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!!