My plan for a relaxing, beautiful, Sunday afternoon in the fall ended up being a ridiculous exercise in rhetoric. I won’t bore anyone with details, but having had to watch a beautiful day pass by through an open window should be punishable by law. The police should have come to my house, knocked down my door, and dragged my butt outside. While Ryoko and Seijiro did spend most of the day outside, I was able to join them in the evening. Spending time with them was better than using bailout money to take all of my friends to a spa. Oops, I mean, it was better than abusing my power as governor, wait a sec–how did I segue from enjoying my day as a husband and father to political sarcasm? A reflection of my day, perhaps? Today’s theme? Who knows. I do know that I look so forward to this blog assignment every week and am aggravated that today I have squandered my creative energy on an unneccesary task.
To address the assignment at hand: the process of designing an interview guide was really good, actually. I loved working hard to make sure that my interview questions would tie directly into my key questions. ut in order to do that, I had to go back and make sure I understood why my key quesitons were important, and how I wanted to use them to learn. Since I am basing this off of what I am actually doing this year, I was forced further to think about why I was doing this, and how Moodle really could help my students. All this forcing and thinking was good for me this week. It helped glue some things together, making me more confident in my choice of evaluation subject.
The interview itself was a little more challenging. I had a wonderful partner, and we both read up on each other, looking at introductions and evaluation plans prior to the interview. When it came down to it, though, it was hard for both of us to come up with answers to each other’s questions. I feel like this is a cop-out, like when my kids come to me and say, “I didn’t understand so I didn’t do it.” As a teacher, that drives me more crazy than a whole lot of things. But I tried to be very deliberate in creating questions that would yield the data I needed to make sure that I was doing a good thing in my class. Likewise with my partner. Having had no experience with SRSs, I couldn’t think of very many uses for them outside of multiple choice type questions, and therefore had a very limited range of responses to his questions. I struggled to think of how they would help learning because I was so preoccupied with trying to fit them into my class. What would have helped me was if part of our assignment working together would’ve included a brief summary of anticipated responses sent from my partner before the interview.
We both really wanted to work together, though, so we decided to share our questions in full. By doing that, I was not only able to have a better understanding of what Dave was trying to get from his interviewees, I was also able to offer better advice and support for the questions he was writing. I feel that he did the same for me.
While we weren’t able to contribute data to one another’s research, we were able to contribute a lot to the question design. As outsiders without preconceived ideas of what the answers should be, we were able to offer a neutral perspective on how questions might be perceived. We played around with potential answers and worked through the answers of various subgroups, wording our questions to be more inclusive.
In the end, it was a very helpful session, and it was great to spend time with a classmate, one-to-one. And I can’t wait until next Sunday night, where hopefully my mind will be fresher and I will once again have the creative energy to enjoy the fun that this assignment always provides. Good night.
