seriously nice glass

glass2
Originally uploaded by angie cat

My friends Jenny and Warwick have just returned to Wagga after six weeks travelling in Europe. Jenny gave me this lovely little dish which she bought in Venice. It's handmade (blown). Thanks Jen.
The AERA conference in Denver, Colorado is looming and that means that I have to work on the two papers that i will be presenting with my co-authors. Both are on transcription and resulted from my interest in transcription and the review of transcription literature that I published last year. One paper is for the self-study SIG and reports the use of transcription in Robyn Brandenburg's self study. The second paper is with Teresa Moore and reports a small study that we conducted to examine the use of transcription in doctoral research.

Doormen

I've just been into amazon books to check a reference. While there I took a look at a couple of books that caught my fancy. One of those was:

Bearman, P.(2005). Doormen: Fieldwork encounters and discoveries. London: The University of Chicago Press.

The book begins with these words ...

"Residential doormen can be found in most major cities, but like bagels, they are quintessentially New York. While it surprises New Yorkers, for whom doormen are a critical element of their sense of self and place, no one has thought to study them or the larger social ecology of the lobby, where tenants and doormen meet."

Yes, I'm purchasing the book.

Meanwhile, I am intending to finish the last of my revisions for my journal article. One reviewer commented that the child's talk reminded him of Vygotsky's concept of private speech. I didn't know what I was going to do with that comment (and actually wasn't specifically required to do anything), however, I went back to my analysis and re-examined places to identify where the child could be said to addressing an adult and where talk may have been for himself. This exercise proved to be useful -resulting in some fine tuning of my previous analysis. That's the kind of feedback I like.

back on track

front yard left side
Originally uploaded by angie cat

I've now been in Wagga Wagga for just over a month. That time has flown and I am now feeling quite settled. I think it took much longer to reach this same "spot" mentally when I moved to Rockhampton because it was such an unknown place to me (think, moving across three states from Ballarat to Rockhampton -that's pretty extreme!).

I've just received a positive response about an article that I submitted to an an early childhood literacy journal. It is probably my favourite piece of writing to date so I am very happy that i only need to make some minor revisions. Having said that, there were four reviewers and so quite a lot of feedback and points that I need to address systematically.

I started today by writing out a list of suggested revisions. As I did this I realised that some points -while different - could be addressed by reworking the same small sections in the draft. That helped to make it more manageable.

Doing revisions is a stage of the journal writing process that i still find challenging. This is mainly because I have "left" the paper once I send it off and usually go on to submerge myself in other data and another focus for writing. In this case, the review has only taken two months so I dont' feel quite so distanced from it. It is important to get onto this paper straight away - hopefully, it might make an issue for 2010. This will be my first article written under the Charles Sturt University "banner".

Screen

screen
Originally uploaded by angie cat

I've had two main things to address this week. The first was the beginning of teaching for semester 1. My main teaching load is for a first year subject - Language as social practice. While the content is pretty familiar to me, the construction of a good context for teaching is still demanding. Since my administration load at CQU was much heavier than my face-to-face teaching, it has been interesting making a shift to more interaction with students.


The second big task for the week was revising a journal article for publication. This one is for a journal about research and new media technologies. I was pretty chuffed to have my paper accepted subject to "a few amendments". As usual though, even a small amount of revision can be tricky. In my case the single required revision appeared (to me) to be out of kilter with the CA perspective on things. So it was a matter of trying to address the required revision adequately while staying true to the thrust of the article itself. The useful thing about the required revision was that it DID suggest to me that my own take in the article was not clear enough. So, I also went back and tried to draw that out.

It was slow work but is done now.