Category Archives: Study

Anywhere, Anytime, Anyplace: A Brutal Underestimation

Anywhere, anytime, anyplace

This quote was shared by Siân Bayne and Jeremy Knox in their keynote (The Manifesto for Teaching Online) at this year’s annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. The quote particularly caught my attention:

Thrust into the world of online and distance education, it immediately became clear that the slogan of anywhere, anytime, anyplace is a brutal underestimation of the complexities and entanglement of different inequalities and structural arrangements. Overnight, gone is the relative safe haven of campus life, social life and peer groups. Students and staff were thrust into a lack of dedicated space to work undisturbed and the need to care for family members and especially children who must be home-schooled during the lockdown. Students reported more family responsibilities like running errands, household chores, taking care of elderly family members. Such role conflict emerged in stories of students being admonished for being lazy and just reading (rather than physically active); for having even more pressure to choose between prioritising their time/finances for personal gain (their studies) or their families financial or care-giving needs. For some, returning home meant returning to places of violence while residential accommodation on campus was a refuge for those coming from abusive/dysfunctional homes—physical emotional and verbal abuse/gender-based violence.

This comes from ‘A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning‘ – worth reading in full.

Czerniewicz, L., Agherdien, N., Badenhorst, J. et al. A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 946–967 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00187-4

Via The Atlantic: College Wealth Premium Has Collapsed

Definitely worth reading this piece in the The Atlantic, that makes the point that the economic value of Higher Education has decreased in the U.S. (“College still boosts graduates’ earnings, but it does little for their wealth”).

The article leans heavily on a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis authored by William R. Emmons, Ana H. Kent, and Lowell R. Rickett.

Web Scraping Workshop

Web Scraping

John R. Gallagher (Assistant Professor of English at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) provided an extremely useful workshop on web scraping at DePaul today.

The workshop was introductory, and used the XPath query language and Google Sheets to begin, and then mapped out how R and Python could be used to automate.

Planning to come back to his resources and dig in deeper.

EndNote – Manual Entry

EndNote

Most of the time I find EndNote to be useful – a place to organize research resources. Citations are easily imported in as RIS (Research Information Systems) files (or ENL or ENW). Creating a manual entry is a little bit painful, and there does not appear to be much in the way of documentation fully explaining how to do this.

However, a colleague of mine at DePaul attempted to address this issue. Posting this here to come back to later:

  • There is no set format or syntax for creating a new reference in EndNote library. For instance…
    • The “Place published” field can be entered in a variety of ways (e.g. “city, state, country” or “country; state; city”).
    • There are no particular or suggested options for the “Type of Work” field (suggest matching as best as possible to the intended audience).
    • The “Short Title” / “Abbreviation” fields can be updated as you wish (if it were a published journal, then clearly the abbreviated titles would be provided in the journal’s ‘author information’ section).
  • DOI syntax is determined by the DOI Registration Agency you use to create your DOI, should you need or wish to have one (more on the actual DOI syntax at: https://www.doi.org/doi_handbook/2_Numbering.html#2.2 ).
  • The Keywords term list (which maintains a list of terms used in the Keywords field) can be set up to recognize semicolons (;), slashes (/), backslashes (\), and returns as the delimiters that separate individual keywords.
  • If you would prefer to use other punctuation to separate your keywords, you may change these settings using the “Define Term Lists” option located in EndNote’s “Tools” menu.
  • If & when editing/viewing your document in MS Word, you can create/edit reference types and styles using the Word menu option: “Output Style.” EndNote Tech Support recommended referring to this Knowledge Base article:
  • https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Windows-and-Mac-Style-Editing-Guide?language=en_US

Other resources on the wen include:

Resources For The Future (To-Do)

Over time I accumulate a set of resources and things-that-I-should-do,-but-don’t-have-the-time-at-the-moment. Rather than these getting lost, I am posting them here to come back to later. Maybe.

Installing PROCESS macro for SPSS on macOS Sierra

Installing custom dialog files

Installing custom dialog files

I have not had a chance to properly test this (i.e. run the macro on actual data), but the method to install Andrew F. Hayes‘ PROCESS macro for SPSS (Version 24) on macOS Sierra seems to be:

Extensions / Utilities / Install Custom Dialog (Compatibility mode)

and then open “process.spd”

This then adds a new menu item to:

Analyze / Regression

SPSS Menu Item

PROCESS seems to be available after closing and reopening SPSS.