Learning to Teach

               My original research topic was, as you may know, Gangland Limerick in the Media. I had a little research done and a few sources lined up, but was worried that the end product would be more sociological than historical. I had the same problem when I covered a similar topic for my final year dissertation, so after discussing it with Finola Doyle-O'Neill, we both decided a change was needed. I settled on the Limerick Leader as a starting point as not a lot of research has been carried out on the publication. It is my intention that the compilation of my research will not read like a mundane chronolgoical history, but rather it will provide a new perspective on the newpaper, it's place in society and what it has done for Journalism in Limerick and for the city itself.

               I am aware that teaching this subject may be difficult, for undergrads they might not see the relevance in learning about a Limerick based newspaper if they have no association with the area. For this reason, I think it best that this subject would be taught as a case study. In this format I could present my research on The Limerick Leader as an example of a local newspaper, and the students could then use what they have learned to research their own local newspapers or even other media outlets.

Aim of Module

• To show students the relevance of popular local press in society and its importance as a legitimate historical source.

Module Content/Areas of Research

•  A brief historical accounnt of the Limerick Leader.
• Understanding why this paper and other local publications are worthy of research.
• The Leader in society.
• Breaking Stories and their effects.
• Battling against Limericks negative reputation in the media.
• Journalism and reporting - The leader as a stepping stone? A look at Fergal Keane.
• The successes and failures of the leader from 1889 to present.

Presentation and Teaching

• Teaching oints of my research in a classroom that can act as a foundation for multiple class discussion on various topics.
• Case Study Format - Using the example of a specific outlet to teach skills and methods that can be applied to other research topics.
• Engagement with primary sources - Limerick Leader articles that are available in UL library and online.
• Using powerpoint and presentations as opposed to mundane lecturing.
• Involvement of guest speakers - faculty from The Limerick Leader.

Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to:

• Engage with primary sources.
• Show interview and research skills.
• Apply skills to other media outlets.
• Participate in gropu discussion.
• Understand and Evaluate the importance of regional press.

Assessment

• MCQ quiz, small percentage, based on central important facts specifically concerning the Limerick Leader.
• Class attendance and participation.
• A choice of essay questions based specifically on the Limerick Leader.
• A choice of general essay questions that can be answered based on what has been learned in class.









The Art of Learning

               This week, our discussion basically comes down to how we learn. In class, we talked about  Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) which at first glance one might think are the same thing, knowlege and learning...they're all the same, right? When I consider these theories in more detail it turns out they are actually two very different things but they are closely linked. I'd like to define them separately so that anyone reading will be better able to understand what I am rambling on about, and also so that i don't confuse myself in the process. For me, PLE is literally how we learn things; how we study, how we remember facts, how we engage with them and we put them to use. PKM on the otherhand is learning in a broader sense, how we bring everything we have learned and need to learn together in one place and in a way that caters for our individual needs.

               I think that our Personal Learning Environment changes over time as our capabilites improve and what is excpected of us develops. In secondary school the teachers always asked us were we doing any "study". Study in this sense ment acting like a sponge absorbing everyting from 7 or 8 huge books and regurgitating it in 7 or 8 different exams. Honestly, during the year of the Leaving Cert I cant remember doing any study that wasn't a necessity because of a class test or something along those lines. If I did study, I mite be walking around the house with a book or hanging upside down on the bed with the music blaring. I really didn't put in a whole pile of effort when I think back on it. My method was to predict the questions and study the answers, usually at the last minute and using little scribbles, ryhmes and keywords to help me remember. The teachers were fine with this, our entire honours English class went into the exam with Sylvia Plath as our only option in the poetry section because our teacher was convinced she would be on the paper. Thank God she was, an we all rattled our prepared essays into the answer books merely changing words here and there so it sounded like we were answering the question.

               My undergraduate degree was an extention of this type of learning but with a lot more effort and for the first time, a little engagement with the topics. When writing assignments in first year, the aim was to answer the question being asked. Your own opinions were important but not if you couldn't back them up with the work of real academics. Personally I thought we were better off keeping in mind who was correcting the papers, best not to tread on any toes when you're new to the university environment. Exams will always be the same, especially when studying humanities. You're given a question and you give a long winded answer based on what you can remember on the day. The only thing that I noticed was really giving us a chance to develop our learning and our learning environment were the essays and assignments given to us in final year. It's probably a terrible and extremely immature analogy but the longer the word count, the more opinion and effort expected. Our history dissertation helped us to understand and engage with independent research, if we hadn't done that, we would really be thrown into the deep end trying to complete masters research.

               If I could describe my personal learning environment in one word it would be "pressure". Back in my school days I left everything until the last minute and I must admit that I still do. It's not because I'm lazy, I think it's because I work best under pressure. I have started 4000 word essays at 10pm the night before a deadline and gotten on more than ok. Granted the room would be akin to that of a maniac by the time I'm finished; spider diagrams stuck up all over the wall and multiple piles of paper or books all over the floor. I spend more time on the reading than the writing, I'm not saying it's healthy, but it is what works for me most of the time. It looks like mess but I know where everything is. Then I'll hand in the finished product and get feedback from whoever has corrected it. If it is a presentation to my peers, I'll try to make sure it is accessible and that we are all on the same level and of course, take any of their comments on board. The best way to learn is from other people.

                In relation to Personal Knowledge Management, mine is extremely simplistic. I make "to do" lists of assignments, their due dates, meetings with peers and supervisors and any recommeneded or additional reading that might be of interest. I've never used the many Google apps that are available; calendar, search alerts, tasks, blog. My computer is a liability, I can never predict when it will turn itself off, and the administrators in the Boole won't let me install radom apps on computers that aren't mine! Hopefully after Christmas that will change, if the recession hasn't hit santa that is! I regurlarly use Jstor and other online arcives and find them to be a great help, and I will definately be adding Google Scholar to my searches. Filtering out the random and unreliable hits that search engines often throw out is a great help to my research, and I'll sign up for email alerts as soon as I finalised what it is I'm researching as I am currntly in the process of changing topics. As for facebook and twitter, I would never have thought of using them as academic sources if we hadn't discussed them in class. Everyone I know uses them to keep in touch and to share pictures and not much else. Although I must admit that the first place I heard about the notorious bail out was on a "like page" that said RIP Ireland's Independence 1916-2010. I bet all the History students laughed at the inaccuracy.

Text Analysis

               Not too sure what we were meant to write our blog in relation to this week, but judging by everyone elses posts and what we were doing in class last week, I would think that text analysis is a safe bet! I used Martin Luther King Jr's I Have A Dream speech because I figured it would be interesting to see just how frequently he utteres that symbolic sentence. The speech from August 1963 is about five minutes long,  both videos and transcripts are easily available.

               First I ran the text through TAPoR which was useful for getting the specific figures and statistics about the most common used words the epic speech.

Words	Distribution	Count
freedom		21
let		13
negro		13
ring		12
day		12
dream		11
nation		10
come		10
today		9
satisfied		8
able		8
american		7
justice		7
men		6
long		6
time		6
white		6
children		5
great		5
america		5
free		5
new		5

Thankfully the text analysis software allows for the use of words like "a" and "the" and so on, so it's really just the specific words that are frequent and therefore important to a specific speech that are given in the results. "Dream" appears sixth in the list which is relatively high up considering there are 1920 words in the whole speech including the so called "stop" words. I however tought that it would have been the most frequently used word, listyening to the speech in the past it seemed to me that every second sentence was "I Have a Dream". Other popular words, as you can see from the graphics above, are "negro", "nation" and "American" but the word used most, 21 times to be exact, is "freedom" which isn't really surprising considering that freedom is the central topic of the speech.


               With a bit of time to spare I used the same text in Wordle. It didn't have as many options for text analysis as TAPoR did (ie there wasn't as much fiddling around to be done) as this software is solely for making word clouds. I figured Id give it a go anyway, make a pretty picture out of one of the most famous speeches in history!


<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2774812/i_have_a_dream"
          title="Wordle: i have a dream"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/2774812/i_have_a_dream"
          alt="Wordle: i have a dream"
          style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

               The html code above doesn't seem to be working so hopefully you will be able to view my word cloud here.

Newspapers as Historical Sources

          When I started to read Franzosi's article about data collections from newspapers it was going slightly over my head. I didn't think that the whole discussion about theoretical and empirical concepts was of great importance. However, the points that he puts across in the paper are very valid and actually important to anyone studying for a masters or doing a type of research for that matter.

          He says that newspapers are an imformal source of politicial and historical data but that their vailidity and reliabilty are questionable. As soon as I read that bit I started to tune in a bit more. For my dissertation last year on the history and effect of gang violence in Limerick, I relied heavily on newspaper articles as sources for my research. He says often there is no other source available, and I definately found that to be true last year, there hadn't been any real academic research done in that area before yet it was always a topic of discussion in newspapers so that was where I turned. As I intend to develop this topic further for my thesis, I know I'll be faced with the same problem, so the lesson on the validity of newspapers turns out to be an important one.

          Of course everyone knows that you can't always believe what you read in the papers, particularly the tabloids that often print out and out lies. The bigger problem is one that affects all publications, and it's a problem that is often overlooked. "Validity" doesn't question "what" the newspapers are printing but rather "how" they are printing it. That's the best way I can think of explaining it with out a long winded repitition of the entire article. The problem of editorial bias in newspapers or in books, journals and even television documentaries, is something which we as researchers can never avoid. Ten different newspapers can run the same story with the same facts but can give very different perspectives to the reader. How can we tell what a journalist was thinking 100 years after he or she writes an aricle. Impossible.

          The second problem he addressed was the percentage of coverage that certain types of stories receive in relation to their percentage of occurance. I understood this perfectly, I remember trying to prove that the media blows the level of gang violence in Limerick city way out of proportion. I found figures in a book on crime in the media that proved my point, not just about Limerick City but the whole topic. For example, murder made up 12.3% of newspaper reports at a given time, but only made up .004% of Garda reports at the same time. I think that's essentially the point he's trying to make about using a control to show the validity of articles being printed. In my example the Garda Report was the control.

          The explanations he gave about coding seemed a bit drawn out but were esay enough to understand and agree with. It's all about avoiding human error. All this aside, he doesn't think that newpapers should be completely dismissed as research sources and I agree. Errors can be found everwhere, so we can't dismiss everything.

Attempting Photo Edits...

               When something looks or sounds difficult I tend to put it off for as long as possible. It's not that I won't be able to do it, it's that I need to set aside the time to really get into the task at hand. Now this is especially true where anything computer related is concerned.because my laptop is currently on it's last legs. The battery doesn't work and the slightest touch causes it to freeze so it is therefore no longer reliable let alone portable, anyway that's a whole different story. The boole computer centre is as good as anywhere else for now.

Mother Erin

                This photo editing business looked easy in class but I presumed that like most other things, when I tried it myself it would prove impossible. How wrong was I! I used the free version of online photo editor Picnik and it really could not have been easier. Everything is clearly labelled, there's no funny business, no hidden tools or strange symbols and there is even demo photos available for practisng on. I felt like a child playing with paint for the first time;zooming the cursor over my pictures, playing with colours, chopping and changing. It didn't feel like work at all, and made me realise that there will be no more spending money to get personal photos touched up. They'll all be delighted with my amazing photography skills at home!

From Gloomy...

                I'm using the pictures of the monument on Grand parade again, they were the best ones I took that day. Evidently from the first blog post I did about Cork's Historical locations, the weather wasn't great the day I as taking the pictures. The photo editor allowed me to cheer them up a little bit, but this is Ireland so there's only so much technology can do! The monument designe by D.J. Coakley, commemorates four risings between 1798 and 1867. Apparently the monument was unveiled by Fr. Kavanagh amidst verses of "Who fears to speak of 98?". The figure at the centre of design is "Mother Erin" and she shown at the centre of Four of Ireland's great sons; Wolfe Tone, Michael Dwyer, Thomas Davis and O'Neill Crowley.



...to sunny



                On the day it was unveiled there was a procession that meandered from Parnell Place (where the bus station is today) to the end of Grand Parade, the streets in between were lined with thousands of spectators. In his speech, Fr Kavanagh praised the links between Nationalism and Religion while Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa also put more emphasis on the importance of physical force. Both men praised the patriots that had died before them, way back as early as Brian Boru. I think the references in their speeches are what gives the monument its context and what makes it important for the people of Cork City. Sure, it is erected in memory of the names that ar listed on the stone tablets at either side, but what it stands for is much more that. It represents all the men and women who fought for Ireland, not only those who gave their lives but those who in some way helped to achieve Independence. In 2009 there was a ceremony to mark the rededication of the moneument, at which our own Prof. Dermot Keogh spoke and laid a wreath along with members of Oglaigh Naisiunta.

These two images show the amazing effect of photo editing. The top one is untouched, the original from the day I went out with my digital camera in the rain. The bottom one is the same image after a little nip and tuck. The difference in clarity is easily distinguishable, and I did it all by myself! This class is turning out to be really useful. Exciting stuff!!

1911 Census and Spreadsheets

      I decided this week that I would get straight to the assignment that's set for our next class rather than leaving it until last minute as always! I started working on the census at about half past twelve today and it's taken me three hours to muddle through it! I thought at first i must be doing it wrong because basically all I was doing was flicking over and back between the census information on the national archive website and the spreadsheet i was putting it into. Then i looked at the example we had been learning from in class today and mine looked fairly similar and I'm now quite proud that I have something to show before the weekend comes!
      The layout of my spreadsheet is a little different to what we looked at today because the blank forms on blackboard list the colums in a different order (I didn't realise this until I was half way through and was afraid to go tampering with them incase I lost the work I had just done). I also forgot to bring my usb key to the library so I'm just hoping the email I sent myself with it as an attachment is the right format for my computer at home!
      Anyway now for the technical bit. I looked at three areas of Ballymodan, Co Cork; Corravreeda West, Garranbeg and Knockanreagh. I got a little bit stuck calculating the mode and the median. I'm managed to throw up some figures, not sure if they're right but I'll give it another look later in the week.
      The results that struck me the most about the six house I looked at were that there were only two families in which both parents were still alive. The most common situation was that a widowed father was looking after the children and the farm with the help of two or three servants. Five of the houses in question were landowning farmers and the remaining family also worked on a farm though they did not own it. I also noticed that for the Cogan and Buckley families, the occupation of the eldest child was either farmer's son or farmers daughter and nothing else.
      These are just some of the things i noticed at a glance so I hope to edit this post later when I've thought about them more thoroughly.

Cork City's Historical Sites

      I have to say that when we were first given this assignment, I thought it was going to be one of the easiest ones that I have ever been set throughout three years in college. It was easy in the sense that we had to walk around and take pictures as opposed to sitting in the library for days and days churning out two thousand words of referenced opinion. On the other hand it was difficult, because we have all become immune to the heritage of our local areas it was hard to know where to start.

      My favourite pictures from the day I spent walking around the city like a tourist are the ones I have of the National Monument on Grand Parade. Honestly, I had skimmed over a few google hits on Cork City's historical sites and when I read this one I could never recall even seeing it. On the other hand i hand walked passed this giant statue on that part of Grand Parade where "the skaters hang around" a thousand times on my way to the bus station and never taken any notice of it. It wasn't until I was there with my camera that I realised they were the same thing.

      The structure was built in 1906 to commemorate the uprisings against the British in 1798 and 1867. On it's four corners are statues of O'Neill Crowley, Dwyer, Davis and of the most well known of the three, Wolfe Tone. At it it's sides are lists of names who the statue is also dedicated to including the famous Father John Mitchell. The statue was erected by the Cork Young Ireland society in honour of the rebels who had fought for the same cause that they were now fighting for themselves.

      I think the entire idea of virtual tourism is fantastic. Some may say that it is ruining the experience of actually visiting heritage sites and historical places but I think not. I read the post on the the new location based game Gowalla and looked into the game itself and thought it was great. Not only can people millions of miles away enjoy the heritage sites here in Cork City, but those of us living here can learn more about them too. Time spent on virtual tourism is more productive than the hours people spend waiting for crops to grow on farmville!!

Web Logs and Online Discussions as Tools to Promote Reflective Practice

     This piece is aimed at both current teachers and future teachers and it's objective is to deal with the lack of communication between the different levels of the education system. Throughout the article, blogs and online discussions are highlighted as a proposed remedy to this problem as they encourage collaboration and reflective practice.

     He says that school teachers today arrive into their profession with expectations that differ greatly to the reality of their work. What they subsequently find is that, they do not have any control over what or how they teach their students. They are confined by deadlines and a strict curriculum in most instances. The result is that many abandon the profession within their first five years of qualifying. To prevent this from happening, graduates from teaching programs, or any discipline for that matter, need to learn independently how to become more than just information transmitters.

     We are already learning in our classes that technology is the way to close the gap between academic professionals around the world and that it also helps to make intellectual discussions and research available to a wider network. Now we can also see that not only does it allow us to participate in a larger community but that it can also aid in our own personal development. This article helps to explain to our class why blogs and online discussions are so relevant to us as historians. We can evaluate and reflect on our work and eventually learn how to be more independently productive students.

     He explains how electronic media is vital in today's education system, not only because it benefits us personally but because it crosses the barriers of time, scheduling and geography. Blogs and discussion groups are generally in the public forum so the author faces a "potentially large and unknown audience". He explains, and I agree, that this is a key motivating factor for students to engage with the work and also means that they are less likely to write just what the instructor wants to hear if they know that their peers will be reading it too.  For teachers, online discussions allow them to work outside the confines of the classroom. According to the references in this article many teachers feel that they are in an isolated job with a "heavy burden of private responsibility". Hopefully  the new methods being used will help to change this opinion.

     He talks in detail for a while about a class of 56 students that created online blogs as part of their university coursework. Overall the experiment appears to have been a success. The students were taught the values of the different types of electronic communication, their posts turned out to be of high quality and they ultimately developed the sense that they too could be considered as real contributers to the academic world.

     I think that online blogs are a great idea especially for larger classes. We can learn to present ourselves with confidence and voice our ideas even if we are too shy to speak out in class.

Cohen and Rosenzweig

     I read Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web. As with any historical publication, or any book at all for that matter, it takes a couple of reads to really take in the information being presented but I think the authors have done a great job. The book is practically a step by step guide and I think it suits our course perfectly, no detail is left uncovered. Everything we mentioned in our first class is dealt with somewhere in the book, making it reliable to fall back on if all this technology gets to be a bit too much! The authors are not academic snobs, anyone could follow the designs and plans that are set out which is important for maximum accessibility, something which is very important to them where sharing knowledge is concerned.

     They outline the computer as the central tool for today's historian, and denounce the classroom as irrelevant in the world of information technology, thus making their book a must read...very clever marketing! I think it's true though. Ten to fifteen years ago computers were relatively unknown and almost feared. I remember our first P.C. that had little else to do other than solitaire yet I was under constant supervision when using it. Today our house would be cut off without the internet, our neighbors house seems like miles away, it's so much easier to facebook! According to Cohen and Rosenzweig, personal use of computers and the internet has developed at literally the same speed as academic use, maybe even faster. They say that ten years ago historians were curious about computers, the technology was intriguing yet not vitally important. Today, a yahoo search gives out 39,959 historical sites, and that's just the best of the crop which ignores all the hypertext links that lead all the way down the academic scale. Really it's madness how much information is out there!

     I like how they present the advantages of the internet age as they move through the chapters. All these advantages are concerned both with the mass audience and the mass volume of information that can be presented. The sheer storage capacity available and the different formats it's available in, mean that today's history will never be forgotten. Hopefully that means that eventually there will be no such thing as trawling through pages and pages of illegible chicken scratch in order to find one fact or quote...we can always hope! Interactivity between all realms of society means that history is no longer confined to those that can afford to study it, I think this is the greatest advantage. If someone has a passion for history, there should be no price on it.

     Of course the authors don't ignore the fact that the internet is not always the most trustworthy source, the quantity of information available threatens it's quality and even misspelled words will give out hundreds of search words. I think that's a small price to pay considering we can now reach the other side of the world with the click of a button.

     The book outlines challenges for todays historians who now have no choice but to go digital. In the course of the chapters it helps with the basic skills needed and obstacles that may be encountered. Everything from design to copyright is covered as well as a quick glimpse into what the future may hold for historical research. Over-all, it's the perfect companion to a digital history course, especially for those of us that have not completely mastered the ins and outs of everything the internet is capable of!

Introductions....

Hello! My name is Emma, I’m 20 and I hail from West Limerick. When doing my BA, I fell in love with UCC and Cork, so I had to come back and do my Masters in Historical Research here in the People’s Republic! My undergrad Dissertation was on the history and effect of gangland violence in Limerick city. I chose the topic because it is relatively unexplored in the academic field and the issue is close to home because we Limerick people are always being stereotyped. This year for my MA thesis I hope to continue with this topic but with more emphasis on the relationship between the conflict in Limerick and the media attention it attracts. My central focus will be; does the media really help to uncover the criminal underworld or is it just glorifying the lives of criminals by making them front page news.  Hopefully I’ll be able to stick with it and won’t step on too many toes! Anyway, that’s pretty much it so....bye!!