News from secretary and teacher

assignment update

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:10:16 GMT

by Jeremy Rose.

I'ver now received (or been promised this week) the majority of assignments. Therefore I announce that the final date for receiving assignments at the assignment page is November 30th. After that it will no longer be possible to submit (which means that you will not receive credit for the course) and we will proceed with feedback and administration. I don't feel that its fair to the students who submitted on time to wait longer. Best wishes, Jeremy

assignments

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 09:45:07 GMT

by Jeremy Rose.

Thanks to Jens, Charlotte, Jinling, Benjamin, Asma and Tara for submitting and to a couple of others for arranging late submission. For administrative reasons we'll wait until all assignments are in before looking at them. You're reminded that the office will not issue attendance certificates until they receive a list of satisfactory completers from us. If you're very delayed or not planning to submit for some reason please let me know.

Jeremy

assignment submission

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:17:00 GMT

by Jeremy Rose.

Many thanks for your contributions and participation which are vital for making the course a good experience. Please check the assignment details and submit through moodle here.

PIR dedoose enrollment

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 11:29:35 GMT

by Jeremy Rose.

Hi everyone - I hope you've made some progress with getting hold of articles and contacting each other and preparing your short presentations (check the moodle news forum if this doesn't mean anything to you). I hope also you have your travel and accommodation sorted out.

The last thing you need to do before you arrive is enroll with dedoose. Dedoose is a cloud-based content analysis tool which we will use for the practical data analysis exercises during the course. You will receive an email invitation during the course of the next few days inviting you to sign up for the service. You will need to provide your personal details as with all cloud-based services, but the service is free for new users for the first month (you will only need it for the three days of the course). We will work on a project called Publishing Interpretive Research (if you can see other projects you should leave them alone!!).

You shouldn't try to do anything before the course apart from get enrolled - I'll show you the tool during the course and explain how we'll use it.

This is the first time we've tried to use this cloud-based service in this way so we may expect a few problems - please just report back to me as they occur.

ice-breaker assignment

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:51:08 GMT

by Jeremy Rose.

Here is your introductory assignment: it's to be done before you arrive with the aim of getting you to make contact with each other, work together and begin to think about the course material. It's not assessed.

You will make a short presentation (7-10 minutes with a few slides) in groups where you will compare a positivist style article with an interpretive one. To simplify things and give us a common reference point the positivist article is always the same:
VENKATESH, V., MORRIS, M. G., DAVIS, G. B. & DAVIS, F. D. (2003) User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view. MIS Quarterly, 425-478.

The groups and the interpretive articles assigned for comparison are here (session 2). You should give a very short outline of your interpretive article for those that have not read it, but concentrate on the major differences in research style. The articles have different themes, but this is not what we are interested in. We are interested in differences in research method, data collection, data analysis, theory generation, research approaches and styles. These things can be summarized under the headings ontology and epistemology - if you feel you need to know more look at:
ORLIKOWSKI, W. J. & BAROUDI, J. J. (1991) Studying information technology in organizations: Research approaches and assumptions. Information Systems Research, 2, 1-28.
However I have already labelled the articles as positivist or interpretivist - so we need to understand how these different philosophical positions manifest themselves in the texts you study.

You will find your group members' email addresses here and I leave you to self organize using email and video chat. The four presentations are scheduled in the session timetable - but how you get there is up to you. This is an introductory exercise so you should not use more than three hours on it.