Joshua Danish » PDF

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Joshua — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:53:23 +0000

If you are like me, then you are constantly reading academic documents on the computer, and many of these were scanned in. This makes it difficult to annotate, copy text for a quotation, or otherwise manipulate the document in the ways that support scholarship. Enter Optical Character Recognition. This is a general class of technologies that can look at images with words in them, figure out where the words are, and then convert them into a format that you can edit. My current tool of choice for converting papers from images to text is Adobe Acrobat, though there are many alternatives. The documents that I typically convert are already in PDF format, and so it is incredibly convenient to run the OCR feature within Acrobat and then annotate the paper using Acrobat, Preview, or Skim.

Zotero

Joshua — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:39:48 +0000

Zotero is a free, open source, reference manager that works as a Firefox extension (making it cross-platform). Each version is better than the last, and while I don’t use it exclusively, I find it incredibly helpful while browsing for articles. It makes it incredibly easy to grab all of the citations off of a web-page such as a google scholar listing, and boasts many of the same features as Endnote including pdf storage and Word integration. It’s not yet my primary reference manager, but it may be soon!

Incidentally, if you are already using Zotero, you can use Zotero to grab citations for any articles that I have a PDF for simply by viewing the page on which they are listed.

Endnote

Joshua — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:26:03 +0000

Endnote is my primary reference manager. It allows me to store and retrieve academic references, link PDFs to the reference when I have them, and insert both references and an APA formatted bibliography into my word documents as needed. I highly recommend using it early, regularly, and with notes / annotations so that you have everything in one place from the beginning.

Skim

Joshua — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:20:44 +0000

I recently discovered (as in: a colleague suggested this to me) the freeware app Skim for the mac. This is a great little tool for taking notes within a PDF file that I find much much more usable than acrobat pro. Also, the notes are stored in the file-system, not in the actual PDF so that you can then email the pdf to a colleague or student without the notes. It supports attaching notes, highlighting, circling / labeling, a presentation mode, and a host of other handy little tricks.

Paper: ‘Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations’

Joshua — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:45:51 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2007). Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students’ representational activities: the notions of meta-representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first-grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize results from interviews regarding the design choices that they made. Analysis of the semistructured pre- and postinterviews reveals that students attend to the content domain, local activity, and their personal preferences when evaluating representations. Analysis of video case studies that followed the students as they created their representations further reveals several key mediators of the students’ representational activities, including other students, task constraints, the teacher, and local norms for what constituted a ‘good representation.’ In addition, the data show that these norms shifted over time as new content was covered in the class, and were appropriated in interaction with other students. Finally, both sets of analyses reveal that students often face competing constraints when creating their representations, and resolve these constraints through a complex set of negotiations.

Paper: ‘Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations’

Joshua — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 01:45:02 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2006). Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Bloomington, IN. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper we compare two contexts where students were inventing representations; a 2nd and 3rd grade classroom creating a shared representation, and a kindergarten and 1st grade classroom creating unique representations. Contexts for developing shared representations are those in which a class attempts to jointly construct one representational form to solve a given problem. In contrast, contexts for inventing unique representations emphasize individual representational choices with no explicit attempt to create a shared representational form. Drawing on and comparing data from two recent studies we use the Negotiated Representational Mediators (NeRM) framework to analyze young children’s activities oriented towards the production, evaluation, and modification of representational forms. Both cultural contexts lead to a convergence toward normative representations as well as continuing to diverge in the form of individual acts of creativity and agency. We argue that despite these similar trends, the different contexts support unique aspects of representational practice.

Paper: ‘A Work of Goodness: When a Simple Vote Reveals Children’s Representational Ideas and the Classroom That Helped Produce Them’

Joshua — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:43:05 +0000

Danish, J. A. (Spring, 2006). A Work of Goodness: When a Simple Vote Reveals Children’s Representational Ideas and the Classroom That Helped Produce Them. CONNECTIONS.

Presentation: ‘At the intersection of classroom culture and culturally relevant pedagogy: What students’ arguments around maps reveal about how to increase student achievement within our diverse society’

Joshua — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:46:30 +0000

Enyedy, N., & Danish, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of classroom culture and culturally relevant pedagogy: What students’ arguments around maps reveal about how to increase student achievement within our diverse society. Paper presented at the International Society for Culture and Activity Research, Sevilla Spain.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes data from the Community Mapping Project (CMP), a set of activities within a summer seminar for high school students. CMP was designed based on the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy to create conditions where students would appropriate statistics as a tool for identifying and describing inequities that face their communities. An analysis of pre- and post- assessments revealed measurable improvement in the students’ statistics understanding. However, fine-grained analysis of the classroom video revealed several tensions that arose between the three social justice goals of the curriculum and the instructional objective of learning statistics. This paper uses activity theory as a lens to identify and describe these tensions.