Rebecca's Research Blog

Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog.

This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an organisation.

Within Twitter you can:

• Share links
• Collaborate
• Share blogs and news
• Crowdsource
• Backchannel
• Find out what’s happening
• Chat

Tweeting makes your job bigger and smarter and faster.

With Google you have to do the searching, but with Twitter the information comes to you, and you have the opportunity to dip into other people’s communities. If you do ask questions you may get a lot of responses, and those responses are likely to have authority.

An exceedingly late write-up of a talk I went to on Moshi Monsters at Handheld Learning earlier this year.

At that point, Moshi had seven million registered users and was adding over a million a month. About a third of these were based in the UK, a third in the US and a third in the rest of the world. Seventy percent were female. Most were playing for free – and almost a million items were being sold (for in-game currency) in the Moshi shops.

The focus is on the social side – the monsters are pets rater than avatars.

The subscription model works well for young children, as their parents are paying. Micropayments work better for teens, who are often paying for themsleves, sometimes via their phones.

Moshi doesn’t have real-time chat like Club Penguin and Habbo. This means that messages can be approved before they appear on the site.

Another example of a successful site for this age group is Poptropica, which has over 70 million sign-ups.

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

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?

I’ve just been to a presentation by our pro vice chancellor, Brigid Heywood, on the REF that will be used to assess our research over the next few years. Although the REF takes place in 2013, all applications must be in at some point in 2012 – so anything we want included needs to be written in the next year in order to allow time for publication.

Key words in the REF are excellence, impact, transformation, portfolio and engagement.

Excellence The REF replaces the Research Assessment Exercise, which was concerned with quality. Now we move beyond quality to excellence. Not only must we be excellent – we must also demonstrate that we are excellent. And we can’t be excellent in isolation – because the REF is about working in a unit, and is about the sustained performance of the group. The focus is on individual excllence within a group.

Impact will be assessed through a case-study approach and will be concerned with the extent to which our group builds on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life. Impact is not about impact within the university or on our students – it has to be wider than this.

Transformation Impact will be linked to reach (how widely the impacts have been felt) and to significance (how transformative the impacts have been).

Portfolio Each unit needs to have a portfolio of high-quality, original and rigorous research. This should demonstrate that we have shared our findings effectively with a range of audiences. It should also demonstrate that we build effectively on excellent research through a range of activity that leads to benefits to the economy and to society. We must offer a high-quality, forward-looking research environment. We must provide evidence of significant contributions to the sustainability and the viability of the research base – and we must actually be sustainable, not just planning to be sustainable.

Engagement is very important – and appears on every page of the document.

Portfolio

Engagement

Kieron’s summary of the benefits offered by our current book proposal.

Links associated with regrading of research fellows.

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/Researchassociates_17.6.09_FINAL.doc

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/Appendix_1_Comparative_Summary_280509.doc

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/OU85_Res_Asst_GradeAC1.doc

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/Research_Associate_28.5.09.doc

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/Research_Fellow_28.5.09.doc

http://intranet.open.ac.uk/human-resources/research_associates/OU88_Snr_Res_Fellow_GradeAC4.doc

Note intranet must be open when clicking on links

Matthew McFall of Nottingham University spoke at ALT-C 2009 about learning with wonder for wonderful learning.

His key words for ways into wonder included mirrors, puzzles, magic, clews (the thread Perseus used to help him through the Minotaur’s labyrinth), interest, mercury and enchantment.

His boxes of delight are used to collect conceptions of wonder, to collect wondrous things, to share wonder with others, to support a quest for wonder and to help to build a wonder wall.

Liveblogging at ALT-C.

Martin Bean’s title is ‘A journey in innovation’. This refers both to his journey to this point and to the journey involved in educational innovation. We at ALT-C are custodians of a small but important part of this journey.

Education can no longer be regarded as  a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it is a lifelong experience. It is no longer about the 18-year-old cohort getting a one-off experience and then going on to prosper

It is increasingly an international experience. 2.5 million students are currently studying outside their home country.

If we stick with bricks and mortar, the world cannot supply enough HE places to satisfy demand. We need to move to clicks and mortar.

Tax-funded HE worldwide is in retreat mode. The private sector is the fastest growing sector of higher education. The private sector’s  motivation is very difficult to that of traditional universities. It is concerned with shareholder value, not necessarily with social justice.

We need to educate citizens for new types of work. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics(STEM) are key if we are to have a competitive workforce.

Sustainability is also increasingly important. One of the roles of HE is to make people feel uncomfortable in order to bring about the sort of change that is necessary.

Our collective challenge is to transform information into meaningful knowledge.

Currently, school is like being on an aeroplane. You sit down for a long period of time, put your trust in someone at the front – and hand over all your electronic devices.

We need to blend digital lifestyles and digital workstyles. Learning in the workplace needs to becomes integral because people can’t stop their lives in order to get more education. Higher education must remove artificial barriers between formal and informal learning and must become more learner centred. We need to nurture powerful communities of learning. We need to enable relevant, personalised, engaging learning. We need to build agile, efficient and connected learning systems.This is more about the people and the process than about the technology. We spend all our time thinking about hardware and software and very little time thinking about brainware.

The Internet is somewhere we can extend our brand and be visually attractive. We must recognise that we have to produce a whole new generation of engaging, innovative content. The Internet allows us to reach out to users where they live. Over 50% of the people who download Open University material from iTunesU are based outside the UK. This is a very cost effective way of reaching out to people.

SocialLearn can be the place where social networking meets education.

My thesis now has many pictures embedded within it – and my pen drive is full of pictures entitled things like ‘pseudonymise this’ and ‘C2 pic7’ in various formats. The question is, which of the many versions hidden in my different folders are the versions I am supposed to be working with?

I’ve just devoted half an hour to trying to persuade Word to tell me where I got the individual pictures from. I know it knows – but it’s very unwilling to tell me.

The solutions I’ve come up with – and it works, but it’s not as neat as it could be – is to select ‘Save As’ and to save the entire file as a web page. Then I reopen the file in Firefox, select the ‘View source code’ option and it tells me what the picture is called. (See – I knew Word knew). It’s then a simple matter to search for it. (Well, a simple matter on the Mac. PCs always seem to find searching a very tricky process unless they’re helped out by something like Google Desktop.)