{"id":449,"date":"2009-10-18T21:30:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T01:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/?p=449"},"modified":"2009-10-18T21:30:26","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T01:30:26","slug":"engulfed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/18\/engulfed\/","title":{"rendered":"engulfed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier Gus asked Jonathan what &#8220;engulfed&#8221; means, and since I was thinking I&#8217;d write a little something about my research project today that seems as good a title as any.<\/p>\n<p>This year a colleague (at another library) and I got a small grant to do an ethnographic study of the ways that students at each of our colleges research and complete their school assignments and projects. It&#8217;s modeled after a similar study done at the University of Rochester a few years ago (here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/docushare.lib.rochester.edu\/docushare\/dsweb\/View\/Collection-4436\" target=\"_blank\">PDF of the book they wrote about it<\/a>). We&#8217;re interviewing faculty about their expectations for student work, and also doing a couple of different kinds of interviews with students.<\/p>\n<p>Working on this project has been a blast so far. We started with faculty interviews at the end of the spring and over the summer. But it&#8217;s gotten a bit intense over the past few weeks since the student interviews started. Right now I&#8217;m in the throes of 2 kinds of interviews with students. One is called a mapping diary &#8212; I give each student a map of our campus and of the transit system and ask them to trace and log (with times) the course of a typical school day. The other is called a photo survey &#8212; I give each student a disposable camera and ask them to take pictures of different objects and locations, e.g., where they study, what they carry in their school bag, etc. With both of these I&#8217;m asking students to meet with me after they&#8217;ve finished for between 10-30 minutes so that I can interview them to expand on what they recorded on their maps\/photos.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve got enough funding for 10 students to participate in each kind of study. It&#8217;s been a bit more challenging than I&#8217;d anticipated keeping track of everything: which students have come to pick up their maps\/cameras, dropped them off, and scheduled interviews. I&#8217;m running cameras to the drugstore to get developed and buying Metrocards in different denominations (as payment to the students for participating in the interviews). When I posted the flyers to recruit students for the study I had such an overwhelming response that I actually had to go around campus and take them down 4 days later! Which is all great, just a bit of a challenge on top of all of the usual life + work stuff.<\/p>\n<p>Thank goodness for RT! Reassigned time, the saving grace of the junior faculty member. Tomorrow I&#8217;ve got an RT day scheduled and have 4 students meeting me for interviews. Then somebody has a birthday (and will finally be as old as me), and we all get cake. Huzzah!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier Gus asked Jonathan what &#8220;engulfed&#8221; means, and since I was thinking I&#8217;d write a little something about my research project today that seems as good a title as any. This year a colleague (at another library) and I got a small grant to do an ethnographic study of the ways that students at each [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,18],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-research","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":456,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}