Seeing Through New Eyes

I have been meaning to write about my experience at the 2009 Open Education Conference, but haven't gotten to it. So, here is one of my thoughts (building from David Wiley's thoughts here: Feeling out of place ). There were some ideas floating around the conference about the meaning of open educational resources. The one that caught me off guard was someone saying that to be truly open a resource must be reusable (meaning derivative works allowed). Wow, so that means some of the creative commons licenses can't even be used with that definition. I found that the definition of what open really means is changing, and in my opinion not always for the better. As David said, there were some radical ideas coming from many people and that scared me just a bit, mostly because I don't want to see people no longer respect the Open Education Movement. I think it is very important, but it needs to be handled creatively and carefully. At the end of the session by Chris Mackie I was ...

USU had graduation this weekend. It was fun to visit with a few people who are graduating and to see the excitement in their eyes. I was reminded that this could be me next year. Oh, I would love to be graduating next year. My path to the PhD certainly has been exciting, enlightening, and hard. But, I know it will be worth it in the end. Funny thing, is that I don't really see graduation as an end. It is just another stepping stone in my journey. Here's to another year of excitement and progression in my journey and looking forward to graduation!

Every year at the end of spring semester the department puts on a spring social where they hand out awards to students. I was honored this year to receive the Outstanding Research Assistant award. It is something voted upon by the faculty and I thank them for this honor. They are wonderful people to work with and have made my experience as a graduate student great! It truly is a pleasure to work with them and learn from them. I hope all doctoral students have the opportunity to work on research with faculty members. I always learn by doing, and by doing I feel I grow more.

I now have a Selected Works site with bepress. Check it out: http://works.bepress.com/heatherleary. I am planning to keep this up to date, although I still have quite a bit of work to do to it still.

We can add Oregon State University to the open access article mandates, along with MIT and Harvard. Yeah!

I just read that MIT faculty have approved an open access policy for their publications. Looks like one more 'big' name school has made a step forward for allowing access to the research and scholarly work produced by the school. http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/03/18/mit-open-access-policy-approved/

I just read this posting on the SPARC forum. I am happy to see that this has been upheld and will be permanent. First u.s. public access policy made permanent 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentag...

I am excited to announce that I have been accepted to participate in the AERA Division C Graduate Student seminar. It will be a great experience for networking, one-on-one time with some fabulous mentors, meeting other graduate students, learning more about surviving the dissertation, and learning more about research. Looks like I am going to have a great time at this conference and I'm looking forward to it. There are so many things to do before then, but I am feeling good about the direction I am going. The whole PhD experience has taught me so much about myself, the variety of people in the world, and what I can do. I'm glad to be able to share my knowledge when I can and to continue to learn from others.

My adviser signed off on my program of study today. Whew. I just need to finish up a couple incompletes and do my class this semester and I'll be completely finished with course work! In the mean time I need to be finalizing my committee, finalizing my cognate areas, putting together my article list for comps, scheduling comps, and doing them. Then it is off to dissertation land! Projected graduation date: Spring 2010! I have a ton to do before then (need to do some teaching!), but I am excited. I am nervous but ready to be moving forward. I am excited to move forward with problem-based learning and assessing the literature for non-cognitive outcomes. If that doesn't make sense, let me put it this way. I know problem-based learning is as good as or better than traditional lecture classes for cognitive outcomes, so I want to know how it fares for non-cognitive outcomes like motivation, interest, engagment (behavior), self-directed learning skills, etc. I think it can be a very p...

Last week while attending my church services , the topic of learning came up. In fact, the entire lesson was on learning, how it is everyone's right to be able to learn, and how in this day and age opportunities for learning are more accessible than ever. With that, we all need to take advantage of these opportunities and learn. I believe this learning needs to be balanced (just like everything in our lives). It needs to have a portion of spiritual learning (whatever your beliefs), it needs to have physical learning (to me that is knowing what your body needs, how to take care of it, and actually doing those things), and then you need to have learning that helps you succeed in the world (that can be anything from college, apprenticeships, or personal study). Now, learning needs to be something that happens everyday. It should be something we all desire AND something we share in love and gratitude. For what is the worth of learning something? Just for you to know or for you to do an...

As I continue to work on my literature review on meta-synthesis and meta-analyses of data visualization, I am finding another word: meta-study. This is quite interesting as it appears that it is bigger than meta-synthesis or meta-anlaysis. It claims to be another qualitative technique that takes into consideration a large account of what is happening with phenomena and sorting it out, sythesizing it and putting forward new ideas. Funny, cause thought that's what meta-synthesis was. As I wrap this up for my prof I hope that it is good enough work to be making a contribution.