China, far away
The picture shows my collaborator, Fang Ge of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, my former Chinese tutor, Cao Xiuhong, and her husband and my former grad student, Gary Feng, now a professor at Duke.
Tomorrw I return to Beijing for my first visit since the Spring. The main purpose is to collect the data that we weren’t able to finish when SARS shut down all the schools. So I have a lot to try to do in 24 days, including
- trying to validate a Q-sort method for collecting viewpoints on education, with the aforementioned Fang Ge
- videotaping some reading and math classes, also with Fang Ge
- running a study on the possible use of word-level information to guide eye-movements in reading Chinese, with colleagues at Beijing Normal University, and
- running a second-language counting learning study, also at Beijing Normal.
Should be interesting…
One quandary at this point is how to best set up a web-based Q-sort system so Chinese college students and teachers would have access to it. I’m confused about the situation with respect to accessing foreign web sites. In general, if you have paid access (DSL, cable, dial-up connection, internet cafe), you have access to the whole world (except for some blocked sites). Otherwise, you just have access to sites within China. We’ve been looking into setting up a site within China that we’d have access to from Illinois, and there are at least a few possibilities
1. Sign up with a Chinese ISP who supports php, perl, and MySQL (I posed a query about this on the Lonely Planet “Thorn Tree” discussion list, and received interesting if not encouraging replies http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/messagepost.cfm?
postaction=reply&catid=19&threadid=305531&messid=2529299&STARTPAGE=1&parentid=0&from=1
2. Assume people can access a site here in the U.S.
3. Set up a server at the Institute of Psychology or BNU. This may be a real possibility. I tried to do this in the Spring but was stymied. The main reason was that I couldn’t believe it was so hard to set up all the pieces of that packages required to get this working. Having set up Movable Type on my office computer here, though, I now have a better sense of just how hard it is as well as the steps needed.
4. Other ideas, anyone?