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Showing posts from March, 2018

Pink Walking with video

Walking with video is a phenomelogical research method. Researchers walk with their participants and filmed the process. It is argued that the method provides sensory experience and allows reserachers to learn empathetically about their participants' experience. The article starts with the author Pink's own walking with video experience in which she walked with a couple around a garden. The couple showed her some features of the garden. Sometimes the camera was drawn to the ground as the couple showed Pink the textures of the soil.                    According to Pink, the "video tour" increases "understandings of the identities, moralities, values, beliefs and concerns of the people they do their research with".  In addition, with the "walking with" audiovisual methods of research, participants better communicate their perception of their environment. Also the filmmaking draws people, things and sensory experiences toget...

Summary and response to reading “Group Flow in Small Groups of Middle School Mathematics Students”

In her paper Group Flow in Small Groups of Middle School Mathematics Students , Armstrong looked into two questions: 1 ) what are the observable characteristics of group flow , and 2 ) what conditions may help to promote the experience of group flow in small groups in a regular mathematics classroom setting?  Flow is a state in which a learner or a group ( individual flow/group flow ) is/are highly absorbed to an activity and he/they will do it even at great cost for the sheer sake of doing it ( Csikszentmihalyi , 1990 ) . The occurrence of group flow suggests the individual/group is learning. So it is the optimal state of learning and the author is interested in finding out what characteristics are there when such state occurs and what contribute to the occurrence. There are three rounds of observation. In the first round , the author observed a maths class of grade eight students. In the 40 minutes class , she carried a camera and walked around to record any mome...

Words for Diana

Thanks for your wonderful sharing Diana! To be honest I had the same problem in reading those jargonic academic paper just as you did when you just started. So I am very happy to learn that there is an alternative for it, the “faction”. To me, it would be much more readable and approachable than those “patronizing” traditional academic papers. Since I am studying teaching English as a second language, I’ve read a lot of papers in quantitative research, all of which would be an excellent material for “factions”. One records the English learning trajectory of a Japanese girl over two years and that could potentially be a wonderful faction. In a word, I do enjoy your presentation and thank you for the new insight of academic papers! Haynam