About That Poster Presentation at AECT 2019
If you had read my previous post, you’d know I was heading to Las Vegas to meet up with my virtual friend and collaborator at AECT 2019.
And we met! It was unreal and real, to us, and to those who had heard of our story in my previous post. At the poster gallery walk, some folks seemed more incredulous of our partnership across space and time (without having met at all in person) than they were of our poster. Of course, the poster received a lot of traction and provoked conversation. That was the best part of doing a poster presentation: you get to meet and chat with a lot of people about your work. People kept coming by our poster, piqued by our pop-culture study (#GBBO), and as we could only talk to one person at a time, the 1.5 hours flew by quickly. Several talked about their obsession with the show, and how they recognized Noel and the judges (Paul and Prue) on our poster. Tanya and I enjoyed the interactions with our visitors.
In talking with our visitors, we fielded some good questions which challenged us to think more deeply and are helping us to refine our writing further:
- Why are you using a higher ed assessment framework to evaluate the show? That is, beyond the obvious reason that I wanted to know how to better design assessments in higher ed? Tanya commented that the GBBO was learner-centered; contestants did most of the work. The whole show is practically about them.
- How did you analyze the shows? What did you look for?
- What’s your next step?
- “So there’s another dimension to watching TV?!”
- Could the competitive element have made the performance challenges (aka assessments) more motivating? That is, compared to regular classes without the competition?
- Inspiration from pop culture! How interesting! [I met someone who had analyzed the Academy Award shows and examined the probability of predicting Oscar winners.]
These questions motivate us to work on expanding our Methods section and clarifying the steps we took to analyze the shows. We also plan to enlarge our Findings section, include a section on Limitations to Our Study, and explain more on the Implications of this Study. Our next step is to schedule time to turn our proceedings article into a journal article. There is work ahead for both of us but I think we have a good article to share with everyone when we are done. Watch out, world!
Update: 11/4/2019
We have a writeup in the AECT 2019 proceedings. When it’s available, I will share the link. Our poster can be found here:
