Jingyu EDUC500

Walking with video is a phenomenological research method that entails walking with and recording participants as they experience, talk, and show their material, immaterial, and social environments. In Pink’s case, she walked with her participants around a community garden on several occasions. She also video-recorded their walk as her participants guided her through the site and explained to her their involvement and experiences in the garden project. Her participants’ experiences of the place are socially negotiated, and yet the interactions and behaviours are individualised and personal. Pink’s participants showed and told her about the community garden as they experienced it together. It gave Pink the opportunity to use her own sensory embodied experience, for example walking in the rain on wet grass or feeling the texture of brickweave path, to empathise with her participants’ experiences. With “place” being the central concept, the research would be able to “sensing place, placing...

This study explored users’ interaction with a chatbox interface in language learning. The interactions were videotaped, accompanied with individual interviews afterwards. What surprised me: The author started the introduction with conversations he/she had with the students about CSIEC, a chatbox system used in language learning. It is an interesting way to draw the audiences into a discussion about the user experience of a computer programme. I was intrigued by the way the author presented it and wanted to read more about it. Things to take away/questions The author used abbreviation from the start and did not explain what CSIEC is until the third page. I wonder what type of audience we should have in mind while writing our own thesis? Are we writing for someone with specific knowledge? If not, how might it affect the way we write? The author explicitly differentiated ethnographic methodology (whole process of research) and ethnographic research methods (an approach or technique to col...

This interview is unique in a way that Fidler interviewed another radio interviewer. The conversation can be roughly divided into the following three sections. Part 1 1. What was your first job in radio? Did you sort of accidentally backed into it in public radio? 2. How long did it take you to get good? 3. You're impersonating. It leaves you to feeling authentic. Is that what you think you were doing in this clip? 4. So who knocked that out of you? Did someone come along and just say ‘knock it off'? Did someone do that? Or did you just realise yourself that to actually start talking like a normal person? 5. Theory -- 10,000 hours to spend at anything to be seriously good. Do you think there's a similar kind of lesson there to you? 6. It's worse though if she's not mean, isn't it? The two of them were able to build on their shared experience, both being experienced interviewers, and eased into a conversation about Glass's journey as a radio interviewer. Usin...

I like how she developed from the research questions in her Master’s thesis to the ones in her PhD. I wonder if it would make a difference had she not fostered a relationship with the children during the learning experiences? Coming from a science background without teaching experiences, it is amazing that she could work with a large number of children in interviews. As Katie mentioned in the QnA, what impact would it have on her interaction/experiences with the children? Were there any ethical consideration/restrictions that potentially hindered her interaction with the children? If so, how did she cope with them?

Proposed question: I am studying the move to mass higher education in China,  because I want to find out its impact on marginalised groups such as pupils in rural areas and children of migrant workers,  in order to better understand their barriers to accessing higher education and the effectiveness of higher education policies,  so that we will know more about ways to improve fair access. The reading I'm using for this week's reflection: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-010-9384-9#citeas Marginson, S. (2011). Higher education in East Asia and Singapore: rise of the Confucian Model. Higher Education , 61 (5), 587–611. The author studied the phenomenon of massive growth of post-secondary students in the Asia-Pacific region since the 1990s, with a focus on China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam, since 1990s. Except for Vietnam and Japan, these systems exhibit a distinctive model of higher education more effective in so...

Bavelas’s chapter presented a number of dos and don’ts in the research process, each with interesting examples. Essentially, research comes in stages, and researchers need to do the appropriate at each stage. The process goes as follows: assume something is there; explore one’s own thoughts and the phenomenon; generate examples that have the same quality; actively selects events/phenomena to form a class; express yourself in analogues; discover proof of a model; check procedure details with pilot work; check the results through testing. A few quotes stood out. “Creativity in the early stages of science is a way of thinking that can be learned and practiced” (p.308).  However brilliant the initial idea, if one cannot build on it, the research isn’t going anywhere. This is a big “stop” moment for me and made me reflect on how I approached it so far. As a newcomer to the field of Education, there is so much to learn and every topic seems fascinating and worth pursuing. The diffic...