What I got today

It seems I need to learn more about time management. Today not write down my research report too much, not high efficiency.

This is an article about the informal learning and blogs, knowledge management.

“What Is the Most Effective Informal Learning Technology?”

This thesis “Weblogs and the Technology Lifecycle: Context, Grrk-Chic and Personal community” is quite good, from a technology perspective to view blogging. Like Milne’s words “technology is an ‘effect’ of social change, not a cause.”

Also this: “Metacognition refers to the ability to think about thinking – the art of thinking… Metacognition is about the developing students’ own self-awareness as learners and empowering them to manage their own development as learners – learning how to learn… students who develop their metacognitive skills are better able to transfer learning that takes place in one knowledge domain to other domain.” From book «Deep Learning for a Digital Age» by Van B. Weigel (2002, p.7).

Bloggers, full-time bloggers

I feel that I was a bit wrong, thought most people just use blogs as a tool for some personal reasons. Either store their own pictures and experiences or develop ideas, few people are addicted to blogging so much. Blogging is a not very important thing and people blog when they have time. I thought that they blog for memorising something as well as expecting to find audiences. But most of time, they are self-discourse.

However, except news blogs or particular cooperative blogs, full-time bloggers have emerged, such as liewcf.com, ProBlogger and Wendy Cheng, Full-Time Blogging. I think they are using weblogs as Internet marketing tools and they are really wallowing in blogging.

Hah, come across this entry “Why blogging is not a waste of time...”.

Understanding my research

When conducting the research, I found it is not always as satisfied as what I designed. I was struggling with the question “what will happen next?” Supervisor suggested me to read the data again and again, and think. I don’t know if I have spent too much time on thinking rather than writing. Got the following useful suggestions, which presented in Dr. Jens J. Hansen’s article “On developing an understanding of approaches to research”:

• Researchers need to address the imperative of making sense of what is known and simultaneously they must devise, with some degree of certainty, ways of establishing what is not yet known.
• Determining which research tools and investigation procedures will be deployed before the research context, rationale and aims have been elucidated, may lead to an inappropriate choice of methodologies and methods.
• It was recognised by scientists that you cannot measure what is going on inside peoples’ minds. Thus, the approach was to interpret what people said about what they mainly felt (opinion) or remembered as actually having happened (critical instance).
• The point of a model is that it should serve as a useful heuristic for heightening awareness and thus the model should be seen as a tool for growing our understanding of the broad nature of research.
• Research is mainly about determining relative unambiguous investigation parameters and ensuring a mainly straight forward and clearly defined focus.
• Researchers should intentionally and systematically ponder what form the data gathered will take, and even more importantly, they need to determine precisely what they will do with the data.

A qualitative research source

Come across this for qualitative research: QualPage: resources for qualitative research

Insights into blog research

“A blog is more than a communication tool” was posted on Christopher D. Sessums’s weblog. There are many interesting entries on this weblog.

Blogging may become a habit for bloggers, another interesting point from "10 reasons why blogging is good for you" by M.C. Turgeon. But no findings reveal that blog readers feel that reading blogs is a habit.

A brief writing guide

The article “How to write a dissertation” is intent to help students in Computer Science, but it’s still interesting to read.

And some impressive things are:

• After great pain, a formal feeling comes. – Emily Dickinson
• The average PhD thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another. – Frank J. Dobie
• Avoid using “we were surprised to learn …” Even if you were, so what?
• Avoid using “show”, Used in the sense of “prove”. To “show” something, you need to provide a formal proof.
• Avoid using “today”, “modern times”. Today is tomorrow’s yesterday.

Research presentation

A colleague told me that they need to make presentation in their research group almost every month to display their research to date, such as what literatures they’ve reviewed, how the data collection is and what new findings emerge, etc. For me, that’s really a fantastic idea. As an international student, you can have opportunity to practice, the presentation skills as well as English, more important, to get different perspectives and even criticism to your research. It helps avoid researchers’ prejudice and makes them realise the research issues such as methods or technologies. Then at late stage, they won’t be worry about the defense of their research too much during the viva.

Unfortunately, I don’t have this kind of chance to tell people what is going on with my research. However, I’m always happy to communicate with colleagues and peers about my research, either face-to-face talk or email. So far, maintaining a research weblog is a means of making presentation (none sound). It may partly help me reduce the isolation feeling in the research.

Impact of weblogs, overstate or underrate?

If people do research on weblogs, I suppose they will ask “why do people like blogging?”, “Is it necessary to use weblogs?” and similar questions.

This is an interesting article that indicates the usage of weblogs as a personal research notebook (that is, a kind of personal research log management system). It includes the description of technical requirements and the developed system used to enable user to “blog anytime, anywhere”.

Although this piece of work Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication was posted on USC Annenberg Online Journalism website in 2004, it is still worthwhile of reading and to see how blogologists’ ideas about different issues in weblogs usage.

Data analysis starting

People normally put blogging as an inferior thing which should do in a day. Seldom of them will read back their weblogs everyday except that is their daily work or they have ample time or blogging addict. :o)

As too busy these months, I try not to forget my weblogs and put slight useful things here. After open coding, I face another challenge: to analyse data and make them meaningful and comprehensive.

May be these two sources are useful. Michael Larkin’s webpage, which provides resources for qualitative data analysis and psychology research, and an article Doing Qualitative Projects: Some Advice written by School of Psychology, University of Leeds.

Blog research sources

• Blog Basics includes descriptions of why blogging might good for higher education
• It is good to see the top blogger B.L. Ochman's posts: How I Keep Up With It All: My Top Blog Research Tools and Top Bloggers Share Their Essential Research Tools With You

Using ATLAS.ti for literature review research

A colleague popped in and asked me, "Do you use ATLAS.ti, is it helpful for your research?" I answered "Yes, so far it's ok. It's easy to learn and use. I'm just on the early stage, use it to store, code, manage data, relate them and now it's not huge chunk of information. It's ok. But I'm not sure if it's quite good for managing huge amount of data". "Can we use it for analysing literature reviews or things like that?", continued question.

Hmm, it's an interesting idea. I use ATLAS.ti to analyse interview data, direct and simple, because ATLAS.ti supports qualitative data (textual data, graphical data and audio data) analysis and is developed based on grounded theory. I don't have ample experience of using it. So far just 1 month. But if we change the perspective a bit, probably identify each review as a primary document, create each relevant review segment as a quotation, and develop each review point as a concept, etc... In my opinion, it could be useful for the particular research which is based on literature reviews and it also depends on how we use the software. Meanwhile, indeed there are critical arguments to ATLAS.ti and other software could be used. But if it is qualitative data analysis, we can try ATLAS.ti.

Links of blog phenomenon in education

• Blogging Across the Curriculum is a site maintained by Pattie Belle Hastings. It provides many useful links for people who are interested in the use of blogs in education.
• Universities weblog posts information or issues related to higher education.
• Weblogs in Higher Education is "devoted to understanding the best pedagogical and other uses of weblogs and wikis in higher education."
• 2005-2006 John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award: Call for Nominations.