Comments

1. I'm not sure how I feel about leaving the first comment, but overall I feel the group project went very well. This was my first time using a collaborative writing tool on a class project and all-in-all it was well received (at least by my group). I know some groups experienced some stress, but I think that was largely due to people's general frustration with technology. They want the Wiki to do everything MS Word does, which coming from a design standpoint makes sense, but such things are not always feasible. As one of the researchers behind the tool, I wish more people would have expressed their concerns about the tool during the process and Nathan or myself would have done our best to ameliorate the situation.

   I also think the frustrations came from those individuals deciding to remain in their respective silos (mainly our history moguls). I chose the profile team because I knew it would be something different. It probably would have made more sense for me to work on the technology team or the methodology group since these are areas more closely related to my own research. But in the end, I enjoyed the challenge of hunting down faculty and discovering all about the composition of their work. For myself, I am not just in the doctoral program to get my degree and get out. I am fascinated by the academy and this provided me the added opportunity to discover some of the CGU professorate, many of whom I would never come into contact with outside of this class.

   As for my specific group, Daniel, Gudiel, Nawar, Kristina, Tomomi and I functioned very well as a team and we were quite satisfied with our contribution to the project.
   

   brian thoms on Friday, 15 December 2006, 01:07 Pacific Standard Time # |

2. The following are my reflections on the group project:

   I believe that the activities in the group project were conducive to learning about the nature of qualitative research.  One of the keys for qualitative research is organization, so that the findings are not only observed, but also that the results presented are useful to the reader.  The use of ELGG in some ways enhanced the interactions of the class, but in other ways distracted from the overall learning.  The reorganization of the ELGG pages half-way through the semester was particularly disturbing for us understanding the structure of the site.  In addition, the stylistic approach by the “Make ELGG happen” team seemed to be in conflict with the other groups.  For example, is it really necessary to create a new page instead of having to scroll down to see more content?

   In the group project phase it was a separate project about group facilitation and intragroup interaction.  This contributed to the tendency for fewer individuals to carry more of the burden for work (within the group) and for developing silos of isolation between the groups.  These are complex problems to solve and I am not certain about how to go about doing so, especially with the rapid time table of the class.

   In the ELGG site, I did not understand why text that I brought over from MS Word as one style became formatted differently. 

   Kevin Williams on Friday, 15 December 2006, 11:29 Pacific Standard Time # |

3. TNDY 401O Inductive Inquiry/IS366a: Qualitative Methods Class Ends with A Question to Make the Class Better for the Future Students

             TNDY 401O Inductive Inquiry/IS366a ended with asking questions on how to make the class better for the future students.  Many expressed the dissatisfaction of not specific enough in the sense that the class went on with general methodological-disciplinary discussion.  Many people also described the anti transdisciplinary nature of some professors on campus suggesting that the professors also need to believe and support the idea of transdisciplinarity in order for it to be working.    

             I thought of the class otherwise.  Since I focus on the 20^th century US to the present mainly in terms of history, CGU-CSUN history professors especially emphasized the ability to use the computer-technology such as online book, archival, and article searches and use of different kind of programs such as word 2000, endnote, powerpoint and so on.  When I researched on the First Persian Gulf War, I had to use the online sources to supplement the “history in making.”  I use the power point program whenever I present my papers or when I do lectures.   In the class, we used the internet extensively from e-mails to research, and collaborative works. 

             In the class, I learned professors from many different disciplines such as Prof. Allan Wicker who researches on everyday lives of people, Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who looks at the cognitive process of people, Prof. Marianne De Laet who focus on the scientists with ethnographical methodology.  I also thought that Prof. Dean McHenry from Political Science and Prof. Dale Berger who is a psychologist and statistician. 

             The class also gave me a chance to talk to different kinds of people from different disciplines as well as to work with the group of people.  I liked the fact that Prof. Horan was also encouraging people to interact with each other.  It is true that my social intelligence goes down since I am always cooped up in the room reading, writing, and fixing my own writings every single day.  Having the group of people to work with was also beneficial in the sense that some weeks, I was too busy to do anything while some weeks, I could contribute. 

             I also found out how hard it was to maintain a blog every week.  Sometimes, I was pasting my writings late at night.   Nonetheless, it also trained be to write faster and express my opinions freely. The only thing that it was hard was that I had another class right before the class and it was hard for me to drive from another campus to there to be in the class. It was also true that I was always hungry.  But that’s more like I should have considered to have some time in between these classes.  On the other hand, I cannot compromise which classes I want to take. 

             Anyways, I enjoyed the class despite my expectation.  This may be made possible due to the Prof. Horan’s ability to facilitate such a intricate class (and doing lecture is a very difficult thing to do.  I found less difficult to conduct a lecture in front of 150 students when I did TA at CSUN than I did a lecture in a small study session since I had to answer a lot of questions).  I also appreciated Mr. Schooley who was TA for the class answering all these questions I had since I was out there on what was going on in terms of the class.  Also Information Science people were good at answering my questions on computer related things.  Thus, overall, I thought I learned plenty.

   Tomomi Ishihara on Sunday, 17 December 2006, 00:42 Pacific Standard Time # |

4. I believe  the group project was an outstanding learning experience.  Many of us have extensive experience with quantitative inquiry, but very little with structured qualitative studies.  I kept expecting our efforts to get a goal, and then our group to move toward it in an organized manner - knowing where we were going.  The method we used was somewhat uncomfortable, as we just continued to ask questions, and let the answers focus each succeeding iteration.  At some point, a light went  on for me.  The process suddenly seemed productive, and I knew we were getting somewhere.  Eventually, it was clearly coming together, and our main effort became to integrate and consolidate our efforts.

   It did feel uncomfortable for me.  It was one of those experiences that you are glad you had, but you would not readily go through again.  I guess I prefer more structured academic projects.  However, it is one thing to take a class that discusses qualitative research methods, and quite another to actually invovle oneself in them.  The class was full of interesting revelations that came from qualitative inquiry.  However, since the artifacts we studied were completed works that had reached some level  of conclusion, we did not get the personal, first hand experience of the inductive process.  Developing our project remedied this.  I believe I actually learned more from going through the process than from completing the study itself.

   The one thing I would like to see improved is the wiki.  Maybe just use something else.  It actually served as much to disintegrate our efforts as to coordinate them.  It was difficult to figure out who had written what, and where anything was.  Admittedly, we would have needed either more discipline or a dedicated scribe for some of the groups to have any hope of keeping all the blurbs, missives and half baked writing straight.   I managed to personally get quite confused when - after writing an opening that was quite unsatisfactory to our professor - I tried to create several draft options for my team to review in order to help me find an acceptable solution.  Something like an opening for a large paper or project may be short and fairly  uncomplicated, but it is often extremely hard to find the right thing.  I ended up almost incommunicado, as none of my team mates could see or read my postings.  I eventually muddled through myself, and simply emailed my opening to the whole group.  I cannot actually propose anything better than the wiki (unless the school springs for some of the expensive groupware we use at work !! ), but I think the wiki should only be utilized with a clear understanding of its limitations.  Additionally, teams should keep their lives simple and use email to circulate a lot of their work.

   Overall, the project was a good experience which taught me a great deal about knowledge and inquiry.  It allowed me to tie together several concepts from the class.  One hope I have is that I can use this more generally at work.  I have many times found qualitative assessments to be more useful than quantitative ones in complex IT projects, because the quantitative metrics are too shallow and are very incomplete representations of reality.  However, IT groups love quantitative measures, and distrust qualitative ones.  To the degree that I can make qualitative inquiry acceptable for work related issues, this project and the whole course will have provided me with great personal value.  

   Leo Paulo on Saturday, 30 December 2006, 23:36 Pacific Standard Time # |