Category Archives: Research tools

Institutional blogs

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Way, way back, when I first found out about blogs and I was debating where to put the blog for my academic life, there was a debate about whether these blogs should go on institutional sites, or whether they should go on an external provider. WordPress wasn’t as big back then  – there were numerous options, and it wasn’t clear which ones were the best, which were likely to survive, which needed a bit of technical expertise and which were likely to start charging.

I’ve started several blogs since then, but I think this was my first. It took me all the way through my PhD and beyond. I have found it really helpful in reminding me of that process, reminding me of what it felt like to be a PhD student, reminding me of what was important to me at that time and what went wrong. It allows me to track how my research questions and my research overall evolved.

It’s now mainly a record of my PhD time, although I add to it infrequently. It has moved from being a read/write space to a read space. Not just for me – I point my doctoral students at it, and I have added posts on literature reviews and methodology so that I have advice I can point people to.

However, that brings me to the risks of institutional blogs. The university IT department makes the reasonable points that ‘Maintaining inactive blogs uses limited IT resources which are needed for more urgent work. They are also a security risk because any compromise is unlikely to be noticed.’

This one is currently scheduled for deletion because I haven’t posted to it for a couple of years. That’s not too bad but I noticed another of my OU blogs, which I authored with someone else, was recently deleted without warning. My co-author was the named lead, she has left the university, so no warning came and all that material is gone, including one blog post on viva questions that was very frequently read, referenced, and listened to.

Meanwhile, my external blogs on WordPress are there for me as sources of reference. They’ll survive once I leave the University.  This one, though, will eventually be gone. We hear a lot about the dangers of putting things online where they’ll be around for ever. We hear less about the dangers of putting things online where they could be swept away without notice. So much information, so many reference sources, swept away behind us.

Rumpus research

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Research question: ‘In what ways is the Covid-19 pandemic changing understandings of the relationships between learning and fun?’

A limited case study of a research group in a UK university. We expect our findings to have implications beyond that group.

Data collection using epistolary interviews (via email – one question per email, enabling thoughtful responses that can build over time) with everyone in the research group who wants to take part. Participation is voluntary and participants can drop out at any time.

Questions for epistolary interviews:

  • What have been your main experiences of learning and teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • What have been your main experiences of fun during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • How has learning and teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How have you experienced fun changing (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How has your understanding of the relationship between fun and learning/teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • In what ways (if any) do you think the relationship between learning and fun will change after the Covid-19 pandemic?

Method:

According to Yin (who I like following for case study research because he has a clear structure to work to) there are five important components of case study design.

  1. Five components of a case-study research design are particularly important
  2. Its questions (see above)
  3. Its propositions, if any (Prop 1- there is a relationship between learning and fun. Prop 2 – this relationship will be highlighted during the pandemic Prop 3- this relationship may be changed by the pandemic and some of these changes can be foreseen)
  4. Its unit(s) of analysis (individual members of the research group)
  5. The logic linking the data to the propositions (data are collected from people who have reflected on the relationship between learning and fun and who have thought deeply by what is meant by fun and by learning. Also we engage in fun and learning. Also we are influenced by the pandemic)
  6. The criteria for interpreting the findings (thematic analysis to support explanation building, themes drawn from the data but also compared with existing frameworks of fun that were covered in our frameworks of fun paper. Interpretations are originally drawn together by one or two of us but are checked against the understandings of all participants. This is a reflexive case study and this phase of comparing understandings will enrich the analysis)

 

Resurrection

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I thought it made sense to end this blog about being a research student with my graduation ceremony.

And I started other blogs. Lots of other blogs. (Partly because I was working on a blogging project that involved setting up lots of blogs for other people.)

But the official blog is too official, and the joint blog is too focused, and the analytics blog has a set purpose, and the enquiry blogs are project-oriented and usually not my own and I’m using my Tumblr to support a one-screenshot-a-day project. So my notes on conferences and workshops languish in Word documents on my desktop, no use to me or to anyone.

So I’m returning to this first blog, to find out if there’s still life in it.

Why reviewers/editors reject articles

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Notes from a workshop on ‘Writing for peer-reviewed journals’ run by Pat Thomson.

Reasons why reviewers and editors say they reject articles:

  • Lack of focus – saying everything, focusing on nothing, cramming too much in one article
  • Not locating the contribution and the position – for a particular audience, in relation to wider debates. the specific conversation int his journal
  • Poor organisation – not guiding the reader, poor headings, not enough signposts, too many signposts
  • Failing to convince the reader – does not adequately deal with the methodology
  • Not significant – too local, done a lot, doesn’t add anything
  • Sounding like a n00b rather than an equal – assumes significance, sounds tentative, overclaims

Writing for publication

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Researchers write all the time, writing is the means through which we work on and work out our ideas. We don’t just write up – we have not found a transparent truth which we then just put into words. Writing is a representation – we make choices and what we choose to write is a situated approximation.

In writing an article we are advancing what we know and also producing a representation of it. We are not just producing a text, we are producing ourselves as scholars — we are doing identity work.

Rhetorically, we are producing persuasive texts that persuade the reader that what we have done is a contribution to knowledge. The genre of the journal article is an argument. Research writing is dialogic. There are internal conversations which invite readers to make meaning. Don’t make it like a laundry list. Invite the reader in to make meaning. Encourage readers to make associations with other conversations (mainly through references).

When looking at a journal, consider the editorial board. Would you like to meet them and have a conversation with them? Look at recent issues. Which conversations are going on? Do you want to engage with them? Why do people need to know about what you are writing about – this gives a method of selecting a journal. What is the readership and what do they already know? This helps to create a space for your article. Significance is so what and now what? What’s new? What’s different? What does this add to the conversation? Don’t let other scholars do all the talking in your article. Refer to them, but don’t be overpowered by them.

The strongest papers usually have one point to make. They make that point powerfully, with evidence, and they locate that point within the orevious literature.

Can you do an elevator pitch on your article?

Pitching your thesis

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Just watched a Ted Talk by David S Rose on producing a business pitch. Thought I could apply it to writing my thesis introduction.

So the intro should start like a rocket, grabbing readers’ attention, and then it should take a solid, steady upward path.

Start with a title, and then an attention-grabbing introduction. Give a quick overview of the thesis. Like the picture on a jigsaw box, this should help people make sense of the elements to come.

Explain how this is interesting to lots of people – in my case that is how is this interesting to educational researchers and educational practitioners. Give an example. Show how this work can be taken forward and who would be interested in taking it forward.

Then validate it in terms of others, so fit it into the literature and what others have done. Reference things that the audience can relate to. This provides validation becuase the audience sees that things they have already accepted as reliable tie in with what you are saying. Explain what the competition is and why your work is special.

Then move to the conclusion, which is interesting and exciting.

Along the way: don’t include anything that isn’t true, don’t interrupt your audience’s flow by including anything they don’t understand, don’t have any internal inconsistencies and don’t include typos, error or stupid mistakes.

Dating Plato

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Sometimes citations drive me crazy. I’m just correcting one

Plato, & Emlyn-Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2005). Early Socratic Dialogues. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot several things wrong with this citation, as my supervisors did. You may have noticed that Emlyn Hughes was probably an unlikely editor of classical philosophy. However, that example of my mind wandering aside, it still doesn’t look good.

First, there’s the way that EndNote won’t allow me an author to an edited book. So either Plato becomes an editor, or Chris Emlyn-Jones (as he is more accurately styled) becomes an author. The other option is that I remember to correct this manually at the last minute, without giving EndNote a chance to change it.

And then there’s the date. The implication that Plato wrote up the early Socratic dialogues in 2005 is clearly crazy. On the other hand, (2005 / c300BCE) also looks completely wrong. 2005 is probably the accepted way of doing this sort of citation. But I’m not really citing the individual edition; I’m connecting asynchronous dialogue to a long tradition of educational dialogue, which doesn’t work if I only go back three years.

And don’t even start me on the subject of citing and dating Vygotsky…

Reconsidering

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Now that I’m planning out the final (well, hopefully final) version of my analysis chapters, I’m going back over all my notes and checking I haven’t msised anything out. I’m now square-eyed through checking out my last three years of blog entries. Phew.

I think I need to take a break before I start going back over the minutes of my last 60 supervision meetings!

It sounds boring – but it’s very helfpul, because it provides me an overview of the past three years – of where I got ideas from, of the ideas I’d forgotten, and of the ideas that make more sense as I return to them from a different perspective.