What is more pressing -academic work or the lawn?

morning5
Originally uploaded by angie cat.

answer - the lawn! It was very hard to find a place to rent in Rockhampton when I came here. I had left the home I owned (almost) in Buninyong, Victoria, and the rental scene in Rockhampton was limited. I was lucky enough to find a very good house that suited. however, after only a few weeks of rental I received a notice from the rental agents saying that the lawn was dry and in need of mowing. this put me into a spin. since then I've been watering and mowing - watering every day and mowing every two weeks. i would hate to lose this place. the lawn is expansive and so taking care of it is a big job. I bit the bullet again today.

first draft of the new year

today I finished writing an article that I started on 2 Jan 2007 and sent it off to the journal. I note the dates cos my writing turn around is getting shorter. I have to take that as a good sign. post Phd I found writing very slow and difficult - it was like I was writing my phD all over again. I am sure that i am getting better at writing more focused articles. The reviews will tell the tale of course. Meanwhile, what's next?

I have in mind ideas for two journal articles. One would be directed towards an education and literacy journal - to do with student- teacher talk in independent writing lessons. It would draw on analysis of interaction across all the chapters of my PhD thesis. The second would be more specific and probably harder to do - a challenge in fact. I would like to target a sociology journal. The idea i have relates to how extended sequences of talk have been considered within EM/CA.

I have started to make some notes about the EM/CA journal article. I returned to the chapter in my thesis about EM/CA and have noted some questions/tensions that I don't think are addressed in current work to do with extended sequences. I certainly have the data for addressing the area of extended sequences, now just got to see if I have the conceptual understandings right and the analytical capacity to go forth.

we'll see.

impact factor

I've spent a bit of time looking over the social science index and noting the impact factor of some journals. It was an interesting exercise so I will just list a few here.

Early Childhood Research Quarterley (0.703)

Language Learning (0.976)

American Journal of Sociology (3.262)

Journal of the Learning Sciences (2.792)

Reading Research Quarterley (0.859)

Language in Society (0.902)

Language, Learning and Technology (1.367)

Research on Language and Social Interaction (1.357)

Journal of Child Language (1.284)

Elementary School Journal (0.911)

Language in Society (0.902)


By way of contrast we have ...

Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (0.391)

Journal of Philosophy of Education (0.342)

American Journal of Psychiatry (8.286)

Journal of the American Academy for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (4.113)

3 out of four IS sad

I've just noticed that another member of the mamas and the papas has died. I loved this from the yahoo comentary: Doherty once described the Mamas and the Papas' group dynamic like this to the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "The big woman was in love with me, but I was in love with the cute blonde, and she was married." The big woman was Elliot. The cute blonde was Michelle Phillips, who'd wed John Phillips as a teen.

And this,

While in life, Elliot seemed hopelessly in love with Doherty; in her death, Doherty seemed hopelessly devoted to her memory.

"If it wasn't for her, there would be no group, I'd like to get that across," Doherty said of his stage show in the Kansas City Star. "And that she didn't die from a frickin' ham sandwich."

hooley dooley, he was only a decade and a bit older than me. what can I have been thinking of when I embarked on a new stage of my careeer at cqu. should I be thinking of retirement, taking into account three and a half decades of paid working life to date rather than attempting to push forward to (hopefully) new heights as an academic.

I had my meeting with my Head of School yesterday about what I will be doing in 2007. it's a good process but at the same time brings me back to think about the future and what is required to be successful at a time when many of my friends are easing into retirement. what kind of crazy career path is this?

would I have it any differently? mmm probably not.

yeah yeah yeah

  
I saw a book in the uni bookshop about the Beatles. It contains hundreds of black and white photos of them. so - I had to have it.

lippie

This post comes curtesy of my sister who told me a funny story the other day. She and her partner went out to dinner in a local pub. My sister went into the Ladies and was reapplying her lipstick when a young woman entered. The interaction between them went something like this:

YW: oh lippie, can I have some?
MS: um sure
YW: thanks
(YW applies lipstick and then passes it back to MS)
YW: don't like the colour much

Now girls, what would YOU have done? My sister still isn't sure why she agreed to hand over the lipstick to a total stranger BUT it was a very expensive brand and now she says she'll have to toss it. Her partner said "Can't you just take the top bit off". I suggested putting it in the freezer.

I'm still laughing. Julie thinks that perhaps it is a case of her not being able to say "no" to people. But perhaps it illustrates how powerful requests are, and in this case a request that was out-of-the-ordinary and so unexpected that my sister had no "stock" denial to draw upon that was acceptable in this (unacceptable?) situation. Classic last comment by the young woman though.

talk about texts

For the last couple of weeks I've been writing a journal article. It is based around a short excerpt from the transcript I developed for my PhD. I'll record the excerpt here although I'm not sure that all of the notation will survive the translation into html. Let's see

1 Z: ((walking towards the teacher)) Miss Anderson (0.4)
2 T: ((teacher turns to face Zac))
3 (0.2)
4 Z: I writ the whole page ((passing his book to the teacher))
5 (1.0)
6 T: on saturday I went to Nan
7 (1.0)
8 Z: [to sleep up for the night*
9 T: [and Pop's* (0.4) party and slept
10 (1.0)
11 Z: over
12 (1.2)
13 T: did you write all this)
14 Z: [((Zac nodding yes))
15 T: [by yourself
16 (0.8)
17 T: or did Joanne help you? ((joking tone))
18 ((Zac nodding))
19 C: Miss Anderson?,((puts her hand in the teacher's hand))
20 (0.4)
21 T: well done! that's great what goes at the end of a sentence
22 though?
23 (0.4)
24 Z: full stop ((turning away))
25 T: full stop that's wonderful ((turns to face Cathlyn))

The notation doesn't work well on a blog so I HAVE had to omit some things such as changes in intonation. Neverthess, it's a nifty bit of interaction between Zac (who was five and a half) and his teacher. In my analysis I was particularly interested in the way the teacher used her reading of the text, and questioning, to determine whether Zac had written the text by himself.