Much of my background looks more like that of a computer science student, though I don't have much in the way of formal computer science education. Information Technology in Educational Research and Statistics by Liu, Johnson, and Maddux (1999) was a nice step back into my comfort zone of IT, defined as information technology instead of instructional technology. I've found the two areas are actually quite different. When I first heard about the UCF IT, heretofore defined as instructional technology, program, I thought IT was going to be about how to best use computers in a classroom. Instead, I'm finding how people learn and how to develop materials for instruction to be most effective. Before I started the IT program, my goal was to shoehorn computers into everything; every solution to every problem had to involve a computer.

I still remember hearing "pedagogy" the first time I talked to Dr. Hirumi and wondering what it meant. Now I know the definition of "pedagogy", however Liu et al. identified some areas where I could help myself become more familiar with IT-specific jargon. I would likely be well served to subscribe to some email lists and browse the list of e-journals on the Association of Research Libraries website at http://www.arl.org/. Aside from learning new jargon, getting a familiarity of which journals match my interests should be good for my future research. The book mentioned Ethnograph, NUD*IST, and Atlas/it many times as software for organizing qualitative research. One of the three might have been helpful for organizing interviews I did for a project in Spring 2005 for Planned Change in IT. I'll have to do more research to find out if the software even still exists since the book is six years old.

I think I should be able to use some of my programming background to follow through with a suggestion mentioned by Liu (1999) on page 72. I've been amassing a large collection of HTML and PDF files from researching for classes. Rather than go back to the library website to search, log in to the library journal proxy, and search for a journal I only vaguely remember a topic from, I could potentially create a reference database of files. Perhaps releasing it on the Internet under an open source license will even attract the eyes of other software developers interested in adding functionality to such a reference organizer.

After trying to read the chapters on statistics, I found I have much to review and learn about statistics before I will be comfortable with the topic. The statistics class I took at UCF was decent at introducing me to SPSS advanced features, but not good at detailing exactly when or why I would use any of the tools I learned in SPSS. I saved the statistics work I did when I took statistics from the math department at The University of Texas. As part of the assignments, I had to include the rationale for why I was performing a certain operation and what it meant, but I do not remember most of it.

By far, the most boring part of the book was about constructivism. The whole time I read it, I was thinking, "who cares about this abstract term, which seems to have no real consensus for a definition in the first place?" Using this opportunity to reflect on that thought, Liu et al.'s book was not the first time I have seen "constructivism" discussed. I should probably read more about it so I am at least able to develop a definition of my own I can use in intellectual conversation. Who knows, perhaps it will even be asked in my Ph.D. comprehensive exams, where I need to at least be able to have a halfway intelligent sounding opinion about it.

References

Liu, L., Johnson, D.L. & Maddux, C.D. (1999). Information Technology in Educational Research and Statistics. New York: Haworth Press