Turning the timer back on after a couple weeks of being off schedule - I still want to reflect systematically on a weekly basis.
I will start my reflection post with a funny story, a personal one unrelated to research on a surface level but if I dig deep and reflect maybe I will find a connection to research or class. This week I went back home to Chicago for a short Thanksgiving break. I flew on the day of for a 12-hour total travel time where I took a bus from my apartment to the university, a train from the university to the airport, an airplane to Denver, an airplane from Denver to Chicago, and finally was picked up by my sister Diana for a car ride home from the airport to my house. All the vehicles! I'll even include a diagram below for visual interpretation.
On my trip home I decided not to take my laptop home because:
- Airline policies really want to squeeze all the money they can out of you with extra bag charges and measurements [Is this saving fuel because less weight? Are they shipping online shopping items on the plane? I've brainstormed on this topic]
- I was getting my wisdom teeth removed on Saturday and with it being such a short trip I decided to give myself a short break from work.
Anyway, on my flight home from Denver to Chicago I sat next to baby Connor and his dad who I exchanged my aisle seat with his middle seat so that he could have a little more room in our economy priced seats. Baby Connor drank his milk way too fast, chugged if you will, and a couple minutes right before takeoff threw up all over his dad and himself. The poor dad could not get up for 15 minutes after takeoff because of airline regulations to clean up and we spent the next 3 hours of the flight sitting in a smelly row. On this flight home I had planned to read a paper my advisor highly recommended I read Quality in Interpretive Engineering Education Research: Reflections on an Example Study by Joachim Walther, Nicola W. Sochaka, Nadia N. Kellam, which I did and highly enjoyed but for now will always associate it with this funny memory on the plane.
Before I move to my analysis of my paper, I will also note three things that I realized/thought during my trip home:
- Missing my family
- Ethics of anesthesia
- Spiral x-ray machine
- Using technology to understand medications
I'll start with the points associated with my wisdom teeth removal. I was amazed by the procedure, how fast it was, the technologies used, and the state of medicine. My oral surgeon used a 360 rotating type of machine that took an X-Ray of my teeth I had never experienced before. I simply stood straight, placed by chin on a ledge, with my mouth closed and the machine rotated around me taking an x-ray. I wonder if it goes back and forth a couple times to retake the area that might have been blurry. Here is a picture of the machine if you have not seen one before either.
Going off of our discussions on ethics in class, I also thought about the ethics of being an oral surgeon who uses anesthesia (or any doctor who uses anesthesia for that matter) on their patients. The ethics involved with being a doctor and working on a patient who is completely knocked out are so significant Finally, as I have been recovering for the surgery and am taking three types of strong medications, I am reminded of an HCDE 521 talk of a professor Gary who does research with a medical team to make the scientific knowledge of drugs and medications more accessible to doctors. This experience that I am living now really brings saliency to the importance of science communication that my cohort member Ridley is passionate about. During the recovery phase I have been constantly googling if I can do certain things while taking the drugs I am taking and while I do have the prescription labels and informations I wish technology could help support knowledge transfer of medication information from very intelligent doctors and pharmacists to normal people like me! For example, my pill bottle says one type of medication can affect birth control effectiveness. What does this mean? Which birth control? For what type of person? For me? I have many questions that I do not trust unverified websites with but I also do not feel like this is a crucial question that requires a doctor's visit or phone call but I also want to know the answer! The research HCDE is doing is very important in this domain. I also had a question if I could be taking my medications and go on a run. I am eating only mushy foods because of the gaping holes so I would imagine I should not strain myself too much and I also know that I should not be operating machinery like a car but does a treadmill count? I wish technology could help me input these specific parameters and give me a trustworthy answer. This is actually a good transition because it can lead to talk about the paper I read this week in connection to evaluating trustworthiness in research.
On the note of family, I could write for a while about how much I miss home, how much I miss my people, my parents, my sisters, my cousins but for now I'll just say going home made me miss them even more. Seeing what I've been missing, trying to share all my stories of class, papers, and research while catching my breath, and talking to everyone about how graduate school was going felt very special knowing they all cared and they will always be back home - cheering me on.
Now the paper!
I'll try my best to write a short summary of what the paper is about but I would highly recommend reading it if you are interested in engineering education research and specifically like me are wondering how you evaluate quality research.
Walther et al present a systematic, process-oriented framework to evaluate research quality along two dimensions: the making of the data and the handling of the data. The main table in the paper presents quality strategies that the researcher can implement throughout their research stages such as triangulation and member checks. This paper uses an engineering metaphor of quality management to systematically evaluate the quality of your interpretive engineering education research and seeks to further the conversation in the community through an example study.
I enjoyed reading this paper because of the style and language of the text that made clear what the author's meant with each concept introduced and used an illustration after every concept to make tangible their theoretical contribution. Another reason why I resonated with this paper was that given the relatively new space and field of engineering education, this paper seeks to further the conversation about quality in interpretive engineering education not assert their framework is the end all be all. Finally, this paper does a great job with citations - which I evaluated given the lessons we've been learning in 541. Citations are included throughout the paper and the authors do more than simply place throwaway citations rather they present a short summary of what they are citing, what it means, and how it contributes to their argument.
Reflecting on how I read this paper I realize I can treat this reading as a timed-reading engagement from class but in real life. I picked up this paper that my professor recommended, printed it out, read it on a plane and have been able to have conversations about the takeaways, my questions on the arguments, and how it relates to my research.