events, Heliconian, KMDI, UofT
In Reflections on February 1, 2010 at 9:07 am
(In summary? Busy. Next blog.)
January arrived with a bang as I adjusted back to the non-holiday schedules. As you have noticed, I haven’t posted much in that month, and what I did post had more to do with my school assignments than anything interesting to share. I attribute that to the extremely successful SPO concert that ate up a lot of my time (but provided a lot of reading opportunities during rehearsal), the reading heavy courses I am taking (Research methods and a reading course on knowledge organization and classification), and the consultation projects that requires more reading and writing. It honestly doesn’t leave much time to sit and reflect during my day, so the blog has been a little slow. Many exciting things are under way, but I’ll save my time and energy into actually working on them. Instead, here are a few noteworthy events that you might be interested in as well:
My KMDI talk: Music as Embodied Knowledge
February 24th, 4-5pm. Bahen Centre (40 St. George St.) Rm. 7231
In preparation for my talk in Oxford in April, I’ll be giving a version of my talk at the Bahen Centre. This is rather exciting, as I get to test out my ideas to a broad audience, and refine my presentation based on feedback. I hope to draw a at least a few audiences from the Faculty of Music. Click here to read my talk description
audit culture, professionalism, university
In Reflections on January 28, 2010 at 7:09 pm
I have been reading a lot about audit culture, performance measures, autonomy of professionals, and the culture of distrust, mostly from the dissenting perspective. These are cultural anthropologists, quantitative researchers, finance experts, management theorists, all pointing to the poison that has been insidiously eating away at our autonomy (as professionals, as individuals), all in the name of “public accountability” or “transparency”. The level of interest and relevance in this topic caught me by surprise, but then again, Prof. Juris Dilevko never does anything by accident. The assignment asks us to look at the issues through the case of university evaluation and rankings, and the detrimental effects audit culture has had on the actual quality of service provided by the institution. Andrew Sparkes’ narrative approach to discussing the problems provides an accessible and poignant way for layman to consider the impact on our higher education systems through a spectrum of personal experiences. One review of this piece summarized it best, “The world he describes becomes incredibly vivid and tremendously sad – how have we let our institutions of higher education become what they are? How have we ever allowed arbitrary quantitative measures to determine value?” Of course, the sentiment can be also applied to health and law enforcement, amongst others.
music knowledge, research
In thesis on January 19, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Lay out the key features of the research interest that calls out your name. Given that, how would a canonical sociologist (a traditional, quantitative-minded social scientist) design or “set up” this research question? What kind of data would be sampled or gathered? How would the hypotheses be tested? What kind of steps would be taken to guard against bias, and to make sure that the data were generalizable?
I would like to study the learning and information-seeking behaviour of individuals who are trying to learn a musical instrument, using guitar as an example. “How do guitar students learn how to play the guitar by using Information Communication Technologies (ICTs)?”
In order to achieve a ‘random’ sample, controls for variables need to be considered by collecting a wide range of data about age (young prodigies to mature hobbyists), literacy or education level (ability to read or follow instructions, experience with music education), physical or mental capacity (small hands, visually impaired, etc.), physical location (city, suburb, small town), comfort level with ICTs (information addict, technology luddite), Data, data, more data…
