Research Essentials

Life is getting tough in the world of academia, with fewer funding calls and more competition for those that are available. The Institute of Education Technology (IET) is putting in a huge number of bids in January, about 12 I think. Those involved have been working day, night and weekends to get the bids written, approved by contracts and finance and submitted to the relevant bidding system by the deadline. It is worth while uploading the bid the day before because in the hours running up to the deadline, the system can get overloaded and it has been known to miss a call despite having a fully completed and approved bid together simply because the system got overloaded and wouldn’t accept the submission.

As a contract researcher, the success of these bids for funding is of critical importance. I am now within less than 6 months from the end of my three-year contract and have helped out with some of the funding bids. There is a system whereby a contract researcher can be a “Named Researcher” in a bid. This means that if the bid gets funded, you get offered the post without having to go through the process of advertising and interview. So I have potentially got another three-year contract. However, I won’t know whether the bids I am named on will be successful until after the end of my current contract.

If I knew for sure that there would be only, say, a 3 month gap between the end of my current contract and the start of the next, I would make arrangements for that period. But nobody knows whether a given bid will be successful.  So what should I do? Look for work in the meantime seems a sensible move. But if I find something and move on, and the bid I am really interested in gets funded, then it will be really disappointing not to be work on it.

It is a dilemma. Do I risk having an indefinite period of unemployment by holding off looking for other jobs until I know for certain about the bids I am interested in? A risky strategy.

By Gill

Facebook first became popular with young people of university age. They use it to co-ordinate their social lives, alongside mobile phones, to share photos and generally add an extra dimension to the fun side of being at uni. There are more ways in which it can be used, but I think that remains the basis.

Working in education technology, I started to use Facebook to see what potential it might have in the educational sphere. At the start, I didn’t find Facebook particularly enthralling. I’m not a young uni student and I don’t need it to co-ordinate my social life. However as more of my social circles began to use it and I found it to be quite a good way to keep in touch with a range of  distributed social networks. These include family who live at a distance, old school friends, friends I used to live near but no longer see as regularly, OU work colleagues and a close-knit social circle based around the shared weekly activity of Morris Dancing. Indeed, the Morris side has moved its website onto Facebook so when you click the website address, you get routed to a Facebook page which makes it much easier to maintain a dynamic web presence.

The vast majority of my Facebook contacts were over 30 when they started using it.

For the most part, all runs fairly smoothly. People post amusing links or anecdotes on their walls to which others respond in a lively and comic vein. Videos and photos get posted which help people keep in touch and all in all it provides a pleasant diversion.

However sometimes the status updates and comments are not so amusing – there are oblique and unpleasant references to other members of the social circle. Allusions to intrigues and references to personal issues that would really be better kept out of the public domain. I have also seen parents who effectively stalk their offspring on facebook, commenting on their posts and photos in a way that must make the kids cringe and sometimes drives them to “unfriend” their own parents.

I was talking to my daughter about these behaviours. She has grown up with facebook and in her opinion, “older people” just don’t know how to use social networking properly. She pointed out that when young people use facebook, they are also meeting up with their facebook contacts during the evening and day. This means that if they start posting inappropriate and tedious status updates on their wall, or on the walls of others, their friends will tell them in no uncertain terms. Along the lines of “Why on earth are you whinging about your boyfriend dumping you. Nobody is interested, get over it”. She suggested that young people get “trained” in the appropriate way to use the technology. She is strongly of the opinion that “older people” miss out on this essential learning stage.

This may be true. But from what she said, there are also young people who misuse Facebook as a vehicle for cyber-harassment. If they continue with the nasty posts, she simply blocks them and because she sees them on a daily basis, she tells them that she is blocking them because she doesn’t want to see their unpleasant comments. However it is possible that these young people simply carry on. Is inappropriate use of social networks the result of older people lacking a fundamental understanding of how to use them. Or will young cyber-bullies grow up to be old cyber-harassers? Do bullies of all ages simply deploy the new technologies that they encounter to extend their bullying activities into the online sphere, attempting to use the social media as another way to isolate and undermine their victims?

I wonder…   by Gill

I’ve had the iPad for nearly two months now, and am finding a pattern of use. However I think this pattern of use will differ for different people according to their preferences and lifestyle.

iPad Geocaching

GPS

Geocaching (see photo). OK, it looks a little odd to be trekking through the woods holding what looks like a giant iPhone, but the GPS works really well and as my iPhone is an early 3G model, I found it useful to pull out the iPad periodically as the map orients itself according to the direction you are facing. Sim card not essential for this, as you can download Geocaching info and maps using wifi, but it did help.

In car navigation. When not driving, it was tremendously helpful to be able to pull out the iPad and look up where we needed to go. Indeed, en route for our holiday, we got to around lunchtime and I used it to look up a nice pub in the vicinity and navigate us there. It was a bit irritating, but understandable, that it would show all nearby pubs including those that were behind us, but it was still very useful. Sim card essential.

3GS

Holiday. 3G was very useful enabling us to look up places of interest, opening times etc. You could also do this with a laptop but you’d need wifi or tether it to a phone. An iPhone also provides this functionality, but I’ve been finding that for many things, the slightly larger iPad screen makes it the first choice over the iPhone.

Transport

Train journeys. Had to commute to London for 5 days last week and the iPad was brilliant. It was lighter to carry and easier to pull out in a crowded train to check email etc. The journeys passed in an instant. I was also able to upload PDFs and papers I wanted to read and read them easily in the train. I wouldn’t tend to use the iPad for reading because I like to give my eyes a rest from the screen periodically, but it was good to have this facility there for the train journeys.

My husband had a book reader which he used of flights. He now uses the iPad in preference so clearly it performs well as a book reader.

Recently my husband had to go to the US on a 10 hour flight. He found the iPad lasted the entire time, despite watching a film on it and also playing a driving game.

Films and TV

I tried out the BBC iPlayer to see if it worked, and got absorbed by the programme. Quality on the iPad seems pretty good and it is easy to lie down with it tucked beside you, or have it on your lap.

Music

I don’t tend to use it for listening to music – I have an iPhone and a couple of iPod Nanos for that. Once function where small size is an advantage. However I do use it for learning tunes to play on the accordion from YouTube videos. The speaker is good enough and the screen size makes it better for learning dance tunes as you can see what the dancers are doing.

I’ve got the 64Gig 3G iPad. There doesn’t seem much point in going for a lower specification model as I’m fairly sure that once I have it, I’ll want to use all the top-end features, such as GPS combined with 3G etc.

So, having played with the iPad for a day or so, I looked up all the sim card deals for the iPad last night. It’s fairly confusing and rapidly changing. The advantage of an iPad is that it can use any 3G network. This will hopefully encourage competition which will get the best deal for users.

According to the Apple website, you can use a sim from Orange, O2, Vodaphone and Three. Each link takes you to the appropriate page on the provider website where their data plans are outlined. The main thing we wanted was a micro-sim that would allow you to purchase data for a week, or a month to cover a holiday, but which would not tie you in to a monthly contract.

We headed off for Cambridge to get some essential extras from the Apple store (a camera connector to download pics directly to the iPad and a VGA adaptor for slide presentations) and we asked there. They are clean out of sim cards, but said that O2 were the only non-recurring tariff available and that Vodaphone required you to sign a contract. We trotted across the precinct to O2 but, they had no micro-sims either. We were advised to purchase our micro-sims online and I think that is definitely the best option. What I want is a sim that I can load up with credit for when I’m planning to be away, say on holiday or at a conference.

I just went on the online chat to Vodaphone. Despite what the website implies, the 30day is a rolling contract and you have to give 30 days’ notice that you want to suspend it. He also pointed out that even on pay as you go, if you don’t top up within 90 days the card is locked.

Meanwhile, O2 seems to offer closer to what we are after.

Here’s a neat website with a guide to iPad data tariffs.

by Gill

Its just arrived – one day before it’s out in the shops. Very exciting. I’ve twittered and facebooked it and got some interesting comments. As most of my friends are pretty geeky, there were several along the lines of “can I see it”. One or two “I’m stuck in London and mine is being delivered at home” and lots of witty. I got one from someone who had previously commented:
“Thousands queuing for iPad on it’s first day of release” – saddos! Apple should wise up and make an iHoover, iIron and iSaucepan then the wives of the geeks would never have to clean, iron or cook again

asking me:

Oh no…you weren’t one of the saddos who placed an immediate order for the latest Apple gadget were you?! Please tell me it’s just for work/research and not something you really wanted… I’m deeply concerned

Another friend came up with a more interesting question, saying

by Gill

I heard yesterday from the British Academy that I hadn’t been successful in gaining a postdoctoral fellowship from them this year. I wasn’t too surprised, they don’t ever seem to fund anything to do with education on this scheme. Besides, they had 900 applications, and a maximum of 45 awards to make.

I think I put together a strong proposal, and I shall revamp it for use elsewhere. So feedback from the British Academy would be very useful. I was about to contact them and ask for feedback, when I noticed at the bottom of their email: ‘Please note that, as explained in the scheme notes, feedback is not a feature of the Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, and the Academy is, regretfully, unable to enter into correspondence regarding the decisions of the awarding Committee.’

Hmm. 900 applicants. I didn’t see the entire process but it went something like this. I wrote it, my mentor reviewed it, I revised it. The director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology reviewed it and approved it, the Research School reviewed it and approved it. Both my referees read it in some detail and supplied comments. The British Academy logged it on their website, sent me some emails and found someone higher than me in the pecking order to review it. Maybe they even found two people to do this.

It’s a long, complex document. I guess that’s about a week’s work overall – some of it by me (research fellow) but other aspects by lecturers, senior lecturers, administrators and a professor. That’s maybe £700 of staff time (well over £1000 if you go for full economic costing!) That’s repeated around the country 900 times. Nine hundred working weeks. About 20 years. £630,000 (I’ll leave you to work that out with full economic costing).

If the British Academy organised universities across the country to club together and spend £630,000 on training 900 early-career researchers to produce better research funding proposals then that would be expensive, but would have some merit. But that would involve feedback. Without feedback, the British Academy has devoted approximately £630,000 of university funding to making 855 early-career researchers feel depressed.

I wonder if that’s what they’ll put in the Impact section of their annual report?

by Rebecca

Section of my Prezi

Was it worth it? My feeling is – yes – because this is a new way of constructing presentations, more akin to design or to concept mapping. It moves me away from the linear form of presentation and towards thinking of the presentation as a unified whole. I’ve now got a carefully structured and well thought-through piece – which could double as a poster without needing much work done.

Yes, it took me far longer than a PowerPoint – but perhaps not much longer than my first-ever PowerPoint. And, as the university supports PowerPoint, I went on a full-day training course and was supplied with an OU template to use. I’ve now got four years’ supply of old presentations to build on – so I rarely start from scratch as I have done today.

I’m pleased I can link other people to my Prezi and embed it in other sites (not this one, unfortunately, but that’s down to the set-up of this blog, not to Prezi).

I think I’m still on a learning curve. I’ve probably overused the facility to keep swooping back to my central ideas – so my audience will probably be sick to the teeth of my research questions by the time I’ve finished. And it was really hard to estimate how much time this would take to present, so I may end up skipping through towards the end. I’ll need to trial it somewhere, as well – I’m worried that it will fail to work on a strange computer in a new venue.

Prezi is probably also still on a learning curve. I’ve kept almost all of my text and pictures horizontal and upright – but there is still an uneasy feeling to the movement of the focus across the screen. I would have liked more layout tools to help me align items, and a facility to lock groups of items together so I didn’t have to move them individually. The option of saving as an A0 or A1 document would also be useful – I’d have to do the whole thing again in a different program if I wanted a poster at the end of it. A bit more flexibility about colours and fonts would have come in handy, and there were times when I lost control of how I was moving about the screen, and had to log out and start again. And it doesn’t work on a Mac on Firefox, which meant I had to dig Safari out of my applications folder.

It’s been hard work, but interesting. It’s definitely a tool that has helped me to put my ideas together. PowerPoint helps me to isolate and organise individual ideas and sub-sets of ideas – Prezi helps me to combine and integrate them. In the long run I think that Prezi’s will prove to be the better approach for me.

By Rebecca

I’ve recently been creating new blogs on Blogger. I use both wordpress and blogger, swapping from one to the other depending on my mood at the time. Recently, Blogger has been my preferred choice.

I just created a new blog in Blogger: The Connected Peasant. In doing so, I realised I had quite a few blogs that had fallen into disuse, so I started to go through them.

One of these which took me aback was a blog by Steve Godwin, A researcher’s experience in Education. I am a “guest blogger” on this blog which means I can make blog posts but not do anything else to the blog, like change it’s layout or remove it.

Steve, sadly, died last year. I was in “tidy up” mode, so I wondered what to do about this dormant blog which was listed along with all my other blogs. I thought that maybe I should email the Blogger support centre and ask them to unlink me from it. But before I did so, I went back and re-read it.

It was like hearing Steve speaking again. I realised that maybe I didn’t want to be unlinked from it and that perhaps archiving such blogs is not necessarily the right thing to do. I don’t know what the best thing to do with the virtual traces left on the internet by people when they die, but I’m certainly not going to request any changes to this one.

By Gill

Tobii eye tracker

Graham and Patrick led a technology coffee morning focused on their use of the Tobii eye tracker. This coffee morning differed from Jonathan and James’ presentation on eye tracking methods and methodologies in that it was more hands on with a focus on future possible uses of the equipment.

Patrick began by describing how they had used the Tobii eye tracker for analysing websites, finding out what worked and what did not work by seeing how people are actually looking at the site. They very quickly moved onto a demonstration of the eye tracker in practice. The Tobii is a great improvement on previous models. I took part in one of the earlier studies, but the eye tracker was so sensitive that we had to sit in a darkened room which was hardly conducive to feeling relaxed and using the system in a normal manner. The Tobii can be used in bright ambient light and is quite small and neat, looking just like any other flat screen.

Keren offered to be the guinea pig and sat in front of the eye tracker. The screen she was looking at was reproduced on a large display behind her, with the movements of her eyes (the tracks) reproduced real time. They first needed to calibrate the device and, as with most technology, the system failed and eventually they had to switch it off and reboot. Never work with children, animals or technology

The eye tracker can measure where people look first, how long their eyes rest on a particular point and where the eyes scan around. Highlights the connections between the different parts of the site that people are looking at.

Software produces quite easy to interpret statistics on this. However the interpretation is up to you and depends on your research questions.

Although a Anne Adams has used the Tobii eye tracker to research how people use Second Life, which is a different type of interface, Patrick and Graham have focused on websites. They pointed out that when using eye tracker for website testing purposes. It’s best to have a fairly stable site. For example, if you have a twitter feed or something that changes regularly, the eye tracker will not combine different people’s views of that page. You can combine them manually if you want.

We watched Keren exploring an OU site and then replayed the track afterwards. It was very interesting, with people asking Keren what she had felt at particular points in the recording. For example, it was clear that she had read the terms and conditions, she explained why, but the rest of the text she had merely scanned through. It was possible to ask her why she’d looked at a particular spot and repeatedly returned to it, and why she kept returning to the home page. This highlighted a flaw in the navigational menu in that she felt it was taking her away from where she wanted to be in the website and so had to keep returning.

It was clear from this experience that you can gather a lot of data in a very short time, and that the data consists of both the eye tracking statistics themselves but most importantly, supplemented by a post-interview or discussion with the participant. As Jonathan had pointed out, talk-aloud strategy also helps.

Graham then showed how the data is represented. Graham displayed several people’s tracks on the same image, but pointed out that it’s best to use a website that is in a fairly stable site. For example, if you have a twitter feed or something that changes regularly, the eye tracker will not combine different people’s views of that page. You can combine them manually if you want, which is not difficult to do. However in this version it was noticeable that all the eye tracks were offset to the right. Possibly due to the manual combining of the tracks that Graham had had to do.

Graham demonstrated how eye tracker will overlay several peoples recordings of looking at a single page. You can select a particular time segment to focus down on something of interest.

You have several options – web option, probably also one that caters for second life (video). With web option, if you have a small video on the web page that ends up showing as a blank if people choose to play it. This doesn’t look all that good in the playback.

You can also create an area of interest around a particular part of the screen and extract data related to that specific area.. You can either set these things up before you start or you can create them in response to the data you have collected.

• Count (how many times your eye lands on a partiular place)
• Duration
• Gaze plot
• Order in which you look at diff parts of the screen

One finding that emerged very quickly in Patrick and Graham’s experiments was that participants found one feature of the website very frustrating. Two participants found that when they clicked on certain links that opened a new window which they tried to resize but couldn’t do it. Kept returning to it. That simple thing caused frustration. Quick feedback to website designers.

You can export to SPSS and do quite a lot more than Patrick and Graham have had time to describe during this coffee morning.

In contrast to Jonathan’s presentation in which he emphasised how quickly you can generate large amounts of data, Patrick and Jonathan focused in on how you can generate useful small amounts of data during very short sessions with the eye tracker. They discussed using it at a forthcoming Learn-About Fair, getting people to sit for a coupl of minutes to track how they use a particular website to get some fast feedback. Other people in the audience described their use of Tobii for:

• Using Tobii to see how different visualisations of data sets work – if one visualisation is better than another for communicating the information.
• Lab testing on cloudworks site. Taking it to workshops and using with academics with academics who are not that experienced with web 2.0. So would like to experiment with people with different levels of experience.
• Testing whether peoples poster displays worked. Using posters on the eye tracker.

Overall, I was quite surprised at how agile a tool the eye tracker seemed to be. You are not obliged to collect vast amounts of data. Indeed, it seems very well suited to quite short data collection stints – delivering usable and useful data. I liked the innovative idea of putting up posters on the eye tracker to see how well they performed. You could use this technique for comparing things that are presented using different media. An hour well spent I feel.

Identify a subject
What is the focus? Why is this significant? Who would be interested?
Identify a journal
Which journals are interested in this subject – according to their aims and scope?
Which journals have editors and readers who are likely to be interested in this?
Check the journal
Download four articles from the last four years that could be in the literature review.
If this isn’t possible, select another journal.
Answer these questions
What is the focus?
Why is it relevant to this audience?
What are the relevant wider debates, what position will the article take on them and how does it develop them?
How will this article relate to the conversation in this journal?
Is the methodology convincing? Why should readers trust the findings?
Why is this significant for readers?
Write an abstract including these elements
1. Locate paper in relation to larger debates and identify perspective
2. Focus on the questions/issues/problems to be explored/examined
3. Anchor the argument by outlining research, sample and analysis
4. Report on major findings relevant to the argument
5. Argue – open out the argument and return to this article’s perspective.
Convert the abstract into a framework
Check the word count for articles in the journal.
A 15-item bibliography will take approximately 350 words. Deduct these.
Decide how to allocate the remaining words to the five sections in the abstract.
Pick a reader
Choose someone who should find this work interesting and useful. Write the five sections for them.
No section need be more than six times longer than this blog post. Some need only be twice as long.
Check
It is clear what the significance of the work is.
It is an argument: not a narrative, recount or description.
It is authoritative and academic.
(With thanks to Pat Thomson – particularly for the five elements of an abstract.)