Google Notebook

Actually, I found google notebook a better platform to organize my web readings, you can also share your notebook with others. and you can create multiple notebooks for different topics. Of course del.icio.us is faster and more convenient. so try and see which suits your need the best!


http://www.google.com/notebook/

Jan 22 meeting minutes

In our Jan 22 meeting, a number of problems relating to writing the dissertation at various stages were raised, they are:

1. Difficulty finding the right papers, journal articles related to one's study. Things we need to check such as are we looking in the right database? Are we using the right keywords for search? Some people suggest that we can book an appointment with an librarian to shape up our information searching skills

2. Strategies for reading/writing in the beginning. We can start by reading without a clear purpose, which takes longer but will allow one to have a broader understanding on topics. We can also start by reading with clear purpose such as reading in order to finish writing a chapter. A chapter outline will help in this case, to focus your reading on specific topics. This way is more efficient, but will certainly narrow your perspective.

3. Transcribing and translating non English medium data. Since most of the group memebers' data will come from Chinese language sources, such as interviews, the question was do we need to translate all the data into English in the very beginning. This is actually not necessary, even during the data analysis stage. You should analyze your data in its most raw/original format. And not until you are going to write about them, then you select the segments you need to demonstrate in your paper and translate them into English.

4. How to write a good discussion and conclusion based on the analysis findings. Some suggest that we may need further reading, and revisit our original research questions to find a focus for the paper conclusion.

Iris made a good suggestion that for future meetings, we can pick a particular theme to talk about, such as how to write a good lit review. The idea was to spend the 1st half of the meeting to report our progress, then the 2nd half to discuss the selected theme. So for our next meeting, the group has decided that we find some material or info on how to conduct good information search. If you have personal experience or you have come across material that you think would be useful for our next meeting theme, please do bring them with you next time!

Dear all,

First of all, thank the guys who have accepted my invitation to have a dinner party at my home this Saturday. I am heartily looking forward to sharing with you wonderful food, talk, and thought. For those who cannot come, I do hope that we have further opportunities to be together in the future :)

I set my goal to revise a paper last Tuesday. I have done it but was just told by my pervious supervisor that it was unnecessary :( Anyhow, I think that my work won't be wasted; at least I've done some writing and thinking :P I'd like to set myself a new goal: take notes and write summary at least for one article by next Tuesday meeting.

Finally, many thanks to Nicol who introducing the valuable learning web to us. I'd like to follow Nicol's example by sharing with you an article about procrastination since many of us claim that it is one of our biggest weaknesses :P http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

The beginnig of the article is like this :

"I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. "

Hey, happy to be the first one to post something on the blog. Frankly, I am the slowest one in our group and this surely is not a modest parlance. But thank you for all of you giving me the chance to grow gradually:) Responding to some of our members' request, I am advertising here for Cheng Kai Ming's course- Culture perspectives on Educational Studies, which is going to have the second session at 5:30pm tomorrow, the venue is Main Building Room 141, come if you are interested in:)

And my next goal will be, as I have said, translate one chapter of my master dissertation, which is around 3 pages. Considering my weak self-discipline, I think it's useful to set a small goal each time so that it is easy to fulfill and the outcome would be encouraging for me to keep working.

That's all, see you on Saturday and please remember to ask me how I am working on my task:)
By the way, I guess my dish that day will be some greenstuff cause I am a semi-vegetarian, but don't worry, I will try to make it look delicious, haha.

Some advice on lit review

The problem of reading and writing for your study comes up again and again. I found a good webpage that talks about lit review. Below is a short excerpt on the balance of reading and writing. You can go here for a full reading.

Excerpt:

When you read for your literature review, you are actually doing two things at the same time (which makes things more difficult for you!):

1. you are trying to define your research problem: finding a gap, asking a question, continuing previous research, counter-claiming (see the introductions page);
2. you are trying to read every source relevant to your research problem.

Naturally, until you have defined your problem, you will find that there are hundreds of sources that seem relevant. However, you cannot define your problem until you read around your research area. This seems a vicious circle, but what should happen is that as you read you define your problem, and as you define your problem you will more easily be able to decide what to read and what to ignore.

Discussions in Today's Meeting

Dear Super Writers,

First, congratulations on all those who have submitted the assignments and good luck to all those that are going to (Go! Go! You are almost there!) :P

Jessica, Nicol, Issa, Jun, Lucia, Wen Yu and Iris attended today’s meeting. We began with sharing our stories about how we managed to finish our assignments in the last week. Under the pressure of deadline, our “small universe” all exerted extraordinary power, some of us had to stay up for a few nights (such as me :P). But we all agreed that it was not desirable at all, especially at the cost of health and beauty J Surprisingly, the majority of our writing goals for next week were to revise and improve our assignments, that is to say, we regarded our submitted assignments as DRAFTS. Does itindicate the quality of our assignments is not satisfactory (to our standards)? Maybe. Anyhow, keeping on revising and improving our writing is always a good thing, isn’t it?

We also decide to take the advice by Nicol and Issa: if any of us wants to share and get feedback on our draft writing from other group members, we may circulate the piece of writing (e.g. drafts of thesis chapters) among our group through EMAILS (NOT Blog for the confidentiality reason). The other members are free to decide whether s/he will read / respond to it or not. But one important thing is – to show our respect to others’ hard work and our good sense of ethics :P – please don’t keep or circulate the others’ writing; delete it as soon as you finish reading it.

Last but not the least, let’s welcome Nicole to be our Chairperson for the next meeting J

Iris

My Wriing Goal (From 8 January to 15 January)

Hello everyone, my writing goal for this time is very clear: to finish one assignment of MEDD courses: globalization and educational policymaking in Mainland China.

Report of Super Writers Meeting on 8th Jan. 2008

It was nice to have our fist meeting in new year 2008, and thanks to everyone for contributing our group today: Alam, Catherine, Iris, Issa, Jessica, Jun, and Lucia. It is good to see many of group members are changing or reshaping the writing habit in better way!

The reflection and suggestions from group members are collected as following,
- a good piece of writing come from revision, which may develops your ideas while you write.(Issa)
- Write few paragraph everyday and then develop the ideas (Issa)
- Begin to write thesis in early stage: once you read or write, put the writing into the related parts of thesis (Iris’ supervisor)
- Need to know more about taking note in Endnote (Iris & Jessica)
- Mapping out how to use computer in efficient way (Issa)
- Thinking of framework in the mind at night and do it according to the framework the next day (Alam)
- If you have no idea about research, you’d better go out and talk to people, or collect data early (K.M.Cheng’s opinion from Iris & Alam)

Please be free to make comments!

A Brief introduction of Iris's Research Topic

Hi, dear all, long time no see you, how rrrrrrrr uuuuuuu ? Looking forward to seeing you guys tomorrow. By tomorrow's meeting, I expect that I will have written a few pages for one of my assignments. Regarding to the suggestion raised by some of you that we should publish the abstract of our research study here so that we can help each other better, I think that this is a great idea. Here is a brief introduction of my research topic:

My research topic is concerning the implementation of formative assessment in the undergraduate EAP (English for academic purposes) classroom in the continuous assessment context in HK(U). According to Black & Wiliam (1998), who initiated the increasingly hot discussion on this topic about ten years ago, formative assessment refers to “all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by the students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged” (p.2). It is believed that this type of assessment which is indeed a normal pedagogic practice in almost every classroom, if applied appropriately, can be very useful in helping students’ learning. But it is still not very clear that under what conditions and by what means formative assessment can be implemented effectively so that students’ learning can benefit from it. Through the preliminary investigation, I have found that continuous assessment approach is widely employed in the undergraduate EAP courses in HK, which makes the proposed study even more interesting because the literature has quite different opinions about the impact of continuous assessment on formative assessment. Some researchers believe that continuous assessment provides an ideal environment for the implementation of formative assessment; the others, on the contrary, hold that continuous assessment works again formative assessment. Therefore, I’d like to conduct a study investigating a) how formative assessment is implemented in the continuous assessment context in undergraduate EAP classrooms at Hong Kong universities and b) what background factors might influence the effectiveness of formative assessment on the students' academic English learning.

Any suggestions, comments, or questions concerning my research study from you is a great favor for me and very very welcome :)

Writing goal

Very much in Holiday mood, but try to finish: 1) a summary of some articles on identity; 2) revise paper; and 3) plan for the coming semester. Issa

Research topic & abstract

Title
In Search of Self: Understanding Teachers’ Professional Learning in the Community of TATEAL
Abstract
This study is concerned with an emerging community in southern China identifiable as Teachers and Teacher Educators in Action Learning (TATEAL), which has been a proactive force in the support of teacher learning and professional development across institutional boundaries for about seven years. Taking a microethnographic perspective to the discourse of the annual activities conducted in the community of TATEAL, this study intends to explore: 1) how teacher learning in TATEAL is discursively constructed in terms of knowledge and belief, social relations, and identity; and 2) what are the enablements and constraints to teacher learning in TATEAL. Narrative and discourse (specifically Foucault’s genealogical approach) are both used to understand teachers’ lived experiences from individual, collaborative and cultural perspectives in TATEAL, as well as to investigate the relations between discourse, power and knowledge of teacher learning in such context.
Issa

Karri's research topic and abstract

Peer- and self-assessment as tools to develop awareness of students’ oral communication strategies

Karri Lam

Abstract

The action research focuses on how peer- and self-assessments can develop the awareness of students’ oral communication strategies in group interactions. Three Hong Kong secondary teachers were involved in the study, two teaching secondary 1 and one teaching secondary 2. Similar processes were used throughout two cycles of the action research.

The research project consisted of a communication strategy worksheet and videos of sample oral discussion to stimulate student identification of suitable and unsuitable communication strategies in group interactions; the development of peer- and self- assessment worksheets for classroom use; and target setting with students focusing on areas such as eye contact, clarity and fluency of speech, and interaction with classmates.

The main means of data collection were classroom videos, student completion of peer- and self-evaluation forms, and focus group interviews with teachers and students. The expected findings may include: increased student awareness of the need to respond actively to other students’ utterances; the need for teacher guidiance in target setting; and increased confidence in students’ spoken English, although it was too soon to identify significant learning gains.

Jun's research topic and abstract

Research Topic: Students’ Perception of Spoken English Interaction at an EMI University in Asia
Research Abstract: English used as a medium of instruction plays an important role in internationalisation of tertiary education. An English-medium of instruction (EMI) tertiary institution, such as the University of Hong Kong, is ‘an international university with a multicultural and multilingual community’. The aim of the present research is to explore the role of spoken English for communication, learning and identity at an EMI university in Asia through case studies. Based on the analysis of a substantial body of qualitative data, it may be possible to a) understand and improve the spoken English interaction for Chinese students in terms of language development and the use of language, and b) equip teaching staff and education policy makers with useful information about, and better skills to deal with, Chinese learners in an EMI context.

Nicol's research topic and abstract

Topic: Pedagogical bodies & technological spaces: a critical study of ‘learning commons’ as a site for both collaborative learning and social interaction

Abstract: This study will investigate how the designated sites/areas carrying the function of ‘learning commons’ are used by teachers and students at the University of Hong Kong. The purpose of the study is to provide an in-depth and comprehensive review, examining aspects of usage, satisfaction, culture, and pedagogical effects arising from the experiences of teachers, and students who use and dwell in such a space. The study will address issues within four research foci, namely: pedagogical practice, cultural practice, social interactions and techno-spatial framework.


Definition of Learning Commons: ‘Learning Commons’ is described by the University of Hong Kong’s Knowledge Team as “an emerging concept in university communities around the world. In some places, they are called Information Commons. Learning Commons serve a one-stop shop location where students can study, learn, discuss, interact, and relax. The basic components of Learning Commons usually include reference and student workstations, collaborative learning rooms, electronic classrooms, multimedia workstations, consultation stations, writing lab and lounge. They are also open for extended hours, sometimes 24x7.” Also stated in the Executive Summary of the Knowledge Team’s report and recommendation (2006), the major goal of a Learning Commons is “to transform the educational experience given its undergraduates, to give them opportunities to learn skills needed to compete in our rapidly changing environment, to be able to engage in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration, to be able to interact with the world outside the University, to learn democratic values, and to learn critical language and ICT skills.” (p. 2). The Learning Commons is therefore, envisioned by the University governing bodies as a physical facility that support the above mentioned kinds of ‘student-centered’ or ‘learner-centered’ approach to teaching and learning in higher education

Greetings and my goal from 1st, Jan ---6th,Jan

Dear All:

How are you? Haven't met you for quite a long time. Wish all of you a nice new year!

In the past 10 days, i actually idled a lot, and i feel much guilty now. I will meet my supervisor on 8th, Jan, so i guess i'd better post my goals for next week here and make learning a daily routine.

My goals are as follows:

1.Finish a refined chapter of possible research methodology.
2. Finish reading a book which will soon be overdue.

Please ask me whether i have achieved my goals next time when we meet:). Thanks.


JESSICA