House Quizzes

I took the quiz at
http://www.quizilla.com/users/incendio-avis/quizzes/Your%20Hogwarts%20House%20(Harry%20Potter)/

to see what Hogwarts house I belonged in and it was the Raven-puff house-- that I'm a mix between the two.

Then I took the quiz at
http://www.personalitylab.org/tests/ccq_hogwarts.htm

and there I was Hufflepuff with a close placement to Gryfindor.

I think it's interesting how many quizzes a person can take to find out where they belong. When I did my google search there were actually quite a few options available to me.

I know that it doesn't actually matter-- and that it is all fiction-- but it's important to me that I didn't get placed into Syltherin.

for sale

Yesterday we put our house up for sale. I can't believe how much work that is. I feel like it has taken the majority of my effort for the last week--especially the last 5 days. I'm really enjoying the clean house, but I'm looking forward to getting back to academic work.

video game theory

Kids play video games. There are then 2 schools of thought about these kids-- they are doing a good thing for themselves or they are doing a bad thing for themselves. The kids don't care--they just keep playing video games.

The initial good--it improves hand eye coordination.
The initial bad--it makes kids lazy--ie stop playing outside.

A later good--it helps kids learn to gather collective intelligence.
A later bad--it desensitizes kids to violence.

Geoff Sirc asked me what's the big deal about video game theory? What does it have to do with literature?

This is a good question--one that I realize I have to answer. I know it has nothing to do with the first-- I don't care about kids hand eye coordination, and although no one will come out and say it--if all kids do is read, they can become "lazy" just as effectively as they can with video games.

I think the real question is why is collective intelligence something we want? Why is it good? Why is it important? Why is it better than individual intelligence?

lunch with Sirc

Time flies way too fast-- it's already Thursday and I'm just now really trying to think about the questions Geoff Sirc asked me at lunch last Friday.

I was spouting that I think collective intelligence is so great--and that when kids participate in it that they learn so much. And his question was along the lines of-- but what are they really learning?

Cheat codes for video games-- well this keeps them from having to problem solve to get there themselves-- is that actually good? I remember being a kid, before the Internet, following the higher level codes my sister would achieve in video games and then not knowing how to survive in those levels because I hadn't earned the right to be there. Is this what we want kids to learn.

They learn how to work together--they learn that together they can gain more knowledge than they can apart. But does it really work like that-- or do the hard workers do all of the work and the lazy kids just mooch off of them?

The thing that I think is most beneficial in collective intelligence with children is that they learn how to articulate their ideas to multiple audiences. They learn how to share what they are discovering, and they learn how to synthesize their knowledge with other bits of knowledge that are out there. They aren't just stringing facts together so they can tell someone they know all of this stuff--instead they are seeing that their knowledge is a piece of a much bigger puzzle. Collective intelligence makes its participants global learners--participants have to understand that there is always more knowledge to be gleaned.

moving

we've decided it's time to move. i knew this day was coming, my husband has wanted to move since he bought this house, but it's a good little house in a good little neighborhood.

there's a part of me that wants to move, and of course, a part of me that just wants to stay put. the part of me that wants to stay put is the academic. the realtor came by yesterday and gave us tips on making the place more sellable-- one thing that's got to go-- my basement workstation. i am sitting here, working on my laptop for potentially one of the last mornings-- my ugly table has to go.

the good side to moving is that it is forcing me to go through the stacks and stacks of papers that i've accumulated over the last couple of years through my aversion to filing. This is motivating me to throw a lot of dead trees away. Don't worry-- I'm recycling what I can.

IRB

So, I decided that I wanted to add some real student perspectives to my dissertation-- I thought it would be good to say what real children think instead of just assuming what they think-- that sounds reasonable to me. So, I mention this to someone and they tell me to be sure I get my human subject research paperwork submitted. I don't want to do human subject research-- I want to send out an anonymous survey to find out if kids read books and talk about them with their friends-- but apparently that's what human subject research is. To me, human subject research somehow violates the human- that is why you need permission to do it-- but I guess I'm wrong--

Don't misunderstand me-- I know that the kids I want to survey are human. I just thought that since I would never meet them and since they're not telling me their names that it would be anonymous in and of itself. But, I guess it's not. Since I know what school they attend, the IRB people think I could figure out which survey matches up with which kid.

So, today I get to fill out pages and pages of paperwork. When I found out about all of the paperwork, my initial response was to leave out the survey, but I think that would do my project a disservice-- so, I'll let you know how the paper pushing goes.

Fridge Farm

I made one of my C & W outcomes that I was going to try to post to my blog everyday-- which for me means every weekday-- so now, here I am today-- with all sorts of stuff to work on and do-- and I should have academic thoughts to process on my blog, but I'm going to talk about my daughter's fridge farm.

My daughter got 3, count them 1, 2, 3 Leapfrog Fridge Farms for her first birthday last week. Now, this is a gift that I was hoping that she would get-- she's played with it at other people's house, and she really seems to like it, so I thought she would enjoy it. And she does. She loves to pull the pieces off of the fridge. And she likes to put the pieces in her mouth and crawl around the kitchen. She likes to push the pieces as high as she can reach on her tippy toes so that she can't get them back down. And she LOVES to push the Farmer Tag banjo playing button so that I get to listen to more banjo music than I've ever heard in my life. Even as I type this my brain is serenading me with "You made a match" and Old Suzanna on an alternating player despite the fact that my daughter is sleeping and the fridge is silent.

I don't say this to discourage someone from acquiring the Fridge Farm-- it's a fun toy-- and my daughter loves it. I guess I write this to explain to myself why I feel like I'm two different people sometimes. I can sit at a conference and glean knowledge and resolve to be a better teacher, student, director-- and then I come home, and I have this wonderful little girl who doesn't care about how many books I read, or articles I publish, or blog posts I complete. She cares if her picture pops up on the laptop screen. She cares if I tickle her when I read the sounds in Mr. Brown can Moo, can you?

This past year has been a lesson in convergence for me-- how do I converge mommy with scholar? I wish there were a how to here.

Computers and Writing 2007

This week I've been attending the Computers and Writing Conference at Wayne State University. I learned some important things there this weekend.
1. I've got to be better at writing my blog-- if I want to really do this-- use this space, I've got to write more often.
2. I've got to be better about reading other people's blogs-- if I think part of what is good about blogging is the blogging community, then I need to join that community.
3. It's important to talk about your projects with people because they ask questions that you realize you have to be careful to answer. On Thursday I sat with Geoffrey Sirc at lunch and he made me think-- more on that later.
4. I've got to get writing-- If I'm ever going to accomplish any of my goals that involves putting ideas onto paper.

I knew I would get stuff out of the conference, but I got more out of it than I thought I would, so that's cool-- now the challenge will be to live up to what I think I learned.