An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

         For those of you who have been following this blog, then you know that I mentioned in my last post that I had been procrastinating writing my reflection because the words didn’t seem to want to leave my head. Well, that has also been the case for my field experience reflections—again, apologies to my professor!—I’m sure it seems worse in my head than it really is, but try reasoning with my brain. Nevertheless, here I am, trying my darndest to get something coherent onto virtual paper. I thank you, mysterious reader, in advance for patiently bearing with me. EDIT AS OF 12/2/2020: I have now added a more updated website for Bret Willet Staudt , and if you don't want to scroll down to get it then you can click on his name in this sentence. :)

        On this dark and stormy day, I will attempt to somehow condense what I learned during the first week of working on my final project into a blog post. I am, perhaps, making a mountain out of a mole hill here, but the part of my brain that is normally in charge of writing is giving me the blue screen of death so, you know, I’m not that off base.   [ 1 ] Part of why I am having a hard time writing this post, I think, is because I’m not sure how to make this post into a reflection rather than a mere “this is how I did the thing” post. However, I’ve been putting off writing this for longer than I should have—apologies to my professor—so I’m just going to write and hope for the best. With that being said, please read on to find out exactly what this mysterious final project is entails.             My final project for this course focuses on something that I have always thought I would lea...

            This post is partially the result of me realizing that I have not yet written about my final journey with the footnotes which has been a slightly frustrating but ultimately victorious venture; however, this post is also partially the result of me procrastinating writing up my reflection on my final project.   [ 1 ]             A long time ago, aka two months ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write all my unnecessary yet (in my opinion) generally entertaining thoughts in a foot note so that the body of my post would not become an unreadable mess. However, I can’t just transfer over the footnotes that I made in Microsoft Word to Blogger because, as my professor explained, what Microsoft does behind the scenes to get footnotes to work has to be done manually and explicitly by me first in Blogger. I began to write of this phenomenon here , and even though ...

The following post is the result of some more pent-up frustration regarding gender and how it's discussed in a class of mine.   

            Two weeks ago, my class began an exploration of the wild frontier of raw datasets with the goal of ultimately finding ways to visually represent said data.   [ 1 ] I wrote about my experiences (read: battles) here and here . The second week gave us a specific tool to use, DataWrapper which was introduced to us by Dr. Tom Liam Lynch , as well as an added goal of processing the data in some way prior to said visualization. What this means is that my professor wanted us to (virtually) get our hands dirty and manipulate the raw data into new formats that helped give the data meaning. To further clarify, I don’t mean that we altered the data in any unethical way, just that any comparisons or functions completed using the data (e.g. percent changes, comparing data from one chart with data in another chart) would be done by us and not the original collector/creator of the dataset. Unbeknownst to me, I had already done ...