Category Archives: Things to remember

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.

Scrum management framework

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With its scrums, sprints and stories, Scrum Management always sounds intriguing. I’ve been involved with several teams who have either used this system knowingly, or have employed elements from it. However, I’ve never seen the process formalised until I spotted it in the January 2015 edition of Wired magazine (where they had compressed a version of Jeff Sutherland’s book). Wikipedia tells me that this style of software development emerged in 1986 – so I guess I’ve been slow in investigating the approach.

Wired describes it as a seven-step process:

1. Small  teams. These should include the product owner, who has the vision and decides on the order in which things should be done, and the scrum master who facilitates communication and removes obstacles.

2. Tell stories. Each new features should be associated with a short story about the user and why the feature will add value for the user.

3. Assign effort points. Compare the stories and give them points for effort involved (or T-shirt sizes: small, medium, large and extra large).

4. Prioritise features. Each sprint should end with something that can be demoed, so make the chunks of work small enough to fit into a sprint.

5. Sprint. A sprint should be 1-4 weeks long – long enough to deal with a set amount of effort points.

6. Scrum. A 15-minute meeting every morning, standing up, so you’re not tempted to settle in. Three questions. What did you do yesterday to help finish the sprint? What will you do today to help finish the sprint? What obstacles need to be overcome?

7. Sprint review. At the end of the sprint the team meets to discuss what has been achieved, and to improve working practices for the next sprint.

 

I’m back!

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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.

Gaming and learning

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Games are important when building communities. They help to develop trust and an understanding of each other’s skills and personalities.

In terms of language, wordplay helps us to establish register – to work out what we mean and double mean when we use language. Can we create online community without the use of word games?

Note to self – this begins to pull together work on humour within Schome Park and the work on cohesive ties and register in the same setting. Humour is a way of testing out meanings, and of establishing shared reference points.

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

The Bad Supervision Guide

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(Originally from Tony Winefield, University of South Australia. Came to me via an OU research degree supervisor workshop.)

Bad supervision, like any other skill can be acquired and developed with practice. Here are six simple rules to follow:

  1. Be inaccessible.
  2. Don’t return written work because you are ‘too busy’ to read it.
  3. Humiliate and belittle your students with savage, brutal and unfair criticism
  4. Alternatively, treate your PhD students as unpaid research assistants.
  5. Offer bad advice. For example: suggest an inappropriate topic, recommend research methods that have poor relibaility or validity, recommend inappropriate mthods for analysing results, allow your student submit without doing enough research, encourage your student to do far too much work, discourage your student from publishing prior to submission
  6. Choose bad examiners.

Journal impact

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I’ve spent the day looking at the impact factor of various journals.

The ISI Web of Knowledge lists 1985 social science journals (according to a workshop I attended recently, only about 15% of education journals are in ISI). The ‘Annual Review of Psychology’ comes in top for 2008, with an annual impact factor of 16.217.

The impact factor is obtained by looking at all articles in the journal over the last two years (2006-7), and all citations of those articles in 2008. Divide the citations by the article and you get the impact factor. So if, on average, every article was cited once in 2008, you get an impact factor of 1. If every article was cited twice, you get an impact factor of 2. If only half your articles were cited, you get 0.5.

Of the social science journals that are listed (and many of them are not), 1685 have impact scores of less than two. On the bright side, there are 300 journals out there where your article will, on average, be cited twice a year. I’m assuming that this means it will be cited in one of the 1985 journals listed in the social science section of the ISI web of science – but I can’t find that information on the site.

Social science, though, is a broad field. Educational technology journals in which I am likely to publish tend to attract fewer than two citations per article. ‘Computers & Education’ is the honourable exception, It comes in at 244 on the list, with an impact factor of 2.19. I’d be better off becoming an expert in psychology, psychology or marketing. Education doesn’t really make it into the list until no 75, with the US Journal ‘Educational Psychologist’.

Does it matter? It does in two ways. First, the REF will be looking at impact – so we are increasingly being encouraged to go for quality, not quantity. Don’t just publish; publish in the top-rated journals. Second, I like to think that my work could/will have impact. I’m not convinced that the best way to achieve that impact is through journals (two citations a year may not be as good as five links in a blog or ten retweets on an education list). However, given that my career prospects rest, in part, on my publication record, it makes sense to prioritise the journals with the most impact.

So, I’ve sketched out some potential articles and where I might publish them. The list is significantly different from the one I had this morning when I started looking at impact factors. I may not end up writing these articles – I may not end up publishing what I write in these journals – but their impact rating is definitely affecting my thinking about what and where to publish.

Applied Linguistics (2.22)
Building knowledge in the short term
Computers and Ed (2.19)
Methodology paper
JCMC (1.9)
Building knowledge in the long term
Discourse Studies (1.16)
Avoiding disputational talk
JCAL (1.06)
Interaction on distance-learning courses
BJET (1.04)
SL paper
Improving Schools
School Visions
Learning, Media and Technology
Young users of Web 2.0
JIME
Epistolary interviews – research ethics