This post originally took the form of a couple of Twitter threads, which I’ve collected and edited here for easier reading. Greg Sandow asks two very interesting and provocative questions of classical music: When the Museum of Modern Art did its first retrospective of a seminal musical artist, no surprise it was Björk who reached past music …
Author Archives: Ethan
Games for learning research method overview: interviews
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Magnusson, C., Rassmus-Gröhn, K., Tollmar, K., and Deaner, E. Haptimap User Study. Gomoll, K. & Nicol, A. (1990). User Observation: Guidelines for Apple Developers. The Apple developer guidelines recommend incorporating user observation and feedback early and often in the software design process. Rather than receiving …
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Descriptive Participant Observations on the Culture of the Park Slope Food Coop
Writing assignment for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson The Park Slope Coop (PSFC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1973. It offers sustainably and ethically produced food and grocery items. Because it needs only to cover costs rather than turn a profit, the PSFC’s prices are substantially lower than a typical Brooklyn grocery …
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Frank Ocean – Pink and White
I’m working on a new music theory course with the good folks at Soundfly, a continuation of Theory For Producers. We were looking for contemporary songs that use modal interchange, combinations of different scales to create complex blends of emotion. Soundfly producer Marty Fowler suggested a Frank Ocean song, which I was immediately on board …
The Interpretive Turn: From Sociological Positivism to Constructivism
Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Willis, J.W., (2007) Foundations of Qualitative Research, Sage, chapters 1-4. The simplest way to define the difference between quantitative and qualitative research methods is that one uses numbers and the other uses words. But in reality, qualitative researchers use stats too, and all quantitative studies contextualize their …
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More salsa-dancing social science
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Continuing with Salsa Dancing Into The Social Sciences by Kristin Luker. See the first part of the discussion here. Canonical sociologists usually have well-bounded sets of questions, and answer them using well-bounded sets of theories and previous findings. Qualitative researchers have questions that emerge out of theoretical and …
Measurement in games for learning research
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Kiili, K., &; Lainema, T. (2008). Foundation for Measuring Engagement in Educational Games. J of Interactive Learning Research, 19(3), 469–488. The authors’ purpose here is to assess flow in educational games, to “operationalize the dimensions of the flow experience.” A flow state involves deep concentration, …
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The role of culture in interpretive inquiry
Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Geertz, C. “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture.” In The Interpretation Of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30, 1973
The Craft of Research and Salsa Dancing
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides The Craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph Williams is a sober and traditional guide to humanities scholarship.
Introduction to Research on Games and Simulations
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass In this post I’m summarizing some writing about the foundations of research on games for learning. It’s a dry topic, so to enliven it I’ve included a bunch of screencaps from Mega Man 2. They have nothing to do with anything, but they look cool. Plass, …
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