So TyPiCKal!

I'm talking about typical debates on quantitative vs qualitative approaches but in the context of TPCK studies :-)

While browsing the websites tagged "TPCK" in Delicious, I came across a blog created by Brooke, a PhD student whose research study was also on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge ("TPCK"): OER’s, DL’s, Reuse & Culture

The post was about TPCK and its measurement. Brooke made the observation that most of the studies on TPCK so far have been qualitative in nature and went on to explain why she preferred the quantitative approach instead. Her comparison caught my eye:

"and while i do respect and think that qualitative is a perfectly acceptable and respectable way of understanding the world - it’s not the way i’m excited about doing research. i love quantitative measures. there’s a lot of logic there that works for me - rather than being a jumble of a lot of things that i have to put into a logical story that may or may not have clean edges - for me the quantitative measures are puzzle pieces that have to be turned in a very specific way to be able to fit into what is being measured. research becomes a puzzle, a game, rather than chaos."

It is interesting that she likened quantitative measures to "puzzle pieces that have to be turned in a very specific way to be able to fit into what is being measured". Firstly, it seems to suggest that there is a correct way of measuring a construct just as there is one correct way of putting a jigsaw puzzle together so that all the pieces fit together in the way that they were manufactured. Perhaps, quantitative measures are seen as being able to determine the "way things are" such that replicable findings suggest that they are "true" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 109)?

Brooke also seemed to imply that the qualitative approach leads to "a jumble of a lot of things that i have to put into a logical story that may or may not have clean edges". Would she attribute the possible lack of "clean edges" to a perceived lack in objectivity in qualitative approaches? However, subjective judgments are made in both types of research activities, even in the use of quantitative data notably in how an interpretation model is selected as well as in the process of scoring (Ercikan & Roth, 2006).

In the end, the dichotomy that is so typically drawn between quantitative and qualitative approaches may well be a false one; rather the approaches may be better seen as falling within a continuum. Instead of thinking of research as either quantitative or qualitative, one may instead focus on how research questions shape the mode of inquiry and how researchers may collaborate to integrate the different modes (Ercikan & Roth, 2006). Moreover, both quantitative and qualitative research methods value empirical observations, safeguards against bias and invalidity, and the provision of warranted assertions and may be mixed (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004).

The mode of inquiry one chooses ultimately depends on what research questions one wishes to examine. I see the question of how TPCK may be measured to be closely tied to what TPCK is and how it manifests itself. While I am very often confronted with questions of how TPCK may be measured, I find myself drawn to other aspects of TPCK which emerge to me as particularly problematic or which I wish to problematize. For instance, in the depiction of TPCK as the intersection of three neat overlapping circles representing technology, content, and pedagogy (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) it was not clear whether the areas of overlap such as TPCK, TPK, TCK, PCK are mixtures of the bodies of knowledge or transformed through the interactions of the bodies of knowledge. For example, if I have been teaching a particular topic using a particular pedagogy and one day decide to explore the use of a technological tool, does the introduction of technology change the pedagogy and the content in any way? Gess-Newsome (1999) have described the two different views of teacher cognition as integrative and transformative. To borrow a chemical analogy, the former may be likened to a mixture of two or more elements whereas the latter may be likened to a compound of two or more elements such as the very nature of the compound is different from that of the constituent elements. What does integrative TPCK look and sound like? What does transformative TPCK look and sound like? Does it make sense to ask whether TPCK is either integrative or transformative? Can it be both and if so, are they different stages in the development of TPCK? My gut feeling is that there is something very exciting afoot in the transformative view of TPCK, a creative tension that teachers face when they grapple with technology, content, pedagogy in the design of learning experiences for their pupils. I'm interested in finding out what light could be shed in the context of teachers engaging in a discourse community. Will I get to see the tensions arising from the interplay of T, P, and C? That is what I would like to find out.

References:
Ercikan, K., & Roth, W. M. (2006). What good is polarizing research into qualitative and quantitative? Educational Researcher, 35(5), 14-23.

Gess-Newsome, J. (1999). Pedagogical content knowledge: An introduction and orientation. In J. Gess-Newsome, & N. G. Lederman (Eds.) Examining pedagogical content knowledge. (pp. 3-19). London: Kluwer academic publisher.

Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (Vol. 2, pp. 105-117).

Johnson, R. B., & Onwuegbuzie, A. J. (2004). Mixed methods research: A research paradigm whose time has come. Educational Researcher, 33(7), 14-26.

Mishra P., & Koehler. M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.

A little DELICIOUS-BLOG experiment

I'm experimenting with something:
I added this blog to my Delicious bookmarking system
AND
I added a Delicious network badge to this blog
to see whether it will connect me to more people who share similar interests e.g. teacher knowledge, teacher learning, teacher professional development, technological pedagogical content knowledge etc...

So, here goes, I hope it works! Please leave a comment if you find this blog "Long Arctic Day" via my judy.lee delicious bookmarks or vice versa. If you have tried it on your own Delicious network and Blog and the method works well for you, please let me know too! Many thanks!

How to Live Forever

Analytic post on How to Live Forever

Fortunate blog authors who get sent off to exotic places for interesting writing assignments – it’s difficult not to feel jealous about them. Well, while browsing a collection of blogs, I chanced upon a certain Jason Wilson who wrote about an Italian island by the Mediterranean Sea, where centenarians purportedly formed a large proportion of the population in an isolated region. (I Googled to find out more about him but stopped when I came across his byline for another blog article, this time set in Iceland. Envy got the better of me.)

What drew my attention to his blog article was the mention of “Sardinia” (because it is one out of a long list of places I wish to see before I say good-bye to this earth, hence my envy). A group of Sardinian researchers involved in a study named “the Akea project” claimed that they had found a “longevity hot spot” in an isolated region. The blog writer wrote that his mission, as articulated by the magazine which sent him, was to visit very old Sardinians there and to ask them for practical tips to live long lives.

It was an interesting read as the author described his meetings with elderly Sardinians and the lead researcher and compared the research to a similar studies done by the Japanese on Okinawan centenarians.

Near the beginning of the article, I was under the impression that the writer was trying to instill the reader’s confidence in the Sardinian study by contrasting it with another report that turned out to be a hoax. He wrote:

“I remember, for instance, a widely reported tale of men in the Caucasus Mountains who lived to the ripe of old age of 120 by subsisting solely on a diet of yogurt. After gorging myself on yogurt, it was soon reported that whole story was a hoax. The men’s birth records were wrong. Faulty data. Sorry.

But in Sardinia, the story is different. This time, after rigorous study, all the Sardinian centenarians’ birth records checked out. The demographers on the case confirm that the age data are perfect. No hoaxes, no inaccuracies.”

At this point, I had expected some form of explanation that would convince me, the reader, that the “age data are perfect” as claimed by the author. Granted that this is a blog article and not a journal article, I feel that the guidelines that Smagorinsky (2008) laid down for the establishment of credibility of results should nevertheless still apply e.g. description of the method by which the birth records were verified.

Later on in the article, I was given indications of the author’s distrust of the Akea project through his description of his meeting with Lucia Deiana, the lead researcher on the Akea project. One of the indications was how he ended his description of the meeting:

“Later, two of Deiana’s fellow researchers asked me if he’d demanded money in exchange for arranging meetings with centenarians. For the record, I can say that Deiana did not ask me for money. But I can also say that he didn’t introduce me to any centenarians, either, which he had promised he would do.”

The author devoted a portion of his article to the Okinawan study, which he described to be “one of the most comprehensive and high profile studies on longevity and lifestyle”. If the author had adopted a parallel of the case study research approach, one might say that the Okinawan study acted somewhat like a contrasting case (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993) to the Akea project.

Regardless of whether the author is trying to persuade the reader of the trustworthiness of the Akea project or otherwise, I felt that more information of how the Sardinian study was conducted needs to be provided so that I could draw my own conclusions. Perhaps it was because he was not able to obtain any of such information? In any case, we were not told that was the situation.

By the time I reached the end of the article, the question of what the Sardians did to live long lives was largely unanswered as most of the elderly folk he interviewed replied that they led very “normal” lives. The article left me wondering about the writer’s true purpose behind what he wrote. Was it as simple as interviewing centenarians in Sardinia to find out the secrets behind their longevity? Or was it meant to be a critique of the Akea project? If so, why? I guess this is a reminder to me that it is important to engage in some kind of “self-disclosure” in terms of explaining one’s aim in a study and helping the reader to understand one’s subjectivity in academic papers that I write in future. The same does not necessarily apply in writing for blogs, of course, but I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that the author is holding something back in this article. Ah well, in any case, I’m sure he enjoyed his travel into the remote village nestled in Sardinia.

What other learning points may I draw for my proposed research study on TPCK? I'm reminded of the need for reflexivity in one's writing - asking myself what the reader will feel to be a gap in my study and answering questions that may arise. It is the need to balance between optimism for possibilities in one's area of research and skepticism for its significance. The integration of technology has been studied by so many researchers before me that I feel that I might need to look for ways to make the familiar strange again, just like what McDermott (1996) did for learning disabilities. Do I really need to labour till twilight before the Owl of Minerva wings its flight? I guess so! :-)