BLOG about Statistics
This is a Human Resource Development Masters program
A brief description of the organization
What is the issue (in a broad lens) you are interested in?
Why is observation a good source of data for this particular issue?
What did you observe?
A detailed description of your observation
Specific behaviors, not opinions of behaviors
What are the significances of your observations?
What is important?
Why?
How would these observations inform your understanding of a particular organizational issue?
The objective of the blog is to create a space for individual reflection about the weekly topics and a place to express your “aha” moments, your reaction, and ideas that were triggered by the interaction with the contents in the modules. By the end of the course, you will have a collection of your thoughts and learning that happened as a result of your weekly readings and activities. This assignment is similar to a reflective journal, the main difference is that it will be posted on D2L for all your classmates to see. You are required to complete 5 (five) posts in the weeks of your choice, however, you are encouraged to post any time if you are motivated to share your thoughts. Each blog post will be worth 4 points for a total of 20 points. You may not submit more than one blog post per week. What this means is if you procrastinate and we are in week 15, and you have only submitted 2 blogs, posting 3 during week 15 will not be acceptable. You will receive feedback for all blog posts from the instructor and/or peers. Substantive peer feedback may be worthy of extra credit points. The blog is also a great forum to solicit feedback from your peers on assignment strategies and challenges. Some ideas to stimulate your blog post thinking:
What are you confused about from class/readings/assignments?
What surprised you about a topic?
How does what we discussed fit within your current or potential practice?
What about the reading was unclear/disagreed with/agreed with
EXAMPLE:
Many of us would rather avoid statistics if we could. It is like thinking of an out-of-control freight train coming at you; what should you do? Get out of the way? Think that it is just another problem, one of those that appear every once in a while, to give your life a little extra spice? Should we face it and try to look for a solution?. This has been a difficult subject in the past, but I know that it is necessary to make sense of it. Mode, mean, and median sound very similar and confusing, yet, they are very different; how is it possible that from the same set of numbers or data as we should call it, we can get three distinctive ways of interpretation? On top of it, you add standard deviation, range, validity, and other terms, and it could seem impossible. The truth is that we need to make sense of them; have a basic understanding of how to obtain those numbers/data and what they mean. If we do not, then creating reports and offering solutions to an organization’s problems would be very difficult, or to use one of the previous terms, would lack validity.
Only, thru the understanding of these terms and thru practice will we be able to interpret the data we collect and use it to provide meaningful solutions to the problems we will find. We need to become familiar with these basic methods of statistics if we want to become good HRD practitioners; on the contrary, our chances of success might decrease exponentially.
