Microphone Check: One, Two, What is This?
December 01, 2016
Microphone Check: One, Two, What is This?1 We are 16+ blog posts into a social experiment – blogging as a way to partially satisfy our dissemination mandate from NSF. At the time, it seemed a somewhat novel approach for a group so focused on mathematics and computer science education research. While it is true that a blog cannot match the traditional vehicles for presenting results: papers, presentations, etc., we thought it might be a great way to memorialize many of the meaningful team conversations that take place frequently over the life of a project. Research findings can be presented in a paper, but our experience over the years has taught us that there are many other “aha” moments – large and small insights that shift our ways of thinking. These moments occur as we work together, particularly when the group is interdisciplinary. So then, we think of the LTEC blog as a way to create artifacts – lingering records of these conversations – for ourselves and for others. It may be vain, or at least self-indulgent, to think that others may benefit from our own evolution record, but we have all had that moment, listening to a colleague’s tale of conversations past, when we feel a ripple of excitement, an echo of a life-changing “aha” moment. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when that went down! The questions we would ask! The kudos we would give! …
So we’ve been writing – trying to speak with the voice of the project – hoping for more harmony than discordance. This is easier said than done, but even discordant internal first drafts help us to learn and clarify our project’s purpose and mission. Even so, achieving the right tone is tricky – particularly when we don’t know who’s reading. Interested colleagues in the same discipline? Colleagues from different disciplines? EM fans? EM haters? Just our moms on different devices? Google Analytics can’t tell us that2, but our readers can. So in this 17th post, we’d like to solicit some feedback from you. As the title suggests, we can think of this as a microphone check. How do we sound? Are the microphones too pitchy? Do we need to turn the base up? Or, in analogy-free terms, what could we change about our blogging tone or content to retain and attract more readers? If you will, please take a minute or two to tell us what is or isn’t working for you. We’ve enabled the comments section below, which uses disqus, but feel free to also RT our tweets (@everydayCS), or even send us an email. We hope to hear from you … and soon.