Key actors in the NPP

Citizens:
Every citizen with a home address

Business & Organisations
Every business, organisation and department with an address in Ireland. Every organisation that stores customer or member address data would be impacted by the postcode system.

An Post:
The national post service.

3PL Industry:
Transportation, freight forwarders, parcel services, and third party logistics providers (3PL)

Hybrid e-tailor/fulfilment enterprises
Specialist warehousing, pick and pack, robotic distribution centres

ComReg/ODTR
Established in 1999 the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) operated from 1999 to 2002 run by a single commissioner. The Commission was replaced by the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulator (ODTR) in 2003 and the governance structure altered to rotate the director annually.

ODPC
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC)

Internet commerce services
Any retailer e-tailer offering products for sale via e-commerce that ship goods to addresses in Ireland. Impacted by mandatory postcode fields in customer registration and address delivery forms.

Geographical and Location Data Service Providers
Firms and organisations including GeoDirectory, OpenPostcode, Loc8Code and Go Code

GPS Technology
SatNav devices, smart phones with GPS functionality.

Producer/consumers of Demographic Data
The CSO (Central Statistics Office) and other agencies aggregating citizen data based on geographic location and address such as the HSE (Health Services Executive), city and county councils, the Revenue Commissioners.

Service and utility providers
Any organisation that captures and utilises address data for service provision and billing, e.g. gas, water, electricity, telephone, broadband.

Emergency services and first responders.
Garda (Police), Fire, Ambulance, emergency and council services.

EU
The European Union, promoting member state commitment to deregulating and introducing competition into service sectors.

Film Business

My notes on The Business of Film

The "carefully constructed system of film exploitation" is Bharat Nalluri's pithy one-liner depicting the film industry ecosystem and its various value chains. He acknowledges moreover that this tried and tested system under pressure, is having to respond to radical change occurring in the market place. Change in the form of shifting audience behaviour as a result of new digital distribution systems, change in preferences for the kinds of entertainment, the channels they use, how people consume it, when, where, how, who with. And digital technology's inherent capability to duplicate digital content has expanded opportunities to make copies and share media, leading to a commensurate loss of control of digital intellectual property.

The film industry has been both blessed and beset by radical change in recent decades. Digital media, connected devices, internet services, innovations from pov cameras, drone camera mounts, 3D, virtual reality, improvements in NPC AI, through to the now almost conventional innovations of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Furthermore Film is competing with new forms of digital media which is producing shifts in its consumption, from places and locations, to non-location via connected devices, new channels, all enabled by the growing capability and capacity of expanding digital infrastructure. Much of this is driven by advances computing hardware, software and software infrastructure, and by digital content itself, compelling characters, narratives, story worlds. The technological transformation has been propelled by the computer industry, including the computer games, digital animation, and perhaps too by advances in military technology feeding back into markets, entertainment and the world at large. All of these complex interrelated forces, coupled with the increasing fidelity and realism of simulation, and augmented reality aren't simply pull factors, as they both expand and feed into the markets for entertainment with strong digital elements.

Where do you source the money required to develop screen and film projects?

Valuing intangible assets is one of the most pressing challenges for enterprises producing them.
However, we can price the costs of production, the base cost of producing the goods in the first place, usually the cost of labour, paying for the time and attention of creative talent, plus any necessary physical goods, tools and other material goods needed (film hardware, software, computing resources like workstations and render farms, etc.).
Finance can be raised from the following categories of sources: commercial, economic, & cultural institutions.
Typically financiers seek funding support from distributors, equity
Distribution finance ranging from 100% to partial arrangements; buying all or some territory rights, from funding the entire project to selected parts, distributing to outlets, gathering revenue.
Equity finance via funding bodies usually public sector cultural bodies, through to private sector investors such as individuals, shareholdings, tax break investments, and tax credit mechanisms.

Reference Material

Behind the scenes reflections from Peter Jackson's pick up of The Hobbit on Guillermo del Toro's departure as director (link). The pressure of a deadline put on a project that still needed preparation.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9764016/peter-jackson-the-hobbit-movies-terrible-explanation

Designing meta-objects; the containerising of practices and things

Design of a meta-object and integrative attempts at containerising current practice and extant information infrastructures.
The emergence of unplanned for beneficial innovation between so-called information infrastructures and organisational process has been identified others (Leuenberger, 2007; Leuenberger, 2010).
The argument being that the evolution of large scale infrastructures occurs through a co-dependence between the structuring of information objects and organizational/societal form.

Within these fields of understanding

The naive positive turn is an uncritical use of radical realism, an overarching appeal to the objective rationality of techno-societal interventions. In this mode, information infrastructures are instrumental interventions, straight-forward designs that can be dreamed up, developed, and deployed. Understanding success or failure is largely in terms of the rational or irrational behaviour of those involved.

A related but more subtle theoretical frame explains the phenomena of infrastructure through the concept of agential realism, that such the meta-objects of infrastructure acquire a quasi-autonomous existence and exert agency in turn upon their human users.
Indeed the human agency of human protagonists (entrepreneurs, designers, promoters, developers) begins to diminish in comparison with the scale of a meta-object's inertia and momentum. Unexpected behaviour, even the emergence of unplanned for coherence (serendipity) transcending the designers' original intent is evidence of the object's agency, its unintended intentions.

Others attempt to de-humanise the meta-object by re-humanising its operation.
Critical researchers illustrate by deconstructing the 'thingness' of information infrastructures into their constituent micro-objects, technologies and social-organisational relations \citep{StaRuh1996aa}(Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker, 2002; Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010; Edwards, 2010).

Star and Ruhleder's (1996) \citet[p. 113]{StaRuh1996aa} definition of the dimensions or features of what constitutes infrastructure present a useful test for whether the status of infrastructure has been achieved by a particular social technological arrangement.

• Embeddedness. Infrastructure is "sunk" into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies.
• Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks;
• Reach or scope. This may be either spatial or temporal: infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice.
• Learned as part of membership. The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1992; Star and Ruhleder, 1994). Strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned about. New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members.
• Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice, e.g. the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs. Generations of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and thence by the design of today's computer furniture (Becker 1982).
• Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion.
• Built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo: it wrestles with the "inertia of the installed base" and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibres run along old railroad lines; new systems are designed for backward compatibility; and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes (Monteiro and Hanseth, 1996).
• Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks; the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now visible infrastructure.

These dimensions suggest that infrastructure is attained by accumulating social understanding over time; that design objects are gradual and fluid. /blockquote{Something that was once an object of development and design becomes sunk into infrastructure over time.} /citep[p. 152]{StaBow2002aa}

Interestingly, information infrastructures are complicatedly involved in the ways we understand the cartesian physical world (space).
They shape and are shaped by temporal contingencies, moments and contexts past, present and future.
They intervene in and alter our social-cultural perceptions of place.

OS X El Capitan grief

Note: OS X El Capitan changed permissions on /usr thus breaking access to MacTex's expected path to applications /usr/texbin. On El Capitan you may need to add /Library/TeX/texbin to $PATH. Do so via a shell/terminal e.g. sudo nano /etc/paths. Might also need to delete previous package in /usr/local/texlive. Might also need to change "System Preferences/Security & Privacy/Allow apps downloaded from:" Change to "Anywhere". Possibly unrelated, but on OS X may also need to install legacy Java (link).

Troubleshoot installations? Type command L from the first screen of the installer to open the log window so you can see error messages.

The MacTeX site strongly recommended download via Safari. A warning I ignored at my peril, because downloads on OS X via Chrome produced files with wrong checksums! Proof below...

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = 6aa62533c5aa0bc3d25b166cd67741fb

Yet another download via Chrome produces another (different) checksum.

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = 5bde8e023873ad2b70b28ee28f170f7a

Whereas the stated package checksum for the MacTeX package [14 June 2015], should have been
= bf579a512d31253d828591fdb3644dca

At last a version downloaded via Safari yielded the following...

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = bf579a512d31253d828591fdb3644dca

Lesson learned "do do do run the MD5 file checksum" & "don't use Chrome on OS X for large downloads".

Note: The file downloaded using Safari will also preserve the creation data / date modified, whereas large files downloaded using Chrome will be timestamped today and vary in file size from the original and multiple attempts.

Product Design DelftX

My course notes for Product Design DelftX #delftxdesign designed and delivered by Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)
(recommended book, the Delft Design Guide)
Faculty
Jaap Daalhuizen (design thinking), Paul Hekkert (form theory), Pieter Jan Stappers (techniques), Jelle Zijlstra (didactics), Matthijs va Dijk (applied), Carlos Cardoso (fixation), Stefan va de Geer (concept dev and eval), Koos Eissen (sketching), Jan Buijs (creativity), Annemiek van Boeijen (culture), and student tutors Koen and Iris.

Course Notes:

The Delft approach to design consists of 6 steps occurring throughout a 'design cycle': Discover, Define, Design, Deliver; and that design is always iterative.
Annemiek van Boeijen clarifies that this should not be understood as some kind of mechanical loop. The process is in fact often chaotic, with ideas diverging and converging at different times. Iterative implies that we expect activities to repeat, that stages may occur in different sequences, that activities and phases may even overlap. 

The Delft Design Guide asserts that:

Products are just a means for accomplishing appropriate actions, interactions and relationships; products provide meaning for people only through interaction. (Buijs, 2012, p27)

In essence, products and services don't exist for their own benefit, they are tools through which people achieve their goals by interacting with the products.

A designerly orientation to the world is a kind of continuing questioning. Paul Hekkert refers to a way of 'seeing' the world as a way of noticing how products are used and the contexts from which they were developed. A shorthand for this approach is "why, how, what".

When analysing an existing product we ask 'why' it is the way it is, how it came to be. This is called the context level. Addressing these questions requires an understanding of the product's context and history. This is is an analytical process we call 'deconstruction', a kind of 'unpacking' the understandings, assumptions (implicit, explicit), conditions etc. that aligned to bring the original product into existence. Similar factors in turn precondition the bringing into existence of a new product.

When using a product we become involved in the 'how', the doing of using it. This is the 'interaction' level of analysis. The 'why' informs 'how' the product works, how it is used, how the work it does is achieved. The third analysis is 'what', that is the intention users have in using the product, what goals they achieve through using it. They refer to this as the product level, typically driving the development of a new product.

Overlapping with these questioning stances is an experiential orientation towards action which is an essential part of being a designer. Designerly action is stimulated by a feeling of 'urgency to act'. The urgency to act is aroused when "we reason from WHY, via HOW, to WHAT. The designer's action is to create the 'what'."  (Paul Hekkert, original emphasis)

The 'Design Squiggle' by Damian Newman. 

Evocative. http://ow.ly/SQGj4

My own design process sketch tries to bring something of the recursive/chaotic character of design, but not random, conveying that design is most definitely deliberate action, although a journey where the destination is not yet known.

One of my visualisations of the design process

By way of explanation: I adopt an orthogonal depiction in which direction changes convey design 'pivots', rather like the business term, where the objective shifts tangentially. The little boxes are intended to convey growing competence or knowledge of a particular area. The 'microcosm box' is a miniature of the larger diagram, intended to suggest the recursive nature of iterations with no real beginning or end as such.

The diagram is oriented in the overall shape of a backwards C in opposition to characteristic left to right progression characterising depictions of temporality that dominate the contemporary culture (a Western tradition?). I think it is important too to acknowledge the 'negative space' left by the contained and directed elements of the diagram. You may think of the negative space as 'the unknown'. I can read a similar interpretation in the negative space left by Newman's 'Design Squiggle' too.

Framing Devices

Delft employ framing devices to establish individual practices and orientation that may be called the 'design attitude', e.g. from objects (describing) what, how, why = deconstruction -> design process or 'designing' = future context, interaction, new object. Technology push, market pull, user centred.

Jaap Daalhuizen states that for a designer from Delft "designing is a verb first and a noun second". The gerund form of design and many of the other activities of design indicates that the process, creative problem solving, is a basic philosophy behind their approach. It involves, at different points, keeping control, releasing (losing) control, periods of sustaining certainty and then other periods where uncertainty is valued and emphasised. There are examples of oscillations between opposing conditions, what we might characterise as different kinds of tight-loose attitudes.

Paul Hekkert emphasises the fact that everything around us is designed, our houses, our environments, the cities we live in, the things we use. Whether these products, objects and things are designed well or not is another question, regardless they have been designed at some level, and furthermore we all experience and interpret the things.
We can consider the characteristics of extant objects at three distinct levels: what, how, why.
The 'what' level is concerned with so called objective aspects, for example the factual characteristics.
The 'how' level deals with explanation, our own mental models and design models, the mechanics of how objects respond to/in use. This involves an initial kind of unpacking of the object, a deconstruction of it (ideationally) and positing interpretations of how things happen.
The 'why' level is the level of broader context, understanding reasons why things are the way they are, what makes things meaningful).
All together these levels are an approach to design deconstruction, deconstruction of the designed object. This is simply a technique for interpreting, one of the approaches or tools of a 'design attitude'. We use this to consciously unpack experience. It is necessary because we don't always confront designs in a direct manner. However, through introspection and deconstruction we learn to identify, describe and unpack the ways that we feel and think about designed things. It is an analytical approach to gaining understanding of why things are the way they are.
The 'design process' is presented in symmetry with deconstruction. A design orientation involves a process built on knowledge established through deconstruction of extant objects. The design process is action as a mirror to design deconstruction.
In describing how deconstruction shifts naturally to designing Hekkert describes a designery feeling of "a sense of urgency", a desire to act, to change something, to alter the scene in order to learn or to improve the experience of using or interaction with these objects. The design process, design action, quickly becomes complicated because so many relevant factors must be brought into to play, to to understand, to explain, to justify, to use, to change, to act, to adapt etc. Designers inevitably respond to and draw upon factors from multiple domains; technology push, market pull, user centred needs. Each domain is comprised of and utilises many different factors. The designer's job is to focus on what is relevant and interesting. This job is, in part, an artful selective use of these factors and tools, used in order to obtain greater understanding, evidence, to test, to reason and appreciate the effect and affect of new designs.

---

References and further reading:
Buijs, J. (2012). The Delft Innovation Method: a design thinker’s guide to innovation. Eleven International Publishing, The Hague.

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The Morning Rituals Project

Over the course we develop an overall design project addressing the theme 'morning rituals'.

My notes on 'morning rituals'

My own morning ritual

The alarm goes off, throw off the covers, bathroom, brush teeth and shave, warm-up routine, make the bed, make sure the kids are awake and getting ready, get dressed, breakfast, go to work.

Open the office, start the computer, check email, respond, start work tasks. Get a cup of tea and complete more work tasks.

On the physiology of sleep/wake cycles

Our bodies respond to the transition from dark to light, the dawning of the day. No matter what time we go to sleep our bodies respond to the morning. Light stimulates cells in our retinas that in turn stimulating our brain and establish the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is an endogenous cycle of biological activity synchronised with the day/night cycle. The retinohypothamic (RHT) tract is a photic (in relation to light) neural pathway that carries these light=day/dark=night signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) region of the brain. The SCN in turn plays a role in regulating our sleep/awake cycles. As it turns dark outside the RHT signals the SCN which then triggers the pineal gland (PG) to release melatonin, a hormone that prepares us for sleep. Waking up reverses this process. Interestingly the colour composition of the light matters; daylight equivalent is best at triggering melatonin release. In response to the issue of bright LED lighting ruining people's sleep cycles (link) night shift mode on iPhone changes the colour balance of the screen from bright blue/white to a softer yellow/white illumination (link).

---

References and further reading:
* brainpickings.org by Maria Popova
* Joe Hanson's video: Why do we have to sleep, and how did it evolve in the first place? https://youtu.be/3mufsteNrTI via @okaytobesmart
*  Scientific American topic and article "Can Napping Make Us Smarter"
*  Social jet-lag or sleep intertia

---

Notes on a product for morning rituals

Improve on the LED Pillow Clock or a pillow that lights up?
Why not combine a pillow light with a sleep cycle stage sensor?

Associations
transitions, still tired, restarting

For the purpose of the exercise the morning rituals will be considered to occur over any part or all of the time from waking up to arriving at your next location (work, school). The designer's goal is to have an impact (positive) on the zone of interest, where the design is employed. The impact of the design should be valuable and meaningful for/to its users.

Discussions with others
I found the discussion posts to be really informative, more than just the usual, people are genuinely different, different habits, different rituals, different approaches. So many people do things just plain differently to each other, so much variation in approaches, in what people do, when and where they do it. Different priorities, sequences, orders. Different objects and arrangements.



My morning feelings

My words for feelings, weekend mornings...

Weekday feelings...

My Morning Ritual - Deconstruction Exercises

The 'what', 'how' and 'why'

The timeline of a morning

Contesting the shape of technology

Terra incognita is a term derived from cartography and designates undiscovered lands; lands that are unknown, unmapped and, by implication, unowned.
It is closely associated with global expansions of the European colonial era, when explorers mapped the "unknown", then (usually) claiming the lands on behalf of their sovereign.
Through military conquest or legal fiat, the terra incognita segues into terra nullius ("nobody's land") or as military prize, to become the domain of a Crown or State.
The same process also corresponds to the domination, subjugation and alienation of indigenous peoples, through conquest or the law.

How might these consequential topics, linked with the great voyages of 'discovery', cartography, and conquest relate to contemporary high-tech design initiatives?

The concept of a terra incognita can be applied to technological feature topologies.
In this sense the terra incognita hints at the design and features of an emerging technology are as yet undetermined, unknown, or open to negotiation.


By considering an emerging technology to be a malleable resource, as a "terra incognita", diverse actors will engage in technological land-grabs in order to take ownership or control of the future shape of that technology.
Systems and technology designs are a kind of property, and the technology for public services is a kind of public property.
Contests for control and power take place for project resources but more significantly for the potentially preferable, desirable, lucrative or advantageous directions that design decisions may lead to.

Ownership or control of the features of a future technology is important because technology can become a "resource for", an instrument or system yielding power, money, influence etc.

And so it turns out that contests to control the shape of emerging technology are actually contests for the opportunity, if not the right, to shape social institutions.

Efficient way to anonymise interviewee identities for academic research

The question was discussed on tex.stackexchange.com

I'm looking for an efficient way to anonymise interviewee identities using a pseudonym list.
Case studies often use direct quotation from interviews and observational data.
In these cases it is usual to identify the speakers using a pseudonym and/or role label.
Anonymisation attempts to preserve the privacy of research subjects, following the 'do no harm' principle of social and human sciences research ethics.
Using a pseudonym preserves source attribution (i.e. justifies that the quote is an example of actual empirical evidence).

I expect that this requirement is a bit like creating a glossary, a register of names or list keywords used in a document (i.e. create-a-register-of-persons-with-biblatex or create-a-register-of-persons-with-references)

I imagine writing the quotes with correct attribution in my latex document, and they will be replaced when typesetting.
Something like \person{joe} and \personrole{ceo} and a catalogue command like \dramatispersonae that produces a register of the pseudonyms and their roles in a section, somewhat like a glossary, or characters of a play, the dramatis personae.

Perhaps I could do this with bibtex, but I need to the dramatis personae to be separate from the bibliography.

Notes:
I'm not referring to approaches for censoring, redacting or 'blinding' text (i.e. efficient-ways-to-anonymize-a-document)

{best-practices} {journal-publishing} {bibliography}

Nvivo at UCD

The software is available to members of the institution through virtualisation servers.
The old approach was via Citrix client (for both Windows and OS X users) "link"
The new approach is via Application Jukebox client (only Windows users) "link"
Both require a UCD Connect userid and password to use.
Both suffer from latency delay issues so don't expect a snappy response, wait a while and the application should run ok (sooner or later).

Fonts on Mac

Use Font Book to install, view and manage fonts.
Located in the applications folder.
Open Font Book, or double-click a font file.

Q: How to make a MS Word document look like it has been typeset in LaTeX?

Mac Instructions only Based on James Lingard's MS Word template page.
Lingard's template file (LaTeX.dot) can be used to produce documents that look a lot like they've been typeset in TeX/LaTeX but you'll need to install the Computer Modern TrueType versions of fonts used by LaTeX to make them available in MS Word.

Installing the fonts:

1. Download the minimum set: cmr10.ttf, cmbx12.ttf and cmbx10.ttf and other suggested tt files (e.g. bakoma true type fonts) Other examples: https://guides.lib.jmu.edu/freemedia/font and  https://www.1001fonts.com/ and more... 
2. Once downloaded on the Mac, go to the download location and open the files by double-clicking. This starts Font Book which opens the tt (TrueType) font file. Font Book is included with OS/X. Basic instructions on using Font Book from Apple.
3. Font Book provides a small display of the font and gives an option to "Install Font" via the button at bottom right of the window. 
4. Click Install Font; Font Book then checks/validates the font. You might need to review warnings, all trivial as far as I make it, after which the font is now available for Mac applications to use. 
5. The next time you open MS Word it will spend 30s or so updating its font listing. 

User installed fonts view in Font Book

Installing the Template:
Mac instructions only: You add Lindgard's LaTeX.dot file to the appropriate templates folder:
MS Word template location. From the Finder menu; Finder>Go>Go to Folder...

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/My Templates

Then create a new MS Word document based on the template via:

1. From the MS Word menu bar: File > New from Template... 
2. The MS Word "Document Gallery" window opens... 
3. Select "My Templates" in the navigation pane... 
4. Select the template named "LaTeX" 

Word Document Gallery: New from Template. Chose LaTeX

Your new document is now using Lindgard's stylesheet in MS Word, which should also be using the bakoma TrueType fonts. The screen and output should now mimic a LaTeX typeset document very closely.

Chemical reactions in Tex

Test that you have the packages loaded; from the command prompt enter

texdoc chemmacros

...to open The Chemmacros Bundle guide "chemforumla_en.pdf", inspired and based on usefully extending mhchem. 

My example...

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{chammacros}
\begin{document}
\ch{Na2SO4 ->[ H2O ] Na+ + SO4^2-}\\
\ch{( 2 Na+ ,SO4^2- ) + (Ba^2+ , 2 Cl- ) -> BaSO4 v + 2 NaCl}\\
\ch{2 CaCO3 <=>[ H2O ] 2 Ca^2+ + 2 CO3^2-}\\
\ch{HCOOH + H2O <=>[ H2O ] H3O^+ + HCOO^-}\\
\ch{2 CO3^2-\ + 4H^+ <=> 2 CO2 + 2 H2O} \\
\end{document}

Nvivo Exercises

Notes after attending Ben Meehan's "Nvivo; Analysing your Data" course

• Create Phase folders in the Nodes area to capture the state of the codes at different phases.
• From initial readings develop an initial coding framework. 
• Add the initial coding framework, i.e. add 'nodes' you anticipate using to code your data.
• Gather your Interviews or transcripts in word. Formatting may be used for later auto-coding ('noding'). Applying Header 1 for several standard structured questions (closed or open), and can also apply Header 1 for the completely open ended unstructured lines of questioning. Could also use Header 1 for categorical data, structural data, attributes (e.g. male, female, rural, urban, highest qualification, age range).
• Internal Sources. Add your transcripts, interviews and other data sources as separate files (word documents), ie. imported as internal documents. Organise them into separate folders or not. Folder structure might mimic the structure you've used in a file system. 
• Alternatively you can include them as External Sources. The problem with external sources is that you lose the in-system coding and analysis capability. In this case the actual external source isn't accessible, rather the file/object you add to your Nvivo project is what is used for coding. So you'll need to add your own description or copy/paste some of the data in order to enable node coding and query/search etc.
• Refine and develop the nodes/codes after each phase of coding.
• Annotations are a bit hard to dig out but they are 'findable' via the query. Recommend using a keyword at the beginning of each annotation so that you can retrieve them all quickly. This is particularly handy if you use annotations as a place for developing ideas and your own writing.
• Memos are a kind of 'next step' beyond 'annotations' for your own writing. Memos are handy in terms of being part of the Nvivo interface, they can be organised, subsetted and otherwise subject to global query/search coding/noding etc.
• Memos are for secondary materials that you develop yourself. I use them as the starting point for my written analysis.
• Classifications are a mechanism for associating categorical data, usually categories from tabulations (see above). A classification would match categorical/quantitative values with associated interview/observation or otherwise less structured matching data; done via a matching key as unique data index.
• Query/search is a mechanism for more mechanical questioning of your data. Sifting motivated by defined questioning that can be expressed in terms of more and more complex search queries. Can use boolean and search logic to build up queries. Query/searches can be saved. Results of query/search can also be saved as 'coded' nodes, or as 'Collection' sets. 
• Collection sets are more static versions or results from the data. They aren't usually incorporated into future query/search or dynamic node logic.

Magic step: interview files with same name as index in categorical excel 'table' can be automatically 'joined'. 

Adding Sources: (link)
Adding a new internal.
Q: Can I format the internal within Nvivo Mac? For example, add heading1, heading2 to structure the document or should I do this kind of formatting before bringing it into Nvivo Mac?
A: When in edit mode, click on the 'home' tab and use the 'styles' group. (link)

Interpretive data analysis tips

John Schulz gives some insightful guidance on analysing interviews. But I feel his ideas can as equally apply to interpretive data more generally including texts, observations, recordings. Analysis can be approached in two basic ways, in a top-down deductive approach and a bottom up inductive approach. In fact many researchers alternate between the two approaches, particularly because analysis rarely occurs wholly in one more or the other. If we're honest about it we often combine the two approaches, where prior theories inform how we gather and treat the data, and where the data pushes back against preconception and instead offers up other interpretations.

Three steps to charging (taking money) from a mobile phone account

My 12 year old's phone isn't working. He tells me that he hasn't been able to text or call anyone for months.
He hands it to me reluctantly. I top it up with €10 and out of curiosity check the credit again, typing *174# into the phone. What! Only €2.50 left? Immediately followed by receiving a system message on screen.

You have a reverse charge message for you from 57977 that expires on 12-Aug-15. You currently have insufficient credit to receive this message. Vodafone IE-4832 SerivceProviderTxt.Nation Ltd

It isn't a text message because when I click it disappears, no trace left on the phone.
I suspect this has been happening for a while. It turns out that it has been happening for months and €112.50 in call credit has been siphoned off as a result.
No wonder he hasn't been able to make calls or texts.

So what's happening? I ring Vodafone. A fellow called Samir answers; "Yes, I can see the messages, I'm not sure how long you've been receiving them but you can assume it has been happening for a while. But you see sir, this isn't anything to do with us. All I can suggest is that you send a txt with the word 'STOP' in the body to halt your subscription to the service. If that doesn't work you need to contact the service provider immediately and make a complaint."

This is a revelation to me, the mobile phone operator doesn't actually get involved in debit transactions against its own customer's phone accounts. In fact it appears that Vodafone have no control or even visibility, of who or what services (read companies) can make charges to my mobile phone number.

I suppose I'm now being unreasonable but I have to ask, "what about getting my credit back?"
Samir says "Well, first you'll need to find who the number belongs to."
"How do I do that?" I ask, "how to I contact them?"
"You should go to http://www.phonesmart.ie/ then enter the number 57977. Phonesmart is a service run by the Regulator in Ireland, ComReg, they regulate phone-paid/premium services in Ireland.

The Phonesmart webpage returned the following information:

Number Check Results
If you're signed up to a subscription service on your mobile phone but want to quit, simply text the word STOP to the five-digit short code number associated with the premium rate service
( please note that a standard network charge may apply for this text).
Short Code: 57977
Service Provider:TxtNation Ltd
Helpline:1800 812 799
Email:aeus@txtnation.com.

Samir explained what happens. "You will have to call the premium service operator or email them directly. You might want to try to get back your credit. I'm afraid I can't to any more for you, you have to deal directly with the service."

Although I'm getting more annoyed and frustrated I decide to follow his advice. ComReg are the regulator, do they have any information about this scam? A quick look at ComReg's website puts paid to that idea (http://www.phonesmart.ie/Common_Questions/88#A14).

"Just because premium rate services cost more doesn’t mean that they are a scam or that they are bad. Most premium rate services operate without causing consumer harm."

It seems that as far as ComReg is concerned premium rate services are part of a healthy telecommunications ecosystem. Fair enough, but what about the children I say! What checks are in place against a child being enabled, even facilitated, to enrol in a premium rate service? You might say that's my responsibility since I gave the child a mobile phone to use in the first place...

Well the story doesn't end here. I checked the txt.Nation website (www.txtnation.com). It appears to be a bone fide business, they've won awards, go to trade shows and have contracts with government agencies like the UK's NHS. What are they doing taking money from my 12 year old?

I still don't know where or what the money is being taken for. I also feel like talking to someone. Is txt.Nation for real? So I called the helpline (1800 812 799).
A nice sounding lady called Beth answers. "Yes I can help" she says, "if I can verify your contact details and to mention that calls will be recorded for regulation and training purposes."
I explained what was happening and then she explained to me that I would need to log a support request. In fact she is able to start the process for me after which it can continue by email. "You see I'm sort of like a receptionist" she said. "I just take calls, you'll need to contact the support team. I've entered your details, you'll receive an email soon. Just log in to the customer care system and enter your complaint..."

I receive an email "Welcome to Customer Care, Support | txtNation" with instructions to setup an account on their system. I generate a password and access their system. Oh my god, this is getting tedious.

Message from Answer-4u for TXT NATION LIMITED Date and Time: 10/08/2015 20:00 CLI: Message Taken By: Your personal A4U team PA Call Type: New Enquiry Caller's Name: Mr xxxx xxxxx Telephone Number: xxxxxxxx Country: Ireland Email: xxxx.xxxx@gmail.com Message: Caller wishes to discuss charges to his phone.

A support team person added a comment to the 'request' with a message.

Dear xxxx.xxxx, I can see that your mobile number has been billed by the service detailed below. You have now been opted-out of the service so will not receive further billing attempts from the service, unless you choose to opt-in again at some point in the future. If you are disputing the opt-in and wish to request a refund, you should contact Remote directly via +44 (0)333 202 0418 or help@careformobile.com.
Remote is a company that charges €7.50 per week for you to enter a competition to win an iPhone/iPad/MacBook by texting keyword "phone", "apple", "book". You would have first visited the competition website and answered a multiple choice question before entering you mobile number into the box provided on the website...
...
After you have done this, you will receive a free text message.
Once you reply with the appropriate keyword, you will receive another message stating:
"Message: FreeMsg U have subscribed to WIN an iPad playie.77win.co & WIN the iPad each week for euro7.50/wk 3x2.5 euro/msg until u send STOP to 57977".
Best Wishes txtNation Online Support

Two days to get this far. I begin to see why people think premium rate services are dodgy. Just to get to the bottom I've had to contact Vodafone, then txt.Nation, to an operator called Remote running a 'competition' website managed by a service called careformobile.com.

Hmm, let's have a look at that website. Notice the very small lettering indicating that the "Player must be 18 years or over"? I've drawn a red line around it to draw your attention to it...

It turns out that Vodafone have no control of premium rate service access to your account nor do they have access to the data trail that it took me 2 days to piece together.

So money has moved from me to Vodafone. From Vodafone to txt.Nation. From txtNation to Remote. And perhaps also from Remote to careformobile who hosts this iPhone/iPad/MacBook prize lottery websites.

Surprisingly, there are just three (3) steps involved in permitting them to take money from me.
1. Click on the website, provide a mobile number, and click "Enter".
2. My mobile phone receives a message to reply to win by texting a keyword.
3. Send a text message with the keyword to the premium rate number.
Goodbye money.

My complaints are several.
No audit trail provided of communication initially authorising debits.
The actual competition element does not display the age limit prominently, apart from text in very small font at bottom of a secondary web page.
No valid age checks employed to prevent future underage use.
No default time limits set on subscription (it's permanent).
No defined process by which charges may be disputed or refunded.
No evidence that these kinds of lotteries or competitions are properly run or regulated. Is the lottery actually run, are results independently verified, what were the competition results over the period in which I was putatively subscribed to the lottery service? Was a competition actually taking place? How many phones, tablets or laptop computers were actually awarded as prizes?

Tinkering with Technology

Tinkering with Technology: Go to Class -> https://class.coursera.org/tinkering-002
Week One: Introduction to Tinkering

Reflection Question: Having watched the videos what is my reaction?

“What happens when you push the button?” 

Often, the best way to teach, and learn, is to ask interesting questions. If I ask interesting questions I end up challenging myself and/or others to answer them. Often the best questions seem really stupid, or are really stupid, or actually are deliberately stupid, but can be used for a range of things, like stating, re-stating or establishing basic assumptions, like thinking through an idea (often a conclusion) backwards.

I felt, while watching the video, initially sceptical but eventually felt that I recognised the justification for what seem like quite trivial activities. Starting out with the scribble bots, for me at least, is a turn off, but I stuck with it. It took till the unstuffing exercise for me to realise there might be an underlying model, of learning through stages being applied. This happened, a kind of 'ah ha' moment, when I recognised similar mechanics being employed in the design of manufactured toys. I confess to feeling a little concerned when the camera cuts to a child wielding, or rather holding a craft knife while doing something else with his hands. I guess we all learnt something the hard way at some point in time.

Readings Week 1
Excerpts from The Art of Tinkering by Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich with contributions from Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE magazine; Leah Buechley, founder of the MIT Media Lab's High Low Tech Group; and Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson from the Exploratorium.

Dougherty offers a nice definition; "Tinkering is the essential art of composing and decomposing physical things to suit a variety of purposes—from practical to whimsical." p6 He describes the necessity, for physical and social interaction to occur, that 'making' is a good and necessary alternative to screen based engagement with things and others.

World-making or world shaping to suit ourselves. The Exploratorium Tinkering Studio presents tinkering as a form of social engagement, like world-hacking perhaps, but I question whether something so individual can ever become a social movement. After all, in spite of the pronouncements to become creators rather than consumers, I feel when I am the bricoleur or tinkerer that I am ultimately doing it for myself, for my own consumption. In making something I'm involved in imagining its use, how it works, how to work it; that's the process of working it out until it just works. It might be rough (like the picture of the toolbox made of tools), seemingly unfinished, perhaps only useful to me and only useable by me. Which suggests to me that bricolage and made things have a long way to go before becoming products for consumption by someone else.

Dougherty then refers to the contributors as artists not designers or product engineers, or milliners or tailors etc. When does the distinction become clear between the maker, hacker, tinkerer and the artist? Is the artist version of a tinkerer a dilatant versus the professional or practitioner (who probably won't be considered an artist?) who is merely technically skilled? Perhaps this suggests rather the individual's development path? A progression from novice to competence to expertise?

Dougherty highlights the necessity of physical and social interaction for making as a good and necessary alternative to screen based engagement with things and others.

Leah Buechley emphasises the feeling of and need for joy and emotional involvement when making, tinkering, doing, breaking down, assembling, building etc. She suggests tinkering is both playful and reflective. The implication for organising for design is that it needs differing temporal pace and changing ambient environment; "quiet and (sometimes slow)" p9.

Counterintuitively it seems that originality finds its inspiration in copying, which begs the question; is anything truly original?

Wilkison and Petrich note that the word "tinker" comes from peripatetic (travelling) tinsmiths of the 1300s, who travelled around fixing stuff. There are suggestions that the word tinker is onomatopoeic in origin, deriving from the noises that a tinsmith's cart or pack made; the wares rattling as they moved through the countryside. In Ireland and Scotland the word is still used colloquially for people of Gypsy or Traveller ethnicity.

Chapter 2 of Invent to Learn, by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary S. Stager.

This book links maker, hacker, tinker movements with the academic perspectives on education, design, and cognition.

Although it might not concern many, I worry when writers depict knowledge, thought and learning as a psychological phenomenon "constructed inside the learner’s head" p31. Yes, these things necessarily involve the mind, are phenomena of the mind. However I wish to avoid the implication that such phenomena are 'embrained' processes, reducible to abstraction and rational formulation.

Why is this a concern for me? It's to do with what I believe is an implied model of knowledge and cognitive processes. A 'construction inside the learner's head' implies a kind of realism between a model-structure putatively occurring inside the head, corresponding with external action or perceived phenomena occurring outside or 'in the world'. This type of correspondence theory explaining processes of learning, knowledge etc. taps into the philosophical approach known as critical realism. Critical realism is a cybernetic theory of human cognition and agency, in which the human actor perceives the world and acts according to working hypotheses or models contained within their head. Revisable fidelity of the embrained model corresponding with the 'real world' allows for better decisions (actions) to be made.
A characteristic depiction this problematic approach might be

"the... cybernetic structure is itself enclosed in a meta mental model which might be considered as the world-view of the decider." (Chapter 4: Decision Integrity and Second Order Cybernetics by Anthony Hodgson. in Cybernetics and Systems Theory in Management: Tools, Views, and Advancements by Steven E. Wallis, 2010: p60)

In contrast to the cybernetic embrained view of knowledge, Hubert Dryfuss and others have offered compelling critiques of the cybernetic theory of knowledge, learning and action (e.g. Flyvberg), highlighting the tendency for proponents to resort to meta-theoretical frames and transcendental perspectives, all the while failing to account for how we actually how existence occurs in direct experience. We exist in experience, situated, embodied, experientially involved in being, unable to step out of our being in the world.

The chapter contrasts 'constructivism' with Seymour Papert's notion of 'constructionism'. Constructivism presents psychological development of learning as occurring through processes of actively, mentally, reconstructing knowledge through individual and social involvement. Papert extends this by asserting that...

"learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product. (Papert, 1986)".

Rather than emphasing embrained processes, effective learning is necessarily embodied and engaged in the world, therefore involvement in constructing and making things builds more authentic learning and knowledge through experience.

Unfortunately emphasising processes as 'inside their head' or 'outside of their head' resuscitates the previous, flawed notion of learning as a cybernetic decision process.

Three useful ways of thinking about learning are presented: making, tinkering and engineering. Making is a kind of goal directed or driven action. Tinkering is a playful attitude or mindset, less driven, more open-ended. And engineering is a kind of analytical process of reflection and objectification, theorising and formalising what is learnt through description, models, diagrams etc. While these three ways of learning may be distinct, they might also be related to each other in terms of process or distinctive periods of learning through doing; Papert's constructionism.

A lot of space is devoted to how we should deal with computers in learning. The authors present a case for the computer to be a raw material for making and tinkering rather than merely an environment for managing action or consuming content.

If we contrast the cybernetic model against these interactive and social processes of tinkering or bricolage (the French world for DIY) we really must conclude that there is more than one way of learning and gaining knowledge, and therefore that we, as learners and teachers, need accommodate "the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking." (Turkle & Papert, 1991)

We should also stay open to the risk creating and reinforcing gendered roles and identities with tinkering/making/engineering. Gendered identification and gendered styles of teaching and learning contaminate the language and terminology, the way problems are posed, context setting, space making, power relationships in the learning environment, even seemingly innocuous values like dealing with mess versus tidiness, of risk taking or managing behaviour.

Various key authors are quoted around the topics around play and learning (Piaget, Vygotsky)


Week Two: Initial Explorations with Tinkering
Notes on videos:
Circuit Boards: Seeing It in Action: Illustrates the open exploratory approach, messing around with simple dc circuits. Playful, unstructured. It seems a bit limited but still useful foundational experiential electronics. I particularly liked the homemade feel to the elements, various lights and switches and motors mounted on wooden blocks with connections made with alligator clip wires.

Designing for Tinkerability: Circuit Boards: Activity elements: materials, environment and facilitation. 

Materials are the resources that are used, consumed. This requires a fair bit of thinking-through on the parts of the learning facilitators, thinking through how these resources may be used.

Arrangement of environment deals with resources surrounding the activity like lighting, noise, round tables and chairs on rollers, to be aware of how architecture force upon focusing and defocusing structures. Recognise the value of inspiration by displaying decorations, previous examples, random pictures etc.

Facilitation may or may not as apparent, particularly when groups start self-supporting. Facilitation in this setting is all about encouraging people to be make mistakes and learn from them. To adopt a playful attitude and encourage exploration and experimentation. It might at times be useful to suggest some goal or problem that needs a solution to offer a motivation or challenge. Usually the facilitator is hoping to encourage and support an individual's own curiosity, offering supporting knowledge if needed. , flexible approaches, trial and error, meandering. Strategies for facilitating troubleshooting include suggestions like 'ok, it's looking pretty complicated, is there a way to simplify it? Another approach might be to 'do it again', 'let's repeat'. If something starts working encourage the student to expand it 'ok, now let's extend it or add something to it'. 

Inspiration: Shih Chieh (CJ) Huang CJ is an artist working with lights, motors and found or recycled materials to create curious luminous animated structures. Have a look at CJ's workbench for tips on organising a workspace. And take notice of the parts area, he really puts tupperware to use, he does this work on a scale that demands he be organised and efficient.

Chandelier by Shih Chieh Huang

Making Circuit Boards: Various found materials or components can be 'scrounged' and made into 'circuit board parts'. Things like door bells, lights, switches, fans, led number display, alligator clip connections made to nails soldered to the scrounged part. As the circuit boards and scrounged equipment uses DC battery power ranging up to 12V they are in fact safe enough for anyone to use.
Classroom Connection: Persistence, encouraging the students to persist with solving problems, not giving in to tell them a solution, not telling them how to do it, letting them figure it out for themselves, to watch the kids and see the 'lightbulb moment' going off in their minds. Avoiding telling them what we think they need to know and rather let the students take their own paths and follow their own interests which is healthier.

Pedagogical Perspective: Rob Semper: Refers back to Frank Oppenheimer's (particle physicist and founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco) contribution, as part of the academic panel, to the ESS the first elementary science study curriculum in the US. Bulbs and Batteries (not ignoring the wires too) to give an understanding of electricity and circuits, which are pretty fundamental aspects of today's world.

CJ Huang TED talk on recent pieces inspired by bioluminescent life forms.

Carol Dweck talking about 'mindsets'; the book MindSet (2006), and the website at mindsetonline.com

Readings Week 2

Circuit Boards Activity Guide: This guide captures all of the material discussed in the previous videos, but includes much more by way of assistance and suggested prompts for facilitators. Practical and well structured, it provides some structure for the earlier recommendations on organising circuit board activities, i.e. materials, environment and facilitation.
Excerpt about Shih Chieh (CJ) Huang from The Art of Tinkering by Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich.

Week 2 Reflection Questions: 

Post photos of some of my circuit boards in the Week Two Activity forum and using the #tinkeringmooc tag.

Q: How has my identity as a tinkerer or my understanding changed?
A: By being braver, being prepared to crack the case and look inside. Sometimes it ends up being pointless, from an investigative point of view, for example, opening up broken Apple power supply, was simply impossible because it was glued and moulded in place, effectively a monolith.
#tinkeringmooc On a positive note, I am now proud to claim that my messy office is actually a "workshop"

Q: Drawings of circuits that worked. Drawings of circuits that didn't work.

A: I was brought back to thinking about why a parallel circuit, with resisters R, has an effective
Parallel Rtot = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + ... + 1/Rn
Whereas a serial circuit has an effective
Serial Rtot = R1 + R2 + ... + Rn
So I thought of an explanation for myself:
Metaphor for parallel: A resister is like a hole through which water (aka electricity, electrical charges) flows, a large hole is like small resistance, a small hole is like large resistance.
So... in parallel, resisters in parallel act like the holes in a sieve or colander. Even though each hole is exactly the same size, the more holes the quicker the water flows through.
Metaphor for series: A resister is like a short incline or ramp that a stream of moving balls (aka electricity, a moving charge) rolls towards and up, losing energy in the process. As the balls progress over a series of ramps they lose more and more energy.

Q: How at ease am I at exploring circuits in this way? How much time did it take? What contributed the "aha" moments, or frustrations?
A: Well soldering is always messy and tricky, the flux sometimes spits, the wires conduct heat and melt other parts, sometimes the insulators burn and make noxious fumes, you always need a second if not third pair of hands to hold everything in place to get the solder where you want it, putting the soldering iron down without burning anything else (especially people) can be delicate.

Week Three: Identifying Dimensions of Learning
Atelier; a word I rarely encounter and never used. However I find it to be evocative and exotic; a studio or workshop, imagined with paint splashes and wood shavings on the floor. A French word, collective noun, describing not just the studio space but includes the master artist, assistants, apprentices, students and others. The word derives from the Old French astelle and in turn from the Latin astula; meaning sticks, fragments, wood chips, splinters.

Readings Week 3
(PetrichEtAl_ItLooksLikeFun_2013)

Petrich et al (2013) show that one of the core experiences of this kind of unstructured designing/learning process is the "process of becoming stuck and then unstuck".
Their interviews of participants also point to "how important the sense of self is in the interplay of objects and activities... it is the personal accomplishment of becoming unstuck, plus having an artifact to point to" pp55-56.

They characterise learning through tinkering in terms of four observable experiential phenomena: engagement, intentionality, innovation and solidarity. These are observable qualities they can identify among the learners involved in the activities they curate.

The design of their tinkering studio incorporates a number of deliberate features; open layout, highly visible workspaces, expansive workspaces (bench tops and tables), an excess of materials, an excess of tools, all types of tools, all resources at hand and readily available.

They developed three interlinked aspects to consider for structuring events within these spaces: activity design, environmental design and design facilitation. Each of these aspects incorporate a number of considerations.

• activity design
• Activities and investigations build on learners’ prior interests and knowledge.
• Materials and phenomena are evocative and invite inquiry.
• Tools and concepts of science are a means, not an end.
• Multiple pathways are readily available.
• Activities and investigations encourage learns to complexify their tinkering over time.
• environmental design
• Past project examples and current activities are situated to seek ideas and inspiration.
• Activity station design enables cross-talk and invites collaboration.
• Studio layout supports individual initiative and autonomy.
• Activity adjacencies encourage the cross-pollination of ideas.
• design facilitation
• The facilitation is welcoming and intended to spark interest.
• Facilitators try to focus learners' attention, based on individual paths of understanding.
• Facilitation should strengthen understanding by helping learners clarify their intentions through reflective conversation.

Origins: Design Principles - Structure (Petrich et al, 2013: pp58-65

They also suggest empirical observable "tentative indicators of learning" along the four experiential phenomena mentioned earlier, Moreover, participation is characterised by these indicators being evident continuously through being "engaged in the flow of tinkering activities".

1. Engagement 
• Duration of participation 
• Frequency of participation 
• Work inspired by prior examples 
• Expressions of joy, wonder, frustration, curiosity 
2. Intentionality 
• Variation of efforts, paths, work 
• Personalization of projects or products 
• Evidence of self-direction 
3. Innovation 
• Evidence of repurposing ideas/tools 
• Evidence of redirecting efforts 
• Efficiences gained through growing fluencies with concepts, tools, and phenomena
• Complexification of processes and products 
4. Solidarity 
• Borrowing and adapting ideas, tools, approaches 
• Sharing tools and strategies; helping others to achieve their goals 
• Contributing to the work of others

Indicators of Learning (Petrich et al, 2013: p66)

The concept of scientific and engineering practices is powerful because of its inherent conception of learning as processes of being, doing, knowing, and becoming. (Petrich et al, 2013: p67)

Week 3 Hangout on Google+

Journals - Make Journaling a Habit!
I liked the discussion on Tinkering Journals (at 16').
Tinkering journals belong to the same genre as Science Journalling and note-booking.
Consider the different styles and formats possible for journaling, examples like...
Accordion books
Process books.
Process brainstorms on a roll of paper by turn taking speaking and capturing (ref Todd Elkin).

A technique called the thinking routine from Project Zero to achieve the reflective mindset: "I used to think... But now I think..."

#tinkeringmooc

When a learner asks "why?" Often the last thing they want or need is for the answer to be given to them. What we as teachers should enable, is not to provide answers to questions, but to facilitate learning through personal discovery. So when someone asks "why?", a good answer might be "I don't know, but I think I might know how to start the process of finding an answer".

In order to put some shape on this as a process consider the following "moves":

• Diagnose: Identify the problems(s)
• Discover: Independently research the problem area(s)
• Develop: Propose a response or responses, recommendations to resolve, improve etc.

Week 3 Sketchbot

Photo-journal: steps to make a Sketchbot

Readings Week 4
Perhaps the best place to start is to be inspired by someone else's work and try to adapt or emulate them. Rather like, as Steve Jobs said (attributing Picasso with the original quote, although the expression's history is complicated) 

"expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing... good artists copy, great artists steal..." (ref YouTube link)

Creative confidence is (for me) a kind of throwing myself into a situation with some kind of idea of what I want to do out of focus and not-quite-formed floating around the back of my head.

How about this for another Tinkering Tenet; "Make it Same Same but Different" #tinkeringmooc @TinkeringStudio

I was asked my opinion on the top emerging high-tech trends and developments that will impact business and society over the next decade. And everything I pointed to lends itself to a Tinkering attitude...
1. User experience / user interaction design teams will grow. Firms will invest in setting these teams up themselves.
2. Growth of tinkering / hacking movement using new digital platforms such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino and wearable computational devices such as LilyPad.
3. Growth of IOT (internet of things) tech and services permeating everyday life.
I think there is a need for a part A and part B "design experience" module that deals with these topics. The teaching and learning environments for this should focus on tactile-embodied-learning-with-objects, workshops and hands-on sessions that engage students with technology. For example, commercial website hosting services, content management systems, and new computing paradigms like Raspberry Pi, Arduino and IOT devices.
 
Week 4 Circuits. Paper circuits and sewn circuits.
Well I don't have copper tape, so I'll use kitchen foil, it conducts electricity ok but can I solder it?
And I don't have conductive thread, so I'll just use thin insulated wire, that should do the trick.
I'll scavenge some LEDs from broken electronics and perhaps even scrounge some surface mount LEDs.

Well partial success. The LEDs I ended up with needed resistors and a 6V supply, which made them a bit too bulky for the paper circuit exercise so we adapted the situation and made a spooky Halloween mask a little bit spookier...

Added some LED eyes and warts to a Halloween decoration.

Week 5
The Tinkering Studio highlight a quote by Charles Eames "Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas." Toys and games are complex but when you open them up, they are ultimately knowable and adaptable.
The Thinking Routine approach (parts + purposes + complexities) developed by Agency by Design, part of Harvard's "Project Zero" (http://www.pz.harvard.edu). Also see https://makingthinkinghappen.wordpress.com/ which moved its activity to http://www.agencybydesign.org/
This is treated as a structure through which personal learning goals and outcomes emerge from the exercise.

Jay Silver's and Eric Rosenbaum's reflections about making, about Makey Makey, are both quietly inspirational.

An insightful phrase appears in Mitchel Resnick's essay: the idea of "hard fun"(I am inclined to include "hard play"). This is a counter narrative to the sugar coating of difficult tasks by the "edutainment" approach and the un-fun-ness of playing hard in zero sum games.
Another interesting idea is the "design cycle can be seen as a type of play".
Both ideas come together through "playful learning (and learningful play)".

Overall reflection
I like that the lecturers have designed the course with evidence and justifying arguments in mind. This is a useful introduction to the literature on learning, with a clear lean towards activity theory and potentially the philosophy of phenomenology. While the literature they draw on tends towards early childhood development, I think it should be possible to extend this towards adult learning, to educational philosophy of designing in general.

I'm a great believer in journaling and was inspired by some of the examples presented for establishing self-journaling practices in the participants. For example, using the large sheets of paper to organise the Toy Take Apart activity, assigning process/practice meaning to the diagrams by the simple device of changing the colour of the marker for the different stages.

Tentatively might terms such as 'generative activity' and 'generative design' suggest a more general theory, orientation or approach to interpreting lightly structured activity based learning such as occurs in tinkering workshops and similar open-ended learning, stroke, creative environments?

Structure of the Final assignment (not submitted)
Part 1. Initial Goals and Expectations (10 points)
Part 2. Tinkering Journal (30 points)
Part 3. Tinkering Action Plan (20 points) including a SOMEDAY Action Plan and a MONDAY Action Plan.

Nvivo User Group - Intro

This is a starting point for my own NVivo usage. It might be used as a kernel for a local NVivo User Group (NUG).

You work NVivo by assigning attributes to data, linking comments or memos with data, categorising, modelling, searching.
It is a partially recursive and continuous process that eventually reaches saturation.
Using the tool this way embodies the essence of grounded theory, that is, concepts and ideas are grounded in, emerge from, engagement with the field and what we identify as evidence (often misunderstood as data).

NVivo is a rather open ended platform for doing this, particularly as it allows for native annotation of various kinds/types/sources of evidentiary traces. Again, I'm avoiding the term "data".

I am not going to describe NVivo, the menus, ribbon, mechanics of accessing particular functions or any other product feature walk-through stuff. The training courses I've taken were organised just like this, more about using NVivo that carrying out research. So, no boring disconnected stuff like: creating/opening/saving projects, familiarity with the workspace, adding material, nodes, coding with nodes, adding memos and annotations, importing and analysing spreadsheets (i.e. surveys and demographics), framework matrices, queries collections and search, charts, and reports.
For a functional view of how NVivo works review the getting started guides listed below or search for others.

What I am going to describe is some basic research workflow or work-activity that just happens to be performed using NVivo.

Activity scenarios for a historical research project

Exercises

1. Having found a new primary source document: a large scanned report of around 100Mb pdf...

Add a reference to the document as an 'external' source

Open this new element and write out a skeletal structure, table of contents etc, as a backbone to add your own (indirect) coding (nodes and memos).

2. Having found a new primary source document: a page on a newspaper's website...

Click on the NCapture widget from the browser.

Choose between article as pdf or webpage as pdf. Supposedly selects between downloading a representation of the whole webpage versus the bare article. Expect it to generate a file up to 5Mb or more depending on how much content is captured.

I only use this if I'm feeling lazy or if the whole document is interesting, including ad placements etc.

3. Importing NCaptured pages into the project

Select Data>NCapture. NVivo monitors NCapture downloads and offers of list of them for you to import.

4. How do I how to go about 'folding' a new item into the research?

Add memos, link them to nodes, edit the memos again and again...

Talking point: Why bother linking a memo with a source item or a node?

Hmm, I'm not really sure why we're limited to one memo 'link'. It means a 'memo' is a kind of floating annotation. A 'link' in NVivo seems to be used for a special, unique relationship. However you can use 'node coding' for multiple relationships between the memo, but not directly to source items (internals or externals). In that case you've got to go 'through' an intermediate 'node' relationship...

Talking point: While coding (linking to nodes) a new item I notice a theme emerging

I can make annotations in-line, but annotations are local to the document. What I'm thinking of is a new global item, a memo.

So make a new memo, give it a meaningful title, and edit it to start building up the idea of this theme.

However don't forget to link it back to the coded (noded) passage in the item I was working on before...

For me memos are kernels of analysis and argument that eventual evolve into my research paper. A scrapbook of partially thought-through ideas the I'll copy/paste into a working article.

Talking point: Adding a document to the project.

First problem, should I add it as an internal or an external? It depends.
If the document is a huge digital object (100s of Mb or Gb in size) or unreadable by NVivo then use external.
If it is small and readable (e.g. text, pdf, jpg, mp3, mp4, etc) then use internal.
Internal is generally better because you can create in-place links (i.e. hyperlinks) between parts of the document and your coding (nodes, memos etc). Coding an internal or in-situ document is easier because the document itself structures the order and location of your nodes, memos etc. Coding an external document implies that you'll create a skeleton, index, table of contents or other indexing structure for linking coding.

Talking point: Coding, once having added a new source document to the project.

Second problem, this kind of implies that you either have some 'nodes' or that you will spontaneously generate some.
As a starting point I took a initial research proposal and 'made up' terms as nodes in the project.
In the first instance you should just lump them all together as top level nodes. They can be organised into hierarchies but leave that job to later. In fact you will definitely reorganise nodes many times over.
A new top level node can be configured to aggregate sub-nodes; just check "aggregate coding from child nodes" if you want this behaviour. You can turn it on or off.

Talking point: Messing around in the project using "find", sets (collections), classifications, node matrices...

A set is just a way of making loose collections or shortcuts within NVivo. Use sets to organise nodes and sources in some way; like a way to collect narrative documents or things node-coded as narrative? You can add or delete set members without affecting the original items.

Talking point: What's the point of Memos if you can only link them once?

I don't know. You might have thought that you could do the same thing with memos, that is, 'link' them with various relevant instances of evidence in multiple items... Well hard luck. You can't. From the help system - Understanding Memo Links; "Each source or node can have one memo linked to it and that memo cannot be linked to any other item. You can also have memos that are not linked to any item". :-(

Questions:
Lucy
Novice?
What do I do? Total novice?
Basic format you want Word documents in?
What if one is on a PC and the other on a Mac?
What does NVivo do for me?

Marius
Total novice. How do I get started?
How to enter data? How to analyse it, coding techniques?
I want something that does the whole thing? Ironic.
How to do intercoder reliability? Is there a system test or report that can provide data on that?


Jury
Total novice, same questions.
Specifically, what are the pitfalls?
If I ask the system to give me evidence for a specific construct? How reliable is that?
How about linking constructs?

Fiona
I have blocks of data, that look disconnected, random. How to translate that into something that will answer my research question (magically).

Betul
Total novice.
I'm a qualitative researcher, want to to translate into a quantitative format. Some kind of quants?
Content or statistical analysis.

Paul
Advanced beginner.
20 case studies, 50 interviews, industry blocks.
Want to do analysis within and across these elements.


Refs
QSR International's YouTube site
Using NVivo: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Primer by Shalin Hai-Jew
Loads of getting started guides:
NVivo 10 for Windows Getting Started (from QSR)
NVivo Introduction Workbook (Finders University)
NVivo Advanced Workbook (Finders University)