Blogged with Flock
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Finally
When this officially rolls out, it will cut out about half of my remaining MS Word use.
Google Docs Offline Access
Google Docs Offline Access
Blogged with Flock
Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash
I said a couple of years ago that the coming thing would be easy, amateur-oriented end-user programming. We're starting to see RIA apps that deliver on that promise. Sprout may be one: An online WYSIWYG editor for Flash.
Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash
Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash
Blogged with Flock
ControlC
Yet another basic function from desktop OS is turned into a web service. Social copy-and-paste?
ControlC: Turning Cut & Paste Into A Web Service
ControlC is an interesting new site that takes normal copy and pasting (Ctrl-C) and runs it through a web service.I'm still trying to decide if this is clever or not.
At its most basic, after you create an account and install the software, any time you hit Ctrl-C, the information is saved to the ControlC website as well as your local clipboard, as simple text or as a URL link if what you’ve copied is a link.
ControlC: Turning Cut & Paste Into A Web Service
Blogged with Flock
Monday, January 28, 2008
Huddle
A new Basecamp competitor with Facebook integration. It handles MS Office documents via integration with appropriate web-based office tools.
Huddle uses new apps and Facebook to take on Basecamp
Huddle uses new apps and Facebook to take on Basecamp
Blogged with Flock
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Reading :: The Pinball Effect
The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys
by James Burke
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by James Burke's Connections series, in which he would trace causal historical connections among apparently unrelated things. The invention of X would make Y possible, leading to Z, and suddenly it would be so clear that if it weren't for water gardens, we wouldn't have the carburetor.
That sort of causal tracing is a lot of fun when you're a teenager, watching an hour-long PBS special and learning little pieces of history. So when I received Burke's The Pinball Effect for Christmas, I figured I would have just as much fun with this piece of light reading. Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well -- whether it's because I'm older and wider-read or because a book-length treatment makes the flaws more obvious, I'm not sure which. In any case, Burke emphasizes that everything is connected and that we can dig up all sorts of surprising connections between given products, ideas, and inventions. He works these connections in various ways: showing how three unrelated products emerged from the same point, demonstrating how one invention a few centuries ago led to an entirely different solution in this one, etc. etc. The problem is that after a few chapters, the game becomes pretty obvious and we begin to suspect that we can connect pretty much anything to anything else if there are enough intervening steps. The book quickly loses its ability to surprise or delight.
On the other hand, Amazon gives it four stars. Check out their reviews and, if the book sounds interesting, don't hesitate to check it out.
by James Burke
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by James Burke's Connections series, in which he would trace causal historical connections among apparently unrelated things. The invention of X would make Y possible, leading to Z, and suddenly it would be so clear that if it weren't for water gardens, we wouldn't have the carburetor.
That sort of causal tracing is a lot of fun when you're a teenager, watching an hour-long PBS special and learning little pieces of history. So when I received Burke's The Pinball Effect for Christmas, I figured I would have just as much fun with this piece of light reading. Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well -- whether it's because I'm older and wider-read or because a book-length treatment makes the flaws more obvious, I'm not sure which. In any case, Burke emphasizes that everything is connected and that we can dig up all sorts of surprising connections between given products, ideas, and inventions. He works these connections in various ways: showing how three unrelated products emerged from the same point, demonstrating how one invention a few centuries ago led to an entirely different solution in this one, etc. etc. The problem is that after a few chapters, the game becomes pretty obvious and we begin to suspect that we can connect pretty much anything to anything else if there are enough intervening steps. The book quickly loses its ability to surprise or delight.
On the other hand, Amazon gives it four stars. Check out their reviews and, if the book sounds interesting, don't hesitate to check it out.
Blogged with Flock
Friday, January 25, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
WAVE 4 is out
WAVE, one of the leading accessibility checkers, has a new beta version.
WebAIM: Blog - Introducing WAVE 4.0
WebAIM: Blog - Introducing WAVE 4.0
Blogged with Flock
Exigence and experience
Jeff Jarvis, reporting from Davos, notices an interesting rhetorical difference between Bono and Al Gore:
Indeed, Bono is better at telling his story and making his point. Gore spent too many years trying to get sound bites on TV. For example: “The single thing that reminds us that we are all in this together is the planet.” (to which Friedman nods enthusiastically and seriously, as if this were profound). Gore hits the same points with different words again and again, not knowing which will stick so he keeps throwing. Bono, instead, tells a story.BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Davos08: Bono and Gore
Blogged with Flock
Monday, January 21, 2008
Israel's electric cars to be sold on the cellphone model
Israel is going to support electric cars in a big way. Necessity is the mother of all invention: Israel doesn't have significant oil production. But here's the intriguing thing about the approach: the model.
The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware — the car — and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.Israel Is Set to Promote the Use of Electric Cars - New York Times
Blogged with Flock
Packet death
My flagger sent me this NYT article on Japan's boom of novels written via text messaging. Five of the top ten books in Japan right now were written via SMS, "mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels." These sorts of novels have really taken off, partially because of the incredible penetration of mobile tech in Japan, partially because of mass transportation causing blocks of constrained free time, and partially because texting is unlimited:
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular - New York Times
The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004."Packet death." I love that. And I wonder how things would change here in the US if packet data were made unlimited at no extra fee. (Currently I pay Sprint, supposedly the worst US mobile service provider, an extra monthly fee for unlimited SMS and data.)
“Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular - New York Times
Blogged with Flock
Reading :: Writing Workplace Cultures
Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing
by Jim Henry
Jim Henry's book Writing Workplace Cultures, published in 2000, has been on my list of books to read for a while. Henry's book is based on 83 workplace writing ethnographies, primarily autoethnographies, conducted during seven consecutive springs by masters' students in Henry's Cultures of Professional Writing course. The students in turn served as Henry's research subjects. Relying on Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, Henry sees these autoethnographies as "shards":
So the project is a really interesting one, broad in scope, and forming a sort of meta-analysis of the 83 autoethnographies and ethnographies performed by Henry's students. As a meditation on these narratives brought back by the students, it's a good read. But it has two limitations that make me unsure how much I'll use it in my own research and teaching.
The first limitation is methodological. The range of studies -- 83 -- is great. And the focus on workplace cultures is laudable. But these 83 studies are after all performed during a regular semester by MA students who are otherwise untrained for qualitative research. Henry doesn't go into how he trained them to collect and analyze data, to code, or to triangulate; he talks only briefly about their research designs, which sound pretty unstructured. So it's unclear how rigorous the individual studies were or how deeply the analysis was affected by class discussion and other influences. Consequently, it's difficult to determine how comparable these studies are, and without a reference point for comparison, how can a meta-analysis be reliably conducted?
The second limitation is in claims. Henry does analyze the 83 narratives along a number of axes. But the metanarrative -- the grand story that should emerge from these narratives -- is elusive. Perhaps it is because Henry covers so much ground, but I had a hard time discerning a concrete takeaway from this book that was significantly different from common knowledge in workplace writing studies. Even Henry's implications chapter works over well-worn bromides such as the notion that autoethnographies have power "for heightening collective consciousness among all of us who convey fundamental philosophies about writing subjects through the very conceptualization of courses" (p.167) and "part of our work in intervening in cultural reproduction should entail our working with these writers to probe how such writerly subjectivities take form as part of a professional class" (p.168). Henry conducted an 83-study meta-analysis, something unheard-of in writing studies, and theoretically this unique study should have allowed him to generate and support claims that no one else can. I wonder if this has to do with the methodological problem: If these really were relatively untrained qualitative researchers, conducting relatively undesigned studies, working with categories generated from class discussion, perhaps new and grounded insights were simply not being generated.
Despite these limitations, Writing Workplace Cultures is still a groundbreaking book, and I would love to see something like this done with more developed studies -- dissertations, perhaps.
by Jim Henry
Jim Henry's book Writing Workplace Cultures, published in 2000, has been on my list of books to read for a while. Henry's book is based on 83 workplace writing ethnographies, primarily autoethnographies, conducted during seven consecutive springs by masters' students in Henry's Cultures of Professional Writing course. The students in turn served as Henry's research subjects. Relying on Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge
, Henry sees these autoethnographies as "shards":This book seeks to support researchers and writers at other sites by displaying the shards collected over seven years of research, in the hope that these shards can be compared to those of other digs and that alternative unities can take form in other settings. To support such comparisons, I extend the narratological readings of student writers above to demonstrate readings that trace discursive contours of subjectivity, as discourses shape writers' schooling, professional writing backgrounds, organizational sites of work, and workplace cultures. (p.25)Henry demonstrates the similarities and differences across ethnographies along several different categories, using tables to compare writers' skills (p.73), writers' status (p.75), kinds of writing (p.95), multiple discourses (p.99), and so forth. Many of these have to do with the question of symbolic-analytic work, or knowledge work (p.115) -- and for that reason I wish I had read this book a couple of years ago. Henry has some interesting meditations on symbolic-analytic work, based on the many stories that his students brought back from workplaces.
So the project is a really interesting one, broad in scope, and forming a sort of meta-analysis of the 83 autoethnographies and ethnographies performed by Henry's students. As a meditation on these narratives brought back by the students, it's a good read. But it has two limitations that make me unsure how much I'll use it in my own research and teaching.
The first limitation is methodological. The range of studies -- 83 -- is great. And the focus on workplace cultures is laudable. But these 83 studies are after all performed during a regular semester by MA students who are otherwise untrained for qualitative research. Henry doesn't go into how he trained them to collect and analyze data, to code, or to triangulate; he talks only briefly about their research designs, which sound pretty unstructured. So it's unclear how rigorous the individual studies were or how deeply the analysis was affected by class discussion and other influences. Consequently, it's difficult to determine how comparable these studies are, and without a reference point for comparison, how can a meta-analysis be reliably conducted?
The second limitation is in claims. Henry does analyze the 83 narratives along a number of axes. But the metanarrative -- the grand story that should emerge from these narratives -- is elusive. Perhaps it is because Henry covers so much ground, but I had a hard time discerning a concrete takeaway from this book that was significantly different from common knowledge in workplace writing studies. Even Henry's implications chapter works over well-worn bromides such as the notion that autoethnographies have power "for heightening collective consciousness among all of us who convey fundamental philosophies about writing subjects through the very conceptualization of courses" (p.167) and "part of our work in intervening in cultural reproduction should entail our working with these writers to probe how such writerly subjectivities take form as part of a professional class" (p.168). Henry conducted an 83-study meta-analysis, something unheard-of in writing studies, and theoretically this unique study should have allowed him to generate and support claims that no one else can. I wonder if this has to do with the methodological problem: If these really were relatively untrained qualitative researchers, conducting relatively undesigned studies, working with categories generated from class discussion, perhaps new and grounded insights were simply not being generated.
Despite these limitations, Writing Workplace Cultures is still a groundbreaking book, and I would love to see something like this done with more developed studies -- dissertations, perhaps.
You heard it here first
Last week I suggested that someone take a page from the new MacBook Air commercials, develop a laptop sleeve that looks like a manila envelope, and give me part of the profits. Well, I haven't seen any profits, but apparently someone has implemented this idea. Fake Steve Jobs is not going to take this lying down.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Warning: This is not an authorized Apple product.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Warning: This is not an authorized Apple product.
Blogged with Flock
The evolution of social networks
Brian McConnell gives a short history.
Social Networks, from the 80s to the 00s - GigaOM
Social Networks, from the 80s to the 00s - GigaOM
Blogged with Flock
Nokia To Invest In Facebook?
I guess this makes sense since Jaiku is still in the Google holding pen and will remain there for who knows how long.
Nokia To Invest In Facebook?
Nokia To Invest In Facebook?
Blogged with Flock
Friday, January 18, 2008
Reading :: Composing Research
Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition
By Cindy Johanek
When I was working on my PhD, in 1994-1999, one of the big points of contention in writing studies (rhetoric and composition, professional communication, business communication) was the issue of research methods. Well, maybe "big" isn't the right word, since rhet-comp folks were not (and still are not) generally trained very deeply in empirical research methods, and the studies in question were often not well designed and/or came from outside the field. In any case, we had just left the 1980s, when Carnegie-Mellon's alliance with cognitive psychologists yielded several studies using think-aloud protocols and experiments, and entered the 1990s, when compositionists discovered qualitative research methods such as ethnography. The methodological discussions, sometimes characterized as "wars" (although I think wars tend to be larger and bloodier), were partially about the warrants, epistemologies, and theoretical frameworks that the field would accept. In any case, we had reached a sort of detente by the time I began my dissertation, and in 1998 I was able to characterize my work-in-progress as a "mixed-methods" approach, one that "transcended" the "quantitative-qualitative divide."
In 1998, coincidentally, Cindy Johanek went on the market with an award-winning dissertation in hand, one that examined the state of research in composition. Johanek, who studied psychology as an undergraduate, had been surprised in graduate school by the way quantitative research was negatively characterized in her English graduate courses and how qualitative research was valorized with thin justification. In response, her dissertation -- which eventually became the book Composing Research -- examined the state of research, took arguments against empirical composition research to task, and argued for a "contextualist paradigm" for rhet-comp research.
Like me, Johanek characterized her work as transcending the quantitative-qualitative divide. Unlike me, she didn't just roll her eyes when people made disparaging and ignorant remarks about research. Rather, she really took these arguments to heart, even comparing them to bigotry in one analogy (pp.108-109). Aghast at the number of "studies" based on anecdotal evidence, she determined to lay out the case for principled research that begins, not with methods or methodologies, but with context (p.108). "We have fallen into an odd, unbalanced rhetorical stance that comes from the stories we tell," she charges, "stories that appeal heavily to audience emotions but stories that are also uniquely personal to the writer" (p.110).
The heart of the book, more or less, is a table on p.112: "A contextualist research paradigm for rhetoric and composition." This heuristic contains several questions that researchers should ask themselves, with the x-axis representing rhetorical issues and the y-axis representing research issues. This heuristic (I'm not sure I would call it a paradigm) should prove useful to new composition researchers who are trying to work through the beginning stages of a research project, conceived as an argument to a particular audience.
I very much wanted to like this book, but I couldn't find anything terribly solid to hold onto; the argument did not seem to be strongly stated or signposted, or perhaps the text wandered. In addition, other things bothered me.
First, qualitative research gets short shrift here, I think. Judging from the marginal notes that someone penciled in the library's copy of this book, I'm not the only one: next to an evaluation of a study on p.186, they wrote "qualitative [does not equal] anecdotal!" Yes: even though Johanek mentions qualitative research once or twice, in places such as this one, she seems to be equating qualitative research with anecdotal research, and doesn't mention -- leave alone examine -- qualitative methods such as case studies, grounded theory, or discourse analysis (she mentions ethnography in passing). On the other hand, she demonstrates how to set up a quasi-experiment and calculate standard deviation.
Johanek also writes a diatribe against MLA citation style in Ch.7, which I found even less convincing that Charles Bazerman's argument against APA style. It's a little outdated too, from my perspective, since tech comm journals are moving toward APA and Written Communication also uses it.
Finally, she complains about the inadequate textbooks designed to train composition researchers. I can certainly understand this, but look at the amazing surplus of good research texts in related fields, such as education. These are mostly quite applicable to the research we do in comp-rhet. Johanek curses the darkness, while I have preferred to light a candle (see my recent reviews of qualitative research texts).
So here's the question: Do you use Johanek's book in your graduate qualitative research course? I considered it, but in the end decided not to. Not only does it have a short shelf life, it also portrays the field's research too narrowly and dichotomously. I might, however, photocopy that matrix and pass it out.
By Cindy Johanek
When I was working on my PhD, in 1994-1999, one of the big points of contention in writing studies (rhetoric and composition, professional communication, business communication) was the issue of research methods. Well, maybe "big" isn't the right word, since rhet-comp folks were not (and still are not) generally trained very deeply in empirical research methods, and the studies in question were often not well designed and/or came from outside the field. In any case, we had just left the 1980s, when Carnegie-Mellon's alliance with cognitive psychologists yielded several studies using think-aloud protocols and experiments, and entered the 1990s, when compositionists discovered qualitative research methods such as ethnography. The methodological discussions, sometimes characterized as "wars" (although I think wars tend to be larger and bloodier), were partially about the warrants, epistemologies, and theoretical frameworks that the field would accept. In any case, we had reached a sort of detente by the time I began my dissertation, and in 1998 I was able to characterize my work-in-progress as a "mixed-methods" approach, one that "transcended" the "quantitative-qualitative divide."
In 1998, coincidentally, Cindy Johanek went on the market with an award-winning dissertation in hand, one that examined the state of research in composition. Johanek, who studied psychology as an undergraduate, had been surprised in graduate school by the way quantitative research was negatively characterized in her English graduate courses and how qualitative research was valorized with thin justification. In response, her dissertation -- which eventually became the book Composing Research -- examined the state of research, took arguments against empirical composition research to task, and argued for a "contextualist paradigm" for rhet-comp research.
Like me, Johanek characterized her work as transcending the quantitative-qualitative divide. Unlike me, she didn't just roll her eyes when people made disparaging and ignorant remarks about research. Rather, she really took these arguments to heart, even comparing them to bigotry in one analogy (pp.108-109). Aghast at the number of "studies" based on anecdotal evidence, she determined to lay out the case for principled research that begins, not with methods or methodologies, but with context (p.108). "We have fallen into an odd, unbalanced rhetorical stance that comes from the stories we tell," she charges, "stories that appeal heavily to audience emotions but stories that are also uniquely personal to the writer" (p.110).
The heart of the book, more or less, is a table on p.112: "A contextualist research paradigm for rhetoric and composition." This heuristic contains several questions that researchers should ask themselves, with the x-axis representing rhetorical issues and the y-axis representing research issues. This heuristic (I'm not sure I would call it a paradigm) should prove useful to new composition researchers who are trying to work through the beginning stages of a research project, conceived as an argument to a particular audience.
I very much wanted to like this book, but I couldn't find anything terribly solid to hold onto; the argument did not seem to be strongly stated or signposted, or perhaps the text wandered. In addition, other things bothered me.
First, qualitative research gets short shrift here, I think. Judging from the marginal notes that someone penciled in the library's copy of this book, I'm not the only one: next to an evaluation of a study on p.186, they wrote "qualitative [does not equal] anecdotal!" Yes: even though Johanek mentions qualitative research once or twice, in places such as this one, she seems to be equating qualitative research with anecdotal research, and doesn't mention -- leave alone examine -- qualitative methods such as case studies, grounded theory, or discourse analysis (she mentions ethnography in passing). On the other hand, she demonstrates how to set up a quasi-experiment and calculate standard deviation.
Johanek also writes a diatribe against MLA citation style in Ch.7, which I found even less convincing that Charles Bazerman's argument against APA style. It's a little outdated too, from my perspective, since tech comm journals are moving toward APA and Written Communication also uses it.
Finally, she complains about the inadequate textbooks designed to train composition researchers. I can certainly understand this, but look at the amazing surplus of good research texts in related fields, such as education. These are mostly quite applicable to the research we do in comp-rhet. Johanek curses the darkness, while I have preferred to light a candle (see my recent reviews of qualitative research texts).
So here's the question: Do you use Johanek's book in your graduate qualitative research course? I considered it, but in the end decided not to. Not only does it have a short shelf life, it also portrays the field's research too narrowly and dichotomously. I might, however, photocopy that matrix and pass it out.
Blogged with Flock
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Reading :: Designing Qualitative Research
Designing Qualitative Research
By Catherine Marshall, Gretchen B. Rossman
I just finished reviewing Maxwell's Qualitative Research Design, and here I am reviewing Designing Qualitative Research. I suppose there's a finite number of titles you can give to this sort of text. At any rate, Designing Qualitative Research is a fine book, but suffers from comparison to Maxwell's more economical and clearly organized text.
Not that Designing Qualitative Research is a monster text, by any means. The body is only 152 pages (Maxwell's is 115). But whereas Maxwell's book was an overview of principles, Marshall and Rossman's book gets into more details about discrete qualitative research approaches as well as details about data collection and analysis. At present I'm on the fence about whether this is a better approach: I think that a student could design a reasonable study solely based on what s/he learns from this book, a claim that I couldn't make for Maxwell's book, but the discussions are necessarily quite constrained.
Like Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman settle on developing a research proposal as the objective readers should accomplish. But unlike Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman use the generic sections of the research proposal as an organizing scheme for the book: the chapters roughly correspond to these major sections. The advantage of this organizational scheme is that it puts the nascent argument front and center, really demonstrating that research design is an argument. But that's not as big an advantage as it sounds; a research argument has to underlie the design, and breaking the text into proposal sections results in segmenting that argument. I'd have to work around this if I were to use this text in my grad class.
Pragmatically, Marshall and Rossman include a welcome chapter on managing time and resources -- something that many QR texts don't address -- and a chapter on defending qualitative research. In addition, they use many, many vignettes throughout the chapters to illustrate the concepts they are trying to teach. These features make the book easy to follow and, I imagine, easy to apply for graduate students and advanced undergrads.
Overall, this book is a solid entry. I don't think I will use it in one of my classes (I still like Creswell), but if I were asked to do so, I would be happy to use it.
By Catherine Marshall, Gretchen B. Rossman
I just finished reviewing Maxwell's Qualitative Research Design, and here I am reviewing Designing Qualitative Research. I suppose there's a finite number of titles you can give to this sort of text. At any rate, Designing Qualitative Research is a fine book, but suffers from comparison to Maxwell's more economical and clearly organized text.
Not that Designing Qualitative Research is a monster text, by any means. The body is only 152 pages (Maxwell's is 115). But whereas Maxwell's book was an overview of principles, Marshall and Rossman's book gets into more details about discrete qualitative research approaches as well as details about data collection and analysis. At present I'm on the fence about whether this is a better approach: I think that a student could design a reasonable study solely based on what s/he learns from this book, a claim that I couldn't make for Maxwell's book, but the discussions are necessarily quite constrained.
Like Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman settle on developing a research proposal as the objective readers should accomplish. But unlike Maxwell, Marshall and Rossman use the generic sections of the research proposal as an organizing scheme for the book: the chapters roughly correspond to these major sections. The advantage of this organizational scheme is that it puts the nascent argument front and center, really demonstrating that research design is an argument. But that's not as big an advantage as it sounds; a research argument has to underlie the design, and breaking the text into proposal sections results in segmenting that argument. I'd have to work around this if I were to use this text in my grad class.
Pragmatically, Marshall and Rossman include a welcome chapter on managing time and resources -- something that many QR texts don't address -- and a chapter on defending qualitative research. In addition, they use many, many vignettes throughout the chapters to illustrate the concepts they are trying to teach. These features make the book easy to follow and, I imagine, easy to apply for graduate students and advanced undergrads.
Overall, this book is a solid entry. I don't think I will use it in one of my classes (I still like Creswell), but if I were asked to do so, I would be happy to use it.
Blogged with Flock
Reading :: Qualitative Research Design
Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach
By Joseph A. Maxwell
I've been meaning to read Qualitative Research Design for some time. Not only have I seen it cited, students of mine have recommended it to me as a good introductory book for grad courses in qualitative research (I usually use one of Creswell's books). So I finally got to it over the break. And I'm glad I did. The book isn't comprehensive by any means, but it's a good, solid, compact, clearly written discussion of how to design a qualitative research study.
The book was written in 1996 [Note: The above Amazon link is to the second edition, published in 2004], back when qualitative methods were less accepted in the social sciences, so Maxwell spends portions of each chapter discussing how to argue for qualitative research designs to skeptical audiences. This gets a little wearying. But he also lays out the basic components -- purposes, conceptual context, research questions, methods, and validity (p.5) -- and methodically goes through these components and their relationships. He also includes solid, cumulative exercises in each chapter, something that should benefit students at undergrad and grad levels. (The exercises should also help scholars who are reading up on qualitative research for the first time, and cumulatively they lead to a developed QR project.)
The chapter on methods is a bit thin, but I think that's by design. It's not feasible to go into much depth on the basic methods, so we get a high-level overview with cursory descriptions of data collection and analysis methods; readers will have to look elsewhere for descriptions detailed enough to actually implement a study. Fortunately, Maxwell recommends texts for us to read on these issues, particularly Miles and Huberman's excellent text on qualitative analysis.
The final chapter is on research proposals, and Maxwell reminds us here of what I always like to tell my students: your research design is an argument, and you need to be able to identify your claims and demonstrate how your research decisions will support those claims. While being sensitive to the differences of proposals in different fields and written to different agencies, Maxwell gives us good advice and includes a sample proposal.
Finally, Maxwell provides an appendix of recommended resources for those who want to read further.
Overall, a really impressive text. I borrowed this one from the library, but now I'll have to buy my own copy.
By Joseph A. Maxwell
I've been meaning to read Qualitative Research Design for some time. Not only have I seen it cited, students of mine have recommended it to me as a good introductory book for grad courses in qualitative research (I usually use one of Creswell's books). So I finally got to it over the break. And I'm glad I did. The book isn't comprehensive by any means, but it's a good, solid, compact, clearly written discussion of how to design a qualitative research study.
The book was written in 1996 [Note: The above Amazon link is to the second edition, published in 2004], back when qualitative methods were less accepted in the social sciences, so Maxwell spends portions of each chapter discussing how to argue for qualitative research designs to skeptical audiences. This gets a little wearying. But he also lays out the basic components -- purposes, conceptual context, research questions, methods, and validity (p.5) -- and methodically goes through these components and their relationships. He also includes solid, cumulative exercises in each chapter, something that should benefit students at undergrad and grad levels. (The exercises should also help scholars who are reading up on qualitative research for the first time, and cumulatively they lead to a developed QR project.)
The chapter on methods is a bit thin, but I think that's by design. It's not feasible to go into much depth on the basic methods, so we get a high-level overview with cursory descriptions of data collection and analysis methods; readers will have to look elsewhere for descriptions detailed enough to actually implement a study. Fortunately, Maxwell recommends texts for us to read on these issues, particularly Miles and Huberman's excellent text on qualitative analysis.
The final chapter is on research proposals, and Maxwell reminds us here of what I always like to tell my students: your research design is an argument, and you need to be able to identify your claims and demonstrate how your research decisions will support those claims. While being sensitive to the differences of proposals in different fields and written to different agencies, Maxwell gives us good advice and includes a sample proposal.
Finally, Maxwell provides an appendix of recommended resources for those who want to read further.
Overall, a really impressive text. I borrowed this one from the library, but now I'll have to buy my own copy.
Blogged with Flock
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
How to make money
You've seen the new Macintosh Air commercial, in which the astonishingly thin laptop is pulled out of a manila envelope? Manufacture a padded laptop case for the Air that looks like that manila envelope. Post pictures to BoingBoing. Create some Machead buzz. Cease manufacture after six months. Give me a small percentage of the profits.
Blogged with Flock
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
