April 16, 2012, [MD]
I began last week to do a "weekly review", and it seemed like a useful thing to continue. This week, I've been at AERA 2012, so this will be a mix of what I did before I left on Thursday, and some of the notes I've taken at the conference (which is still going on for another day).
Readings
I continued reading several papers by Paul Bouchard at the University of Concordia about adult self-directed learners, and two critiques of human capital theory. In total, I now have high-level notes on 13 of his papers on his author page.
I revisited Joe Corneli and Charlie Danoff's work on "paragogy", and I've read eight of their papers. I still need to read more, including Howard Rheingold and his group's work on peeragogy, which builds closely on paragogy, but I find many of the ideas very interesting.
I also read
AERA
I spent several days at AERA, and used the wiki to take notes at some of the sessions. However, the daily schedule here is quite exhausting, and there were also sessions that were not that relevant to my research, lack of battery etc, which meant that I did not take notes of that many sessions. So far I have [Aera12:start|notes from four sessions], including two about self-regulated learning, one about wikis in education, and one about computer-supported collaborative learning.
I also had a chance to meet with Ryan Muller, another user of Researchr, and we had a great four-hour walk through Stanley park and Granville Island discussing possible future ideas for Researchr, Open Access publishing, etc. I also met with Heather Morrison and Heather Piwowar, both very active in Open Access from different perspectives, and had very exciting conversations with them - expect to see more about that in the future.
Researchr
As usual, I couldn't quite avoid stealing in some time to work on Researchr, and I made 15 commits.
In addition to the weekly review, I felt the need for a space to keep unstructured notes and ideas for future processing. I thought it would be really nice if I could capture the context in which these notes had been made, and I used a modification of the cleanup script I introduced last week to automatically output a list of the articles and pages I had been working on during the last 24 hours, as a proxy for my "mental context" at the time of taking the notes. This script isn't quite finished yet, but here is an example of how it works.
I spent quite a lot of time implementing "semantic" search and trackbacks with proper titles for articles pages, which I wrote up on my blog, and finally I made a bunch of minor fixes, cleanups etc, including making the clip and clip-again scripts more robust and with nicer output.
Stian
Stian Håklev April 16, 2012 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus