My Personal Learning Environment!

     This week we looked at PLE (Personal Learning Environment). Our task was then to consider our own individual personal learning environment. A PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) example by Urs Frei best suits my own PLE. Frei considers the following steps; retrieving, evaluating, organizing, analyzing, composing, presenting, publishing and dialog. When I have an assignment to do firstly I retrieve all the information I can find in concern to the topic of the assignment. I first do this by going to the library to get books or read things from Special Collections such as a thesis. I then check the Internet and check Jstor and search on Google. I was not aware of Google Scholar until this week in class! With all this information I then evaluate its importance and relevance to my assignment and organize the information into sections which would form my paragraphs. I then analyze the information in relation to the question I was set. I consider the information and my own view on the subject. I then compose a first draft of my assignment in the shape of an introduction, main body and conclusion. I then present the final draft and await the feedback from the lecturer which may then help me improve in my next assignment as I could learn where I could do better in different areas.

     'how do they improve their practice, learn from each other, and continue to improve on overwhelmingly complex tasks?..We didn't hire smart people so we could tell them what to do; we hired them to tell us what to do.' This is an important point made in a piece written by Yasmin Fodil. It basically states the benefits of learning from each other. I can first consider what I know from experience. I can reflect upon my past experiences which allows me to build on each assignment, learn from each one and improve. I can consider what everyone around me knows and then join these together, it is said after all that two minds are better then one. A definition offered for Knowledge Management is 'better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.' This is important to note as the more minds that discuss a problem give a better insight to it as we can learn from each other.

     'One of the great benefits of using social media as a KM tool is that you are creating and capturing the knowledge at the same time. However, in order for this to truly work people have to be willing to collaborate in the open throughout the project lifecycle...If you share what you know and what you don't know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment.' I think this is very important. I did not realise the benefits of using social media as a tool until doing this course. I was not even aware of all the resources which are out there for people to avail of. 'Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.' I think this is true, starting out in this can prove to be a difficult process but overtime one would reap the awards of it. Before making this blog I did not have a blog, therefore it was new to me. I now realise that by following peoples blogs one can learn from other people and pick up useful bits of information as well as perhaps discovering links to other places of interest.

     'In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.' Wenger stated this circa 2007. Our own small class in Digital History can be described like this as a community of practice where by we share a common interest in history in general, and a majority interest in Irish media history and journalism. Thus by working together we could learn from each other. Vygotsky shares a similar view. 'Social interactions plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition...Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals...the idea that the potential for cognitive development depends upon the "zone of proximal development" (ZPP)...The range of skill that can be developed with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can be attained alone.'

     The point he concludes on here is what is most important that by collaborating we can achieve more than by working alone. Having done this course and this task in particular in future I shall use more social tools as sources of learning. I will do so as I am now aware of what is actually available to me and that they are actually quite easy to access if the tools are used properly and to their best affect.   

http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/how-do-rocket-scientists-learn
http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm
http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html

Playing with words!

     This week we explored two interesting tools on the Internet; Tapor and Wordle.  'TAPoR is a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation.' 'Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.'

     Tapor I found to be very useful when I eventually got it to work! There are many different options available on the site. I have included some below. I found a piece written on the Internet http://www.irishlanguage.net/irishdialects.asp in concern of the Irish language which I have changed my thesis topic to. I then copied and pasted the URL into the different tools available and some of the results can be seen below. You can find a brief summary of the piece or get the most frequently used words and a word count of each word by using these such tools. When considering pieces to read for my topic this site could be useful as it offers a way of scanning through documents to see what they contain more quickly than having to read the whole piece. I could just search the most used words and know if it is useful to my topic without having to go through it all.

 Here are some of my results of using Tapor:

Summary: There are 371 unique words other than those in the stop list, there are 613 words other than those in the stop list. There are 1062 words in total including the stop words.

Words	Distribution	Counts
irish		54
dialects		21
dialect		12
munster		11
ulster		11
connacht		9
language		9
connemara		9
spoken		5
used		4
speakers		4
scottish		4
gaelic		4
features		4
ní		3
home		3
good		3

Summary

General Statistics
Text Source: http://www.irishlanguage.net/irish/dialects.asp
First non-empty paragraph:

Irish Dialects

Second non-empty paragraph:

Irish dialects. Moreover, you will find other useful resources about Irish like words, schools, Irish literature and more

Total words: 1062
Unique words: 474
Words that occur once: 331
Words that occur twice: 73
Highest word frequency: 54
Average words frequency: 2.24

List top 10 words not in the stop word list

Words	Counts
irish	54
dialects	21
dialect	12
munster	11
ulster	11
connacht	9
language	9
connemara	9
spoken	5
=	4

     Here is the link to my very colourful word cloud I made on Wordle. I used the same piece as I did in Tapor.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2774590/Digital_wordle

I included the link here as I found it difficult to get the image of the wordle into my blog as I was unable to for some reason!

     Overall I found these two tools to be useful in particular Tapor as it has many options to chose from which could be very helpful. Wordle I think would also be a colourful way to demonstrate a point as a colourful word cloud can stand out on a page. For example if in my thesis I look at a survey of television viewership ratings of several channels both English language channels and Irish language channels a word cloud like this would emphasise the point that Irish language channels in this country do not get the high viewing ratings that the English language channels do. This point could be seen by having the frequently watched channels standing out like the most used words that stand out in my above link.

http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal
http://www.wordle.net/

The Press as a Source of Socio-Historical Data: Issues in the Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers_Roberto Franzosi

     This week we looked at Roberto Franzosi's piece on using newspapers as historical sources. I found this very interesting as one could easily and often forget that newspapers are not always accurate. When using newspapers as historical sources it is important to remember this, that while they are useful their validity and reliability can be questionable. Measurement problems that go hand in hand with primary data collection from newspapers are only 'received token if any consideration' which results with a neglecting of the ways in which the measurement process may affect the results of statistical analyses as well as our theoretical conclusions. The paper discusses issues of measurement errors as well as selecting which newspapers to select to use as sources and offers solutions to problems associated with the inaccuracy of newspapers. The writer explains that the main recommendations of the paper is that more emphasis should be placed on problems of validity rather than reliability.
    
     Validity: 'an instrument which measures exactly what it is supposed to measure and nothing else'. Empirical component: 'operationalizing and giving empirical representation to abstract concepts'. Reliability: 'concerns the degree of respectability and consistency of empirical measurements'. Such terms are discussed by Franzosi as vital to consider when using the informal sources of historical data that is newspapers. He informs us that newspapers have been most relied on as sources of data for the study of collective actions and political violence. When using them for this purpose there is always the problem of the source being questionable whether it is valid or not. He states that due to this we are left with the thought of wheater 'we are analyzing patterns of historical events or patterns of news reporting' as newspapers are often biased and selective. For example I read recently about the media coverage and in particular newspaper coverage of the 1916 Rising. James Connolly's death was reported to have happened on four different dates at four different places!! This shows how newspapers are often unreliable.

     Though they are limited sometimes they are the only source available to historians to research a particular part of history as there may not be any other surviving or available source to interpret. He importantly notes that of course newspapers are not the only sources with error as many sources are rarely without some kind of error, different papers too vary as some facts will be in all reports but descriptions and other points of information could be varied. He also interestingly notes that the bias is more of silence and emphasis rather than false information. There are several things to remember when using newspapers in respect to the possibility of them being biased, such as geographical bias as well as the papers ideological stance and of course the journalist own personal opinions and views on things. Solutions are offered in how to avoid problems, such a helpful solution which is suggested is; to compare papers with other papers, as much as possible from different geographical locations and different ideological stances. By doing so similarities will show up which can thus then be taken as accurate. While dates and precise times are often very important in historical research newspapers rarely offer an exact date and time of events.

     'Are newspapers data valid? My answer is, generally no'. They are likely he says to suffer from stematic error and are so not valid. 'data collection from newspapers are reliable. My answer is, generally yes'. Therefore Franzosi comes to the conclusion that papers may be reliable but may not be valid, therefore it is important to keep this in mind as they can be often the only source available for research, which shows their importance yet can only be used effectively by remembering the limitations they behold. 'Validation of data through alternative and independent measures should be an integral part of any research design involving data collection from newspapers'. This final quote sums up Franzosi's view in this paper and the message perhaps he was aiming to put across. It is a very valid one which I believe would be useful for people using newspapers as sources for their thesis topic in particular because it is important to try and get the most reliable information available obviously, to document the historical area one is interested in.      

1911 Census-Lisaphooca

My work this week was to transfer information on one area in Cork called Lisaphooca, from the 1911 Census, onto a spreadsheet. Thankfully I did this before the weekend as it took longer than I expected!! Transferring the information was fine only I had to be careful not to put in the information in the wrong places which I did a couple a times but fixed later! I then found the mean, mode and median. I think I did them right? I am not sure, but I did use a calculator instead of the spreadsheet tool which does that as I kept messing it up somehow! :( I also asked my sister for help she does Maths, but I ended up telling her how to do it! So I hope it is right. :) I got the blank spreadsheet off of blackboard and added in the columns titled "Diff", "1st Child", "Children", and "Intervals". These columns offer the significance of the information as they shine light on the general life of the time in respect to family size, age woman was when giving birth, intervals between having children and the difference in age between husband and wife. These were interesting to look at as differences can obviously be seen when comparing this information to the same areas of life today.

Out of the three married couples there was a ten year age gap in two of the marriages which if compared to today this large age gap is not seen as much as it would have been in 1911. The ages the women were when they gave birth to their first child was quite varied, they were 23,30 and 40. 40 in particular I thought was quite old to have a child I think it would be seen as old today if a woman had a child at 40. At the time of the census though this age may suggest that the women had children earlier but they are dead or have left the family. The ages the women were when giving birth to their other children are not out of the ordinary as they range between 24 and 36. The intervals between having children however I found interesting as there was not much time left between them at all, as they were between one and two years. Today a three year gap between children is favoured by a lot of families. A 53 year old woman who worked as a servant could neither read nor write which I did not find too unusual considering her age and occupation however there was a 30 year old woman also who could neither read nor write which I found odd as I could not imagine not being able to read or write at that age.

It is clear when looking at these examples how Ireland has progressed in the almost one hundred years which have past since the census was taken. More people can now read and write, there are smaller families and in the majority of cases around three years between children. These examples show the progress which has been made in education and family-planning in particular which has been made throughout the years since. People now do not depend upon the farm as much as then also, as practically every occupation in these examples were connected to farming. A different way of life in a sense is on offer in Ireland today in comparison to these examples of 1911!