I managed to lock myself out of this blog for over a year. First I forgot my password – then I forgot that I had created an in-box rule in Outlook that automatically junked any messages from my blog (I kept getting messages about moderating spam). So my password resets have all been vanishing into the ether.
Today I set a new in-box rule and spotted/deleted the old one. I’m back in.
First action – delete more than 10,000 spam comments that have arrived on the site while I have been away.
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.
Advantages of a blogged research journal
Hyperlinks Link your research blogs to useful information sources
Personalisation Use emoticons and images to personalise entries
Categories and Search Find your notes quickly and efficiently
Blogroll, RSS feeds, trackbacks and permalinks Link to other researchers.
Ideas for a blogged research journal
Community Posts Collaborate and link with other academics.
Reflective Posts Discuss ideas, progress, methods, theory and academic writing.
Environmental Posts Share experience of the research environment.
Memos Things to do and remember; links and references.
Emotive Posts share how you feel about your research.
Blogging-related Posts Discuss blogging…
A good blog post on why academics should blog.
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.
I wanted to blog about the EARLI conference in my ‘research essentials’ blog but I seem to have misremembered the password and I haven’t got any note of it on this computer. Not much point to having a blog I can’t access.
OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work.
Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)
Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice…
He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂 ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.
There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.
The paper focuses on three areas:
1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.
I can usually blog at the drop of a hat. It’s a great displacement activity, which I can just about claim is work. So why have I been sitting here all day, failing to blog about the sessions I went to at the CAL conference?
A CAL blog to check out http://speedchange.blogspot.com/
Also, see Gill’s blog in the blog roll.
Jin Tan presented a poster on blogging, so I’ll look out for CAL comments on her blog http://jin-thoughts.blogspot.com/
I deleted some graphically uninteresting presentation pics from my Flickr account last night. I’d blogged them here, and now I see that they are gone. I’d vaguely assumed that they were exported into the blog, but now I see that the blog was picking them up from Flickr. Anyway, that’s why (if anyone’s interested) there are now holes in my blog.