KA SID 2/14/08

This is been a very productive 2 weeks.

After the cluster meeting in late January, I got really excited about my dissertation statement of the problem and research question. I printed out about 10 articles on the problem statement that Yolanda asked me to find. I hope to read those later this week. I also had an advisor from the Small Business Administration, John Edwards, that I'm working with read it (he has a PhD in physics and worked at Bell Labs and other high tech companies for years). He was really helpful and I like the changes he recommended.

On Tues. Jan. 29 I finally (after 4 months), got approval for the YMCA/College Pathways Computer Usage survey to be passed out at the Title I meetings to the parents. This was not what I had ideally wanted - I had asked for home addresses of underrepresented minorities, but the PAUSD does not release this information - so I was pleased anyway. Once I obtained approval, I signed up for SurveyMonkey and started to search for a spanish translater. I also revised my flyer per the advice of the Director of Elementary Education, Becki Cohn-Vargas, to be more informative. Both the flyer and the parental consent form will be translated into spanish. With the help of Carla Colmenarez, I was able to locate a skilled translater who is a grad student at UCLA originally from Mexico City. All the arrangements are done and I hope to have the translations by the 2/17.

I've printed out 50 packets of forms in English for the kids and created self-addressed stamped envelopes and stapled them all together. It took a few hours to get this done. I also purchased some of the incentives (gift cards). I will try to get the rest of the forms printed once I get the spanish translations done (need to have one side english, one side spanish, so I can't print yet).

On Monday Feb. 11, I started a week of vacation, and my first task was to complete the SurveyMonkey implementation of the survey. It did not take much time, as I have a lot of experience in software applications, and some rudamentary knowledge of programming. I am having trouble understanding how I will get this into SPS II later but I hope Yolanda will help me with this. I got about 4 people (the Exec. Dir. of the YMCA, the librarian at my university, and my husband and daughter) to try the survey and with their feedback I've modified several questions. Yolanda is reviewing my proposed changes now. It took me a long time to figure out how to get the graphics (logo) resized, but thank goodness my college-age daughter told me to use Photoshop or I would still have that really big white space!

Then, on Tues. Feb. 12, I worked for 20 hours straight to finish my first draft of the overview for SID. It is 23 pages right now...Yolanda is in the process of reviewing it. I'm very pleased with myself - it's the longest paper I've ever written, and certainly the one with the most footnotes. Remember - I was a business major!

I've purchased and received most of the books for the new KA's I opened last month: Public Policy and Systems Thinking. I have also received more information on the De Anza and Foothill programs to assist underrepresented minorities from Carolyn Wilkenson-Greene. I plan to send out emails tomorrow to these new contacts.

This has been a very good week for my doctorate - probably going to get 40 hours of work in this week!