Projectories

An article from Mark Warschauer in Learning Inquiry that seems interesting:

What constitutes learning in the 21st century will be contested terrain as our society strives toward post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition and production without having yet overcome the educational contradictions and failings of the industrial age. Educational reformers suggest that the advent of new technologies will radically transform what people learn, how they learn, and where they learn, yet studies of diverse learners’ use of new media cast doubt on the speed and extent of change. Drawing on recent empirical and theoretical work, this essay critically examines beliefs about the nature of digital learning and points to the role of social, culture, and economic factors in shaping and constraining educational transformation in the digital era.

In the latest number of science studies there is a book review of A. Aneesh’s book Virtual Migration. It seems like an interesting read. From the review:

Aneesh offers us a productive approach by focusing on the kinds of practices that govern the global movement of capital, codes and individual lives … The difference [of the new global order] with the previous orders lie in what he calls ‘virtual migration’ where the work travels while the worker and the conditions of work remain stationary. … The autor shows … that the governance of the otherwise dispersed code and capital in ‘virutal’ work is knit though the ‘rule of code’ or the ‘rule of algorithm’. Aneesh names this ‘algogracy’ to focus on the programming code, which is under-analyzed. Algocracy is ‘a new kind of power’ and a distinguishing marker of the current era of globalization.

One of my colleagues Ericka Johnson has just published a great book titled Dreaming of a mail order husbandand on Duke university press. Apart from being a great piece of work that walks the tight rope of critical feministic anthropology to construct an empirically and theoretically grounded thick description of russian mail order brides and their stories of internet romance it also mentions me in the foreword…

Here I go again. My posts about Top 10 Universities of Sweden are by far the most popular posts in my blog. I got so many questions about what the best institutions were for xxx (insert your subject here) that I had to remove the possibility to comment on my old entries (here, and here).

For an interesting read about the manipulations of the US University ranking system read David L. Kirp’s book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, which I reveiwed in no. 15/2006 of Utbildning & Demokrati (Education & Democracy).

Anyway, Shanghai Jiao Tong University has done it again, and ranked the world’s top 500 universities. And as usual I’m interested in seeing what they find out about Swedish universities.

Without further babbling. Here’s the list:

Gustav Holmberg (as usual) pointed me to the new version of the Swedish National Library Search System LIBRIS. You can subscribe to searches via RSS, save search hits, browse your immediate search history, group your search, etc. Of course, there is also an Open Search Plugin (which makes my own plugin obsolete).

I was reminded by Gustav Holmberg about a review by Steven Shapin that a friend of mine sent me a couple of weeks ago.  At the time, I enjoyed reflecting on pneumatic tubes for mail, but didn’t note it anywhere. So here comes a late notice.

Edgertons book seems interesting, I might have checked it out at the library, except the Stockholm University Library is closed due to sabotage. Let that sink in for a while… Sabotaging a library. Who does these things? Disgruntled student? Lots of overdue books?

Anyway, check the review out.

In the largest Swedish newspaper today there is an article about mathematics making you a better student. I’m quite surprised that the journalist doesn’t seem to have a clue about the difference between correlation and causality.

According to the journalist, the research showed that students that attended three years of math in high school had better grades in biology, chemistry, and physics at the university. The question is: does three years of math make you a better student, or do better students (more motivated, smarter, more supported from home, etc.) to a higher degree choose three years of math? If you ask this question it might not be a question of causality, but of correlation.

In my high-school, all the motivated students selected certain subjects, while all the slackers chose others ? just because the subjects had a reputation for being a slacker subject, or a hard-worker-subject.

So there was a correlation between being a hard worker and choosing certain subjects, not necessarily a causality between attending certain subjects and becoming a better student.

Please, DN, before putting something on the first page, get your argumentation straight.

I have for a long time thought about writing about when my colleagues finish their defence, and become PhD’s. Well I seem to have forgotten about that in the thick of battle during the semester. Well, now I’m going to start backblogging.

The last dissertation I wrote about was Petra Jonvallen’s book Testing Pills, Enacting Obesity, the next one written in English from the department is Corinna Kruse’s The Making of Valid Data. People and Machines in Genetic Research Practice, which was defended on the 22 of September 2007.

Corinna’s dissertation is a multisited laboratory ethnography about how ‘samples are turned into data that is considered valid and useful by the research community.’ The dissertation dives into machines, norms, ideals, skills, as well as validity, agency reproducibility.

Theoretically Corinna’s study draws on Bruno Latour’s popular concept of immutable mobiles and Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism to discuss ‘various notions of humanness and machineness which shaped scientists’ practices and made the creation of valid data possible.’

A long-time overdue, Congratulations Corinna!

At the moment I’m starting work on new empirical material, which I hope will yield insights into the discourse of contemporary distance education. The empirical material consists of about 300 articles in PDF-format, a quite large amount of data.

I’m in the process of trying to find quantitative text-analysis software for analyzing these articles for trends in the data (preferably with the possibility to group different documents) for the purpose of providing input to a deeper qualitative analysis of a selection of the documents.

So far I’ve come up with the following freeware programs for Windows. Any other suggestions, please leave a tip in the comments.

TextSTAT

Kwic Concordance 

AntConc

Simple Concordance Program 

ConcApp 

Kwicfinder

Xaira

Poliqarp

MLCT: Multilingual Corpus Toolkit

CorpusSearch

aConcorde

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.“

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968