You can always change this.

Gasoline.
You buy it.

On Wednesday, I’ve got the permission to print. In last couple of days I was finalizing the thesis. Printing SHOULD and not shall (yes J. J. R. was here) be on Monday. Thanks everybody for support.

Second day of Koli Calling 2007 over. Brief observations:

This year’s Koli shall have a small subtitle: Phenomenography or A.B. was here.

The best way how to induce a heart attack on a person is to tell that a research question of his/her student indicates another method of inquiry than a phenomenographic one.

One of the interesting studies was about Karelian pies and the fall of Rome empire. Well done with the last slide!

Seriously, the study of teaching strategies to students in programming classes by (Michael de Raadt) was perhaps the only one that actually had a experimental and control group. It turned out that the control group somehow developed about 30% of the assessed plans, while the experimental applied about 50% of the plans that were taught to that group. Who likes Soloway’s research, check the paper as this is a nice application of his studies.

The quote of the day: You would not buy a washing machine with a bug. (Which is a free paraphrase of a real quote about washing machines, software, bugs, and disclaimers).

Latest news from Koli 2007, day I. over:

We managed to split the audience pretty much in halves: a half loves the idea of conflictive/disruptive materials, those were nodding. Another half would love seeing us unboned, those were rolling their eyes. It was a great fun.

Robert McCartney, the current editor of ACM JERIC, said he wants to change the perception of the journal as an outlet of ‘I have these great course materials’ papers. Instead, more empirical work is invited.

There are as many foreign conference-participants as the domestic ones, a fact that’s considered positive. Also, since 2004 there seems to be a growing proportion of research papers (whatever it means). Well done, I think. Pity our paper really was only a proposal this time.

Finally, the quote of the day overheard while queuing for the dinner: ” I think I read too much Ben-Ari!’

We are creating a survey questionnaire. One of the questions is to indicate the order of preference (strength of belief) about what intervention works (“Indicate the order in which you believe the students benefit from the following list of six interventions”).
There is some order already inherited or known or researched, but we want to see whether the experts feel the same.

The question is, what system for ordering to use. We came up with two: from 1 to 6 (lowest preference/no benefit to highest/best benefit) or from 1 to 6 (meaning first best – worst, last best). These two schema are opposite, so getting ‘1′ in the first is the same as getting ‘6′ in the second.

Which one do you feel is more intuitive? Do you use some other way of asking the order?