific snippets were chosen to paint the university in a positive light. In this case, the stories are data that are preserved digitally, yet this does not protect them from targeted editing. This may lead to folks in 2112 receiving an inaccurate perception of what the research was actually about, and what the stories were actually trying to say. I suppose this reason, the vulnerability that collections of stories/data face when digitized, is why I still have a soft spot for also storing things in hard copy (however problematic this may be!).

Week 11

My raw data from my research will come in the form of video. I’m planning on taking that video and turning it into maps that show the paths that people take when visiting the library. I think ultimately it might be best to delete the videos after turning them into maps in order to protect the identities of the participants. With permission from the participants I’d like to make the maps available on the library shared drive in order for future librarians to be able to access it.

It would be nice to be able to document the thought processes of the library users, and their goals when visiting the library. My research does not focus as much on this because the main concern is for the physical use of the library.

Week 10: Information Experiments

Karl's post about the Justin Bieber cover reminded me of something that happened years ago with my daughter Madeline that has since fascinated me. As someone who rarely listens to popular radio, and considers her tastes to be fairly non-mainstream, I was surprised to hear my 18-month-old, mostly pre-verbal daughter clearly singing the song "Baby" by Justin Bieber. My mother actually recognized it, and looked up the music video on YouTube, which she then played for Madeline, who immediately began dancing and singing along. For at least a year after that Madeline would ask to watch "BeeBee" (a hybrid of "baby" and "Beiber-- I know, she's a genius) on at least daily basis. What struck me then was the sheer power of a pop song to get stuck in your head, no matter your age. I realize that "Baby" probably being blared out of car and shop speakers wherever we went up until that point, so it would have been nearly impossible to avoid it. But there were songs that I had played over and over again within our own home that have never resonated with Madeline, and what is it about that particular type of song that makes it stick around?
Clearly there is some sort of formula that must work, since the music industry continues to pump out and profit from these types of songs, and Owen Pallet penned a great essay about the musical theory behind Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" in 2014. There are even failed attempts at manufacturing them, like Rebecca Black's infamous "Friday", although at 91 million views and change, maybe that example is not such a "fail" after all.
But what I am interested in studying is whether or not certain songs can have a universal appeal, regardless of taste or age. In other words, is taste simply learned? Ideally there would be some kind of neurological component to this experiment to see how the brain would react, in case it differed from what the subjects would report. The independent variable in this study would be the song choice, and the dependent variable could be that we could play a cover of the 1st song by an alternative, less mainstream band to see the difference. So basically, what I want to find out is: does everyone secretly love Justin Bieber?

Week 9: Artifacts

There are so many artifacts that I would love to research that it is hard for me to choose. However, I think that I would like to explore the satirical news and media content site, Clickhole, which I have already mentioned in another blog post.
Created by the people from The Onion, content-wise Clickhole functions like a mix between Buzzfeed and Upworthy, and pretty much any other contemporary "news" site that pops up in your typical Facebook newsfeed. What makes it so fascinating to me is not only how consistently it makes me literally LOL, but the way that it so perfectly taps into the zeitgeist of contemporary internet culture. The format of The Onion is now out-of-date because people don't consume news the way that they used to, whereas Clickhole simply could not have existed until recently because of its very specific format and language. I would like to study what exactly it is that makes it so funny (if that is even possible), and the ways that it uses language and even metadata (i.e. #wow) to both blend in with and subvert its very format. It would also be interesting to observe the comments, to see who is or is not IN on the joke.

Week 10: Information Experiments (Althea)

The example that I have chosen to discuss here is not a conventional experiment but is definitely one related to information. Datta, Tsachantz and Datta (2015) who carried out the project and wrote the paper called it “Automated Experiments on Ad Privacy Settings: A Tale of Opacity, Choice, and Discrimination”. Google had come out with Ad settings as a way to allow users exercise some control over the profiles Google creates on users, and Datta, Tschantz and Datta (2015) wanted to find out how user behaviors, Google's ads and Ad Settings interact, and created an automated tool called AdFisher that can run browser based experiments and can conduct statistical analysis. 

The main idea that is that when a user changes settings in Ad settings, they also exert some choice over the profiles Google creates on users and the search results should reflect this change.

Datta, Tsachantz and Datta (2015) determined that there were three privacy properties that could support their methodology for finding causal relationships and they were: 1) Opacity, 2) Choice, and 3) Discrimination. They created two groups for statistical analysis, one of which receives experimental treatment  while the other remains a control, and other variables were changed accordingly to the property they were analyzing. I will describe their experimental variables for analyzing opacity below:

They decided to examine how much transparency/opacity Ad settings provided by checking whether visiting websites linked with certain interests could cause changes in the ads shown that is not reflected in the settings. The interests they chose to cover included but are not limited to, substance abuse, disabilities, infertility.

Null hypothesis: The two groups with the same ad settings receives ads from the same distribution despite being subjected to different experimental treatments

Independent variable: Visiting websites associated with certain interests

Dependent variable(s): Interests listed on Ad settings pages and the ads being displayed

Controlled variable: The control group did not visit the related sites

Week 11 Eleni Pallotta

Since most of my research will be done online through TPL's online catalogue, I do not expect there to be much research that cannot be easily documented and kept over a long period of time.  I plan to use Excel sheets to document research so that can easily be stored in the cloud (i.e. Dropbox) where it is most likely safe from computer crashes.  As for the interview part of my research (the more epistemology aspect), transcripts of the interviews done between myself and TPL librarians can be typed on a Microsoft Word document and also put into the cloud.  Furthermore, idealistically if my research was to be approved and implemented, depending on the results discovered, the TPL catalogue might change to reflex my findings.  In this sense, the online catalogue (for LGBTQ children's books) will always reflex my findings because changes would be made to have subject searches which were not in place before.

On a totally unrelated note, this week's topic reminded me a lot of a movie I recently watched, Hector and the Search for Happiness (which is also a book, just FYI!).  In the movie, Hector travels to China to search for happiness and tries to document what makes people happy.  I think it relates to this week's topic because happiness can arguably be something that is ultimately not measurable and unable to be document as concrete research to prove something.  It reminded me of David Philip's performance-based research and how it is very unique to the research and academic world.

(Retrieved from: http://dailynova.org/movie-review-hector-search-happiness/)

Week 11: Documentation and Experience

The kinds of records that my project will produce will be ethnographic. For my proposed research I intend to take intensive fieldnotes, photographic inventory, interviews/transcripts, and collections of documents. From an anthropological background, I have learned to store my research for physical documents, in a locked drawer or box, and the digital documents stored on a external drive, encrypted with a passcode for access.

For ethical concerns, as I will be dealing with National Team athletes, and a somewhat sensitive topic, I do intend to keep my participants anonymous. Therefore I will need a document that distinguishes a code and pseudo names to ensure that each participant’s identity will be kept private, which I will plan to store in an encrypted file. Along with this document I will keep the consent forms. While I could have an option to destroy the contents of this project after it is completed, I have yet to decide whether or not I will do this. I have done this in the past, and I am not sure if it was worth it. I might give the participants the option of whether or not they would like the data they provide me to be destroyed after a certain amount of time. This way I can adhere to my participants needs.

Week 10

I was having some trouble thinking of an experiment for this week and over the weekend my youngest cousin mentioned some of his friends have abandoned their smartphone for flip phones. This got me thinking about technology and how inescapable it is, especially for young people.

I worked for a while as a neurofeedback trainer. What is that you may ask?  Well, using the clients EEG (measured by placing electrodes on the person's head), we would target brain waves to increase/decrease and 'train' their brain to do so using visual and auditory cues, biofeedback (heart and breathing rates), and strategies taught to them during their sessions.  (If you want to know more about it, just drop me a line.  It's a pretty awesome process.)

Now the experiment I'm proposing here would be very expensive and time consuming.  So let's assume that I'm the richest woman in the world and I want nothing more than to improve the education process.  

I would select an average high school, and with the consent of all participants of course, I would have the students hooked up with electrodes, heart rate monitors and breathing monitors (it's really not as invasive as it sounds).  

At this school 2 classes would be randomly selected and I would record their baseline EEG and biofeedback.  Then the real fun begins!

One class would have students use only electronic devices for note taking/assignments (independent variable) and another class would exclusively use paper and pens for note taking/assignments (control).

The dependent variable would be the EEG and biofeedback data.  I think I can safely assume that the students who use electronic devices would should neurological and biological patterns indicating a decrease in focus from their baselines, whereas the control group will show equal or improved focus from their baselines overall. 

But I'm not insanely wealthy researcher, so I guess we'll never know for sure. 

Week 11 Blogging Question: Documentation and Experience

In my project, most records generated will be digitally logged. They will come in the form of recordings and electronic transcripts detailing the amount of harassment experienced by female gamers, as well as data on skill level which will be pulled from existing online public records on both the harasser and the harassed. If I were looking to preserve my findings, then I feel that the best method to do so would be to create a pen-and-paper copy of all the observations made during the research process. Preserving my results digitally will be trickier, as it is probably safe to assume that in the future, any particular means of data storage we employ now will be completely outdated (just look at floppy disks!).

But of course, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Storing my data on a cloud, as well as on a USB drive will probably be a safe bet in preserving at least one record of my findings past ten years. Additionally, any recordings made should be deleted after being checked over (to verify the harassment), as players are not aware that they are being recorded for research purposes (and therefore have not given consent for their matches and conversations to be stored and possibly used for purposes outside of research). Furthermore, the appropriate steps to eliminate all traces of the recordings from hard drives will be taken. Plenty of care will also go into making sure players remain anonymous after both harassment and skill level have been assessed and recorded. 

Week Eleven: Sacred Thoughts

Anything that is not tangible is impossible to document.

Stream-of-conscious thinking, the way you come from an idea to a solution, things I call "micro-ideas" (the initial inspiration behind the more polished thought) are all things that are impossible to document. Perhaps some day, our brains will be hooked up to some kind of machine that can document every single thought we have (enter Orwellian philosophical discussion). Until then, we cannot possibly document these things. However interesting it may be to understand how a thought becomes an idea, I am grateful that these instant synapses are intangible and, at least for now, "undocumentable".

Week 10: Information-Related Experiment

Personally, I need white noise to concentrate on my studies. Some need complete silence. Others can write the next best-selling book in a busy coffee shop! 

If I were to research anything related to information, I would study the reading comprehension of students when given a passage of literature they have never seen before to read, and are then asked to answer questions relating to reading comprehension on the passage (name of lead character, antagonist, any tribulations the main character has had to overcome, etc) in either two situations: total silence, or with background "white noise". 

A group of students would be randomly chosen then assigned to read the passage in either of the settings. 

The control group are the students who are in a room with no white noise.

The variable group are the students who are in a room with white noise. 

I would be interested to see which group of students performs better! 

Week 10

Generally my research interests are sociologically based, and I like to look at how communities act over long periods of time without manipulating any variables. I would be interested in learning about how high students who are removed from regular classes due to behaviour would react to a different way of being graded. The experiment would require the teachers to have non-judgemental one on one conversations with the students about the work they hand in instead of offering formal letter grades. The only feedback that these students would get would be these conversations, but the work would be separately graded by another teacher. I would want to see if the performance of these students improves over time (the dependent variable). The independent variable would be the method of giving these students feedback. I wouldn’t place any controls on the experiment. A control group might be ideal, but might create some ethical problems, and these students might also influence each other when discussing the feedback they receive.

Week 10

The study that I'm proposing for this course's final assignment would be considered an information experiment. The purpose of my proposed study is to gain insight into how post secondary students engage with academic information resources. In particular, I'm interested in how efficient students are at navigating institution produced websites to locate certain pieces of academic information. My experiment would consist of a series of one on one interviews where a student is asked a series of questions about their information seeking behaviour. Observation sessions would also be set up for these students, where they would be asked to perform certain tasks with an information resource (e.g. find a course timetable on the Registrar's Office's website) while their clicks are measured quantitatively and qualitatively.

My proposed study would be considered a traditional experiment as it would occur in a controlled setting. There are many variables that would need to be controlled for when recruiting participants for the study. Some of these include: student's year of study, familiarity with the information resource, comfort level with technology. Some of the independent variables of this study include: the list of tasks that the participant is asked to complete, the information resource (e.g. which website) that is used, the technological resources available to the participant (e.g. no use of google). Some of the dependent variables include: how many clicks it takes the participant to complete the task, whether or not the participant is able to complete the tasks successfully.

Armed with the results and information learned from this first experiment, changes could be made to the information resource in question, and a second round of this experiment could be held to see if these improvements made an impact. Essentially, I want to learn information through an experiment, that will help facilitate better access to information.

Week 10 Blogging Question: Information Experiments

In the same vein as Alan's example of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's experimental track "Take Five", I also want to use an example of musicians manipulating variables that we would probably see as essential in order to produce a great song. For Brubeck and his bandmates, this independent variable was time signature, and for Kurt Hugo Schneider and Kina Grannis, it was the instruments they chose to use. Instead of going for traditional strings or percussion instruments for their cover of Justin Bieber's What Do You Mean, Kurt and Kina opted to use things you can find around the house like keys, a garbage can, a coin, and so forth. Of course, the dependent variable in this example was the performance. Would it sound good?

You be the judge:

As for me, I loved it. Not only was this a creative way to cover a hit song, it also ended up sounding sublime. In terms of controls, I would say that everything from the lyrics, to the melody and rhythm remained the same. In other words: same track (except better!). 

Week 10: Information Experiments

In the project “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester” Foster and Gibson write about their ethnographic project on finding out more on how undergraduate students at the University of Rochester conduct research, their habits, and library needs. I believe this is an information-related experiment because Foster and Gibson are “interested in how students write their research papers and what services, resources, and facilities would be most useful to them,” (Foster and Gibson 2007, p. 5).

In this study, these are the variables I would identify:

Independent – undergraduate students (never changes)

Dependent – How students’ research/student practices (dependent on the students) and how the librarians encouraged help through advertising, deciding on what they could do to improve student participation in librarian assistance by testing timing, encouraging students through free stuff (cookies/coffee), and using different outreaching techniques (e.g. IM, reference desk, etc.) (dependent on the librarians and how the students use these) 

Controlled – the space of the library (a controlled space that never changes)

I would see this as an experiment because they are testing how undergraduate students do their research and how they can help improve this as librarians. This in particular is a unique experiment because it does not fall into traditional standards. First and foremost it is an ethnographic study, researching student habits. However, I think it can be considered an experiment because it has the independent variable of the undergraduate students, the controlled space of the library, and finally the dependent variables of the researchers changing the ways they reach out to students and discovering what is most effective. In the end they discovered that the best technique for helping students was through face-to-face contact (2007, p.19). They also came up with a list of ways for improving their library to create a “student-centered academic library,” (2007, p. 83).

Of course, this was based on only part of their study, as there are many dependent variables that they include. I chose this specific experiment because I liked that it took an ethnographic approach and it shows that experiments can appear in more than just a scientific study.

Resource: 

Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. L. (2007). Studying students: The undergraduate research project at the University of Rochester. Assoc of Cllge & Rsrch Libr.

Week 10 Eleni Pallotta

This week, I thought I would share the results of a research study I conducted with a group in my undergraduate Research Methods course.  We looked at Opinions on Formal vs. Informal Assessment within the Field of Early Childhood Education (ECE)

•           Early Childhood being ages 0-8
•           Formal Assessment meaning standardized tests, quizzes, etc.
•           Informal Assessment meaning, for example, assessing a child on their counting skills while they are at play in their classroom during play time

Basically, the purpose of this project was to compare and analyze the different perspectives of ECE profressionals and Early Childhood Studies (ECS) students’ views on formal and informal assessment for children aged 0-8.  In other words, we wanted to see if professionals who have a lot of experience in the field have a different perspective on how to assess children vs. students’ perspectives based mostly on what they learn in school about assessment.

•          Our Independent Variable was Amount of Experience (i.e. ECS student vs. ECE professional)
•          Our Dependent Variable was Opinions/Views on Assessment
•      Our Controlled Variable was the field of Early Childhood Education (because only people who work with children within this age group qualified for the research study)
•         Our Hypothesis: We hypothesized that the amount of experience or years (independent variable) working with children in the field of early childhood would influence the subjects’ opinions (dependent variable) and how they view formal vs. informal assessments used for children between the ages of 0-8.

We collected data through an online survey which we sent out through email to ECE professionals and ECS students.  We found that:

•          Our sample size wasn’t big enough to produce a statistically significant difference in opinions on formal vs. informal assessment

However, we did find some other information such as:

•          ECS students seemed to believe that the age of the child determines the major benefits the use of standardized assessment can have on children 0-8 years old, while ECE professionals seemed to believe that formal and informal testing used together determines the major benefits the use of standardized testing can have on children 0-8 years old (qualitative).
•          We also found that more ECE professionals considered other aspects when providing their reasoning for their ratings including disabilities and cultural differences in comparison with ECS students.

I wanted to use this example because I think it demonstrates that while not all findings in a research project directly support your hypothesis, the data you collect may provide you with information you were not expecting to find…in this case, for example, the difference in HOW, WHEN, and with WHAT AGE GROUP different forms of assessment should be used.  I think it is good to keep your mind open to finding information other than what you are "expecting" to find as a researcher.  

(Retrieved from: http://www.parenting-journals.com/2150/helping-your-child-prepare-for-tests/)