Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Day the Left Bank Died....

Waxing nostalgic....I LOVE this video:




It has the flavor of "American Pie" (with all of the embedded cultural references) with  French twist, of course.  Watching the imagined draining of the Seine still brings a tear to the eye. I used to offer this song up as the "road to an automatic A" if a student could identify and explain all of the hidden cultural references. They worked like gangbusters for a week or two, then figured it was easier to just do their homework. But they would hound me about it semesters after the course was over.

Somehow, I don't think Alain needs to worry as much anymore about US, given how impuissant we've become....

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Cloud, meet Atlas. Atlas, meet Cloud.

Somebody with two similar Windoze machines running atlas.ti needs to try something for me…

Theoretically, if one were to put one's hermeneutical unit within a folder in Dropbox, along with all associated files, one should be able to call all of that up on two separate computers running atlas.ti, non?

 Well, I've poked at least one hole in that theory…

  I can open up the hermeneutical unit… no problems. However, the primary documents do not appear, as they cannot be found. The problem seems to be the fact that atlas.ti links PDs to the HU using * absolute  pathways*!! And since pathways on a Mac running Windoze  are not absolutely identical to the pathways on a PeeCee running Windoze... you see the problem.

 Dear Atlas.ti: * relative pathways*...learn them, use them. And while you're at it, port your program to MacOS already!!

 Dear rich fat-cat with two PeeCees running Atlas.ti:  will you please try this experiment with your computers and report your results here?  I'm dying to know if this works between oranges and oranges, since it obviously doesn't work between Apples and oranges.

 I'm sorry,  I meant to say lemons...Apples and lemons....

A bit of situational levity in the midst of EOS chaos

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=908

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

While other places have ponies, or parrots... we have dragons.

I am in transcription hell.  I would have quit well over an hour ago were it not for the lovely and talented Dragon.

Looking at a multimodal transcript after-the-fact is pretty fun, but, just like sausage, no one should ever have to see it made. It's not pretty. How "not pretty" is it, you ask? Let me tell you...I'd rather take the GRE over and over... how's that for you?

At least my fingers are not throbbing and popping... love the Dragon... feed the Dragon...

In my scholarly meanderings this week, I came across an interesting article that I started to read ( I probably should be reading the stuff I should be reading, but I couldn't resist the shiny PDF), not because I really believe in it, but it's helping me to separate a ( flavor?) of DASP from other flavors and from other theories:

 de Rosa, A. (2006).  The “boomerang” effect of radicalism in Discursive Psychology: A critical overview of the controversy with the Social Representations Theory.  Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 36:2, 161–201.

It offers itself up as a critical overview of the catfight between radicalized DASP and this "SRT", but it does a really good job of giving you the range of  DASP stances and some theories, affinities, and battles on the margins. Or so it seems so far.

Monday, April 4, 2011

bof...

Participant observation this week...not looking forward to transcription. JT comes to mind this week...(Well, JT channeling GJ...actually, AG does a nice version):

"Well, I'm just a researcher, and I don't like my work...but I don't mind the data at all...."

Fortunately, I don't feel like this often. I guess if I ever get to the point where I have "translated" the entire song, I need to pack it in and content myself with praxis and anecdote...

Potter/Edwards/Hepburn...burn...burn...burn Sacks...

Did you know that the 1200 pages of the Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning was insufficient? That there is a second volume of similar magnitude?

This week, I pine for the simpler days....