Sorry, bare en lampe.

Lyset var slett ikke enden av tunnellen. Som sist klarte jeg ikke å holde tempoet oppe, og etter to gode arbeidsdager våkner jeg med hodepine og lett feber.

Men denne gangen prøver jeg en ny strategi: I morgen har jeg time hos fysioterapeut, og neste uke begynner jeg med fysiopilates. Anima sana in corpore sano. Cogito sana in anima sano?

Enden av tunnellen

Klokken er ni, og jeg føler alerede at jeg har fått noe ut av dagen: Jeg har gått gjennom tekstanalysematrisene en siste gang, og luket ut momenter som ble for detaljerte eller som falt på siden av problemstillingen min. Nå er jeg klar for å ta dem med meg til biblioteket for nestsiste kildesjekk i lærebøkene.

Onsdag skal jeg gjøre det samme med de statistiske analysene, torsdag skal jeg sjekke teori-kilder og så skal jeg -kors på halsen - skrive ferdig med det materialet jeg har.

rhizomes

With spring comes new ways of seeing life. Fresh green leaves and shoots develop much like ideas mature and evolve.

New for me this spring, is the use of arboretic and rhizomatic growth as an effective metaphor used to divide thoughts and ideas into groups of hierarchic and parallell logic. The rhizome used by Jung to describe a wealth of invisible underground ideas, wonderfully illustrated in Hemingways "tip of the iceberg" novels, has developed into a way of analysis when Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the same metaphor to investigate texts with several entry and exit points.

Using their theory and the observation that first graders always "read" textbooks in fragments intersected by other school subjects and by activities outside school opens up an intriguing field of study: Comparing texts cross subjects and cross the boundaries of school and leisure time we open for more perspectives than the linear logic that dominated the last centuries.

Data mining

I have made the cardinal error of changing my focus several times, and naturally much of my reading have been a waste of time from the perspective of writing the thesis. I have also collected a vast amount of data that I no longer know what to do with, not to mention my struggles with the still somewhat mysterious Chi Square Analysis.

As an easy start after Easter holidays I spend a few days mining throug a set of nominal data on the different exercises in three textbooks, enjoying the irony that this rather simple task is explained as difficult as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data." It is really just a wild goose chase after any speculation that pops into my head.

Counting game

At last I have completed the first stage of my textbook analysis: I have labouriously counted and typed into the SPSS-matrix how many activities involve what senses, how often the pupils are required to leave their chairs, and how many instructions to talk, write or draw about oneself. That last one gave an avarage of twice a year, including the instruction to write your name on the first page!

It was not always an easy task to classify the activities, and I decided to play nice and include every part of written or readable image in the pupil's book, and every instruction in the teachers' guides concerning the pupils' book, as a separate activity. Hopefully I will find time next week to include all the extra activities in the teacher's guide and other material, for now I have setteled for a qualitative analysis of the extra activities that are significantly different from activities already analysed.

In a separate database I have noted the aims of each activity. Which senses they include, what parts of the body, what learning styles and learning domains (Blooms Taxonomy) they relate to, and how they position the pupil in a basic comminication model. Saddeningly, most tasks simply asked for reproduction of knowledge presented on the previous page.

Inspired på an article by Eva Maagerø, about the compositions of text and image of a five-year-old, I also included the variable modality and registered the task in categories of "1 pure text," "2 text and image," "3 text, image and sound" and "4 other." Other modes include games and childs play, and one instance of pure image. I have treated text instructions read by the teacher, read on tape and read by the pupils as basically the same, as the limits are vague in a group learning to read.

Now, I end my day with the first hour of actual thesis writing. A large and scary step towards my degree.