Now that's encouraging

I just finished Michael Cole's excellent book, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. For the last sentence of the book - and I don't think I give too much away here - he writes, "The failures are sure to outnumber the successes by a goodly margin, making it certain that you will never run out of interesting things to do."

I wonder how long I could keep committee members interested in my failures. On second thought, it's probably best not to push too hard on that limit.

A Data-rich Observation

I've been sitting at the back of the portfolio lab at HBU for a week. At the start of a semester, it's no surprise that nothing interesting has cropped up. This morning, my time paid off! Two HBU students came into the lab to work on their portfolios. They sat directly in front of me. (Serendipity!) I couldn't hear everything they were saying, but I could tell a lot about what was happening just from watching.

I saw evidence of nearly every aspect of the CHAT models. They (subjects) were working to create their portfolios (objects). They used a variety of tools (computers, software, handwritten notes, the Internet) to pursue this. Clearly, they were adhering to some rules (what should be included) and norms (their layouts looked remarkably similar to others I have seen). The division of labor was not completely clear to me, but I'm sure my interviews will give me data on that.

I watched these two interact for two hours and took about 12 pages of handwritten notes. I've seen these two in the lab a couple of times - and I know about when they are usually there. I expect I will see them again.

Each evening, I come home and transcribe my notes for the day. I need to keep up with this habit, because I found I had some errors in the notes. I had been referring to them by computer number since I didn't know their names. That worked until they kept switching places!! At any rate, I was able to fix the errors because I transcribed the notes within a few hours.

The "teacher" in me wanted desperately to help them as they struggled for 20 minutes or so, trying to solve a problem I knew exactly how to fix.

Minor Geeky Morning

This morning I went to the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and spent an hour with Will. I wanted to learn three things - all for the sake of anonymity:
1. Blur faces on video
2. Alter voices on video
3. Alter voices on just plain audio files

I spent several hours messing with audio files and an audio editor and was not satisfied with the final result. Thanks to Will, I've got these skills well in hand. It's always so easy when you find someone who knows what they're doing! By the way, I am more than pleased with the results on manipulating the audio.

Rubbish Theory

Someone made a posting to the XMCA mailing list about a recent Engestrom & Blackler article (March 2005) titled On the Life of the Object. Since an object carries the motive in an activity system, I thought it would be a good idea to do some extra reading on objects so I started with this one. In it, the authors extend the work, Rubbish Theory, by Michael Thompson (1979) to discuss what happens to an object once it is produced. The central focus of interest - at least for me - is that an object can be designated as "durable" (having value) or rubbish and that objects can change states in a variety of ways.

What does this mean for portfolios? When reading about paper portfolios, I see discussions of portfolios abandoned in professors' offices. Since the portfolio authors didn't consider them worth retrieving, I will assume they considered their portfolios rubbish. Some recycled the portfolios into examples for other students - a rescue from the rubbish bin. Others probably recycled portions (the binder or tabbed dividers) converting the rubbish back into resources to be used again for something else. Digital portfolios leave a much less visible form of clutter than their paper cousins, but I've certainly stumbled across abandoned electronic portfolios on the Internet. I wonder what, if anything, my participants will have to say about "rubbish" or "durables" with respect to their digital portfolios.