I usually blog what I have been doing but, in an effort to follow my supervisors’ advice and cut down on my non-PhD activity, I am now blogging what I have NOT been doing. How come, if I have turned down at least five days of activity since my last supervision session that I still […]
I’ve just been reading an article which I think will be very important for the structure of my thesis, because it outlines the key elements of a sense of community. From what I have seen of my data, I think that where the learning goes wrong is when these elements of community go wrong. McMillan, […]
Well, I’m working on my literature review, so I’m bound to tinker with my research questions, aren’t I? Also, an initial pass over my data showed me that if I just look at the skills and resources that people use to learn together online, I’m going to end up with a list. And not a […]
Networks are self-organising structures that lie somewhere between order and chaos. Jones, C. (2004). Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks. ALT-J, 12, 1, 82-93.
I think I may have grasped the point of activity theory. It’s about looking for common units of analysis with which you can analyse and compare a great variety of stuations. I think. Which leads me to ask what my unit of analysis is. I got caught up earlier in whether the unit of analysis […]
I’ve done three or four really serious versions of my pilot for my supervisors over the last 18 months, and it’s STILL not right 🙁 I know when I’ve rewritten it another couple of times there’ll be a time when it’ll be fab and I’ll be really pleased with it and it will make utter […]
I have knocked my 21 interviews into more-or-less usable form. I now have about 27,000 words of interview response data which is a fair amount to work my way through. To give me some initial pointers, I have made it all into tag clouds using the very user-friendly site tagcrowd.com The picture below shows a […]
This time I’m removing the interviewee’s sign off, which is their complete address. If I do any word frequency or tag coud analysis, sign offs like that could skew the figures. On the other hand, in the conferences, I think I’l keep in people’s stock signatures because they perform a number of functions. Oh, and […]
Nothing’s ever straightforward, is it? I realised that I asked different questions of the tutors and the students, so ‘question 1’ won’t mean the same thing in every place. So now I have question 1 (the tutor’s question) and question 1s. I have an interview which intersperses my questions with the answers, so Ive added […]