Ethnography inquiry and teacher education. The use of diaries for the comprehension of educational practice

We present in this communication a work of inquiry carried our using the diaries of students participating an educational experience in a primary school. Along a semester, a group of 10 students was workomg with a community learning project. These students were engaged with a teacher training experience which is being developed in the Education College at the University of Málaga. In this experience some teacher students attended two subjects of his education as collaborators in this school. His experience was collected systematically in field diaries in which they reflected their everyday experience in the school, as well as his insights, assessments, feelings, etc. These diaries become into the working material to study the school functioning and their experience. For that reason, working meetings were held with teachers of their subjects at the university. Collaboratively, diaries were analyzed, categorized and interpreted in an attempt to understand the school practice, and thus, progress their training process.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Media Kits

The 2015 Media kit for the Society Diaries magazine including distribution information, advertisement specifications and rates, editorial calendar, magazine insertion order and an advertising contract

Contact patterns in a high school: a comparison between data collected using wearable sensors, contact diaries and friendship surveys

Given their importance in shaping social networks and determining how information or diseases propagate in a population, human interactions are the subject of many data collection efforts. To this aim, different methods are commonly used, from diaries and surveys to wearable sensors. These methods show advantages and limitations but are rarely compared in a given setting. As surveys targeting friendship relations might suffer less from memory biases than contact diaries, it is also interesting to explore how daily contact patterns compare with friendship relations and with online social links. Here we make progresses in these directions by leveraging data from a French high school: face-to-face contacts measured by two concurrent methods, sensors and diaries; self-reported friendship surveys; Facebook links. We compare the data sets and find that most short contacts are not reported in diaries while long contacts have larger reporting probability, with a general tendency to overestimate durations. Measured contacts corresponding to reported friendship can have durations of any length but all long contacts correspond to reported friendships. Online links not associated to reported friendships correspond to short face-to-face contacts, highlighting the different nature of reported friendships and online links. Diaries and surveys suffer from a low sampling rate, showing the higher acceptability of sensor-based platform. Despite the biases, we found that the overall structure of the contact network, i.e., the mixing patterns between classes, is correctly captured by both self-reported contacts and friendships networks. Overall, diaries and surveys tend to yield a correct picture of the structural organization of the contact network, albeit with much less links, and give access to a sort of backbone of the contact network corresponding to the strongest links in terms of cumulative durations

The Diary of Colonel Israel Angell Commanding Officer, 2nd Rhode Island Regiment, Continental Army

This document includes the full text of Colonel Israel Angell\u27s Diaries compiled by Edward Field and published in 1899. It also includes the text of three manuscript diaries from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. These diaries were transcribed and digitized by Norman Desmarais and inserted in their proper location in Field\u27s text. The diaries are organized here by the year of coverage rather than by the individual manuscripts as in Field\u27s book. The five chronological sections of this combined text are also available as individual downloads in the supplemental materials section of this page

USING DIARIES TO IMPROVE ENGLISH WRITING SKILL FOR THE THIRD YEAR STUDENTS OF SMPN 1 LAMONGAN

English is an International language that has important role in the world of knowledge and it is used for communication. In Indonesia, English belongs to a foreign language and it is taught from elementary school to university. In language teaching process, writing is a subject which gets least attention from the teacher and the learner. Whereas, writing, especially in English, is an important subject to master. To solve that problem, one of the efforts which can be done is through writing diaries. This study investigated can diaries be used to improve the students’ writing skill for the third year students of SMPN 1 Lamongan and how effective can the diaries improve the students’ writing skill for the third year students of SMPN 1 Lamongan. The purpose of this study was to find the answer whether the use of diaries can improve the students’ skill or not and to describe how effective the diaries can improve the students’ writing skills for the third year students of SMPN 1 Lamongan. In conducting the study, the writer employed a quasi-experimental design. The subject of this study was one class which consists of 44 students. The instruments used to collect the data were pretest and posttest, then the scores were calculated by using t-test formula. The result of this study showed that there was a significant different between the scores of pretest and posttest. Besides, the result of the calculation of t-test showed that the pretest and posttest already make a significant progress. It means that the end of the study the both tests were significantly different. So, it can be concluded that the diaries can be used to improve the students’ skills in writing and effective to be used to improve the students’ skills in writing

Evaluating the audio-diary method in qualitative research

Purpose Audio-diary methods are under-utilised in contemporary qualitative research. In this paper we discuss participants and researchers’ experiences of using audio-diaries alongside semi-structured interviews to explore breastfeeding experiences in a short-term longitudinal study with 22 first-time mothers. Design/methodology/approach We provide a qualitative content analysis of the participants’ feedback about their experiences of the audio-diary method and supplement this with the perspectives of the research team based on fieldwork notes, memos and team discussions. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the data attained from diaries compared with those from the interviews. Findings The diaries produced were heterogeneous in terms of data length and quality. Participants’ experiences with the method were varied. Some found the process therapeutic and useful for reflecting upon the development of breastfeeding skills whilst negative aspects related to lack of mobility, self-consciousness and concerns about confidentiality. Researchers were positive about the audio-diary method but raised certain ethical, epistemological and methodological concerns. These include debates around the use of prompts, appropriate support for participants and the potential of the method to influence the behaviour under scrutiny. Interview and diary accounts contrasted and complemented in ways which typically enriched data analysis. Practical implications The authors conclude that audio-diaries are a flexible and useful tool for qualitative research especially within critical realist and phenomenological paradigms Originality/value This appears to be the first paper to evaluate both participants and researchers’ experiences of using audio-diaries in a detailed and systematic fashio

Stella Benson: a life of reading, writing and publishing

Stella Benson – feminist, diarist, novelist and travel writer – published her first novel, I Pose, in 1915.  Her last book, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously in 1936.  Although her diaries might suggest some reservations about the reception of her earlier novels, in a letter to Marie Belloc Lowndes, Benson’s husband James O’Gorman Anderson said of her work: ‘Stella was quite happy about her writing, was sure of herself there, and had no thought of not being sufficiently appreciated.’  Others shared that opinion; for example, her 1932 novel Tobit Transplanted (titled The Far-Away Bride in America) won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize and the silver medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Benson’s writing was informed by her reading; she was an avid reader throughout her life and talked at length in her diaries about books that she enjoyed.  She often read a book in a day and it is evident from her diaries that she was always keen to read contemporary, Modernist and avant-garde poets and authors such Sturge Moore, Dorothy Richardson and Ford Maddox Ford (reading, for example, The Good Soldier in just one day on 3rd January 1918).  Her diaries, for the most part unpublished, provide a rich source of material, detailing both her reading and her writing.  Drawing extensively on those diaries, this paper discusses the connections between Benson’s reading, her writing and the subsequent publication of her early novels. It will explore her relationship with her publishers and will also, as a postscript, consider the role of the recent republication of her fiction by Michael Walmer in a possible reclamation and re-examination of Benson’s work in the twenty first century.

Longitudinal falls data in Parkinson’s disease: feasibility of fall diaries and effect of attrition

Background: Identifying causes of falls for people with Parkinson’s disease has met with limited success. Prospective falls measurement using the “gold standard” approach is challenging. This paper examines the process and outcomes associated with longitudinal falls reporting in this population. Methods: Participants were recruited from ICICLE-GAIT (a collaborative study with ICICLE-PD; an incident cohort study). Monthly falls diaries were examined over 48 months for accuracy of data and rate of attrition. To further inform analysis, characteristics of participants with 36-month completed diaries were compared with those who did not complete diaries. Results: One hundred and twenty-one participants were included at baseline. By 12 months, falls diary data had reduced to 107 participants; to 81 participants by 36 months; and to 59 participants by 48 months. Key reasons for diary attrition were withdrawal from ICICLE-gait (n = 16) (13.2%), and noncompliance (n = 11) (9.1%). The only significant difference between the completed and non-completed diary groups was age at 36 months, with older participants being more likely to send in diaries. Conclusions: Prospective falls data is feasible to collect over the long term. Attrition rates are high; however, participants retained in the study are overall representative of the total falls diary cohort

In the eye of the storm: preliminary evidence on the use of online learning diaries

The surprising lack of pressure and speed in the centre of the vortex of a storm are in stark contrast to the force and destruction often experienced at its periphery. Many spectators watching a developing storm will be caught between fear and a desire to escape. The metaphor of a storm has been applied here to the emotions experienced by many students enrolling in online learning courses. Not only do the requirements of studying online collide with personal and professional commitments, the experience of learning online (often in groups) results in many students feeling displaced, scared or out of control. Learning diaries, especially in an online environment, present students with an opportunity to reach the centre of the vortex, though this may not be as quiet and safe as we may have presumed. This paper reports on students’ reflections in their learning diaries as a prescriptive part of the Professional Certificate in Management offered by the Open University. The research focused on the unstructured learning diary entries of 12 students from one tutor group over an 18 day period of a short compulsory online course. This phenomenographic study used grounded theory as methodology to analyse and describe students’ use of their learning diaries. The research found ample evidence that online learning diaries provide students with a safe space to reflect on the vortex around them. Without a quiet and reflective centre, students may be overwhelmed by the wider forces impacting on them. Students’ postings provided rich descriptions of the vortex of studying online and the function of having a centre to which to withdraw. There is, however, also evidence that posting reflections in learning diaries can itself be a dislocating and uncomfortable experience for some learners, while others question its usefulness. The work provides practical and useful information for managers of online learning experiences, instructional designers and curriculum developer