Reading Dervin's article "Qualitative Research in Information Management" made me feel like this poor woman in the photo. She put her reading glasses on so she could really focus, but she's still confused. She gathered her informational resource, but she's still confused. She even has a trusty sidekick to guide her in this process, and yet she is still confused. I felt my eyes starting to glaze over when reading the article and I was only on the second page. Maybe I needed a different environment? My quiet room might work. Nope. I found myself skimming the entire article to try figure out the core idea and using the strategies I teach my students- look at the text features like headings, captions, etc but that didn't help much either. After struggling for 7 pages, I finally began to feel frustrated. My notes in the margin say, "What can I take from this reading that can help me and my students?" Unfortunately I still don't really know. My only glimpse at understanding came midway through the article when I saw the stick figure drawing crossing the gap toward help. Hooray!- Dr. Bobbe Baggio must be right that visual representations convey more meaning to most people. After finally reading the six different exemplars, I think Dervin's main point has something to with systems thinking?
If I had to teach this content to high school students, I think I would definitely pull in Baggio's approach and try to visually represent the six different exemplars because those real world examples made more sense to me. I wasn't tripped up on syntax/vocabulary so I was able to focus more on the content. I think if we sketched out each specific example and tried to synthesize the idea into a caption like a series of cartoons, maybe some connections would start to form. I am glad that we were warned that reading this article is "dense" otherwise I think I would have wound up feeling dense! This was only my first reading and I can tell that this will require multiple reads to try and pull out something (anything!) that is meaningful for me..
4 Comments
9/20/2016 08:49:13 pm
Dana, I loved your blog because that's EXACTLY how I feel (you just said it better than I could have). I am actually not done reading the chapter. I had to stop, take a break and read Baggio's book for a change. What a relief to realize that at least I could make sense of that book!
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Lori
9/22/2016 06:33:07 pm
Thanks for your comments, and especially for the hilarious photo! My experience is similar to yours. I studied the graphics, hoping that they'd help me to understand the concepts better. Agree that a visual approach would be very very helpful to our students!
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Joe Madigan
9/24/2016 03:02:22 pm
I'm sitting here Saturday morning trying to make sense of this article, I've got by google docs opened, so when something...ANYTHING...that makes sense jumps out at me I can record it...I really tried not to read anybody else's blog first because I didn't want to be persuaded....I was on page two when I started think this was a conspiracy...I think the whole point of this assignment was to get us to feel so frustrated, I kept reading, highlighting, re-reading, and finally after about four pages, gave up. This is way out of my league. Then I read yours and Florencia's blogs, and that's when I realized my first assumption might have been true, that we were supposed to feel completely lost and frustrated...I will post my random thoughts sometime later today on my blog...
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Dana,
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Dana HandI teach Read 180 at Northwood Elementary School and I am passionate about reading (obviously!) In my "free time" I love hanging out with my 2 teenagers and taking our two dogs for long walks. Archives
March 2017
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