What do academics do all day?

It's hard to account for today. I would code it as a "research day," but the subsequent analysis is difficult. I worked between two projects: first, and mostly, on establishing the data analysis framework for the "What I learned" paper that Jeanie and I are developing. For the final paper (to be submitted to a journal such as AMLE) we will use 15 student papers from each of three international practicums -- to Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium (the low countries), and China -- however, we will work with just five papers related to each destination for the conference (EAM-I) paper. Today I use three papers from each trip - total of 15 -- to establish the coding scheme. This is a move analysis (Ding 2003) of the genre of reflection essays (Hedberg 2008) that demonstrate development of a worldview (Fugate and Lassk 2003) in a business context.

References:
Ding, H. (2007) Genre analysis of personal statements: Analysis of moves in application essays to medical schools. English for Specific Purposes 26: 368-392.
Hedberg, P. (2008) Learning through reflective classroom practice: Applications to educate the reflective manager Journal of Management Education
Fugate, D. and F. Lassk (2003) Are U.S. students prepared for careers in international business? A multinational study of worldview. Journal of the Academy of Business Education. (Fall): 53-62.

Then Diana was in and out, bringing with her SPSS printout for our Donor Decisions paper. First she needed to undertsand the variables, then she was having trouble printing the correlation matrix, and finally we needed to reduce the mess of variables to a manageable set that would provide some answers to our questions. Her original correlation matrix covered many pages -- I don't know how many variables there were -- but we've now reduced the set to 38 variables. I have data entered for 25 cases, so need to acquire the information on the 38 variables and enter data for about 80 more cases before Diana returns from Australia -- they leave on Friday and return on August 12.

Jeanie took us out to a nice lunch overlooking the water at Skipper's Dock, so not all the day was spent in scholarly pursuits! Now it's evening and really quiet; Jack is watching TV, Jeanie has retired with a (non-scholarly) book, and I'm about to do the same.