21st Century Scholar

Peter Scott uses the metaphor of “the angle of repose” in his nice new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. The angle of repose is an engineering term, but I know it as the title of a book by one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. In engineering an “angle of repose” is the angle at [...]

This is the first of a two-part blog where I discuss the use of social media in research and practice. Today’s blog emphasizes methodological concerns. Next week, I will discuss social media in schools. As regular readers of the blog know, I am conducting an ethnography that focuses on the lives of 17- and 18-year-old [...]

In late December, Collegeology game designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission: Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right [...]

My interest in college readiness includes organizations and individual actors; therefore, the case study methodology is an appropriate research tradition. After receiving approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and gaining entrée and access to the respective case, the data collection begins. However, one of the first elements established for my projects is determining reciprocity: [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a critique and a celebration. I recently attended the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting in Charlotte and there is much to report about the role online communication technologies are (and aren’t) playing in the postsecondary research community. The critique is the obvious stuff: No wifi [...]

Credibility is the first (and most important) criteria for establishing trustworthiness in qualitative research. Credibility, like it’s step-sibling validity, is often the subject of much debate; scholars argue about what it can and cannot do and what strategies researchers should and should not use to ensure rigor in research (see “Varieties of Validity: Quality in [...]

I call it a blessing to spend time learning from high school students. You might think I am crazy for electing to design research activity that promotes what Geertz’s describes as “thick description.” I honestly enjoy the energy housed in high schools, and smile at what is perceived to be “drama” for adolescents. We must [...]

A few years ago I was working at Mountain West University* as a retention specialist for Student Support Services, a federally-funded program which serves primarily low-income and first-generation students. Not only did we provide students with great programs and workshops to support them academically, we also organized trips to campus theatre performances and other events [...]

We here at 21st Century Scholar are delighted to bring you a special week focusing on undocumented immigrant students. Each day, a guest blogger—Uriel Rivera, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, Crissel Rodriguez, Susana Muñoz, and a brother and sister from a mixed-status family—will talk about their experiences as, interactions with, and hopes for undocumented immigrants and students. We hope that you [...]

Thursday is TechDay Today’s Thursday is TechDay blog is an introduction to the future of qualitative research software: the online platform. If you haven’t heard the news, there’s a new qualitative software player in town. It’s called Dedoose, and it’s worth a look for two reasons. First, within the qualitative research community, it pioneers the [...]