My Research in Plain English

Inspired and encouraged by friends in the #phdchat twitter community, here is my attempt at explaining my research for my EdD in plain English (and it was more difficult than I thought!):

Teaching in Higher Education has changed a great deal over the years, partly to do with technological advances, and partly to do with Government initiatives to increase the percentage of people who go to university. More and more university courses make use of the technology on offer and are delivered in a blended (which is a combination of face-to-face and online delivery) or totally online delivery instead of the traditional campus based face-to-face teaching. Tutors are often expected to adapt to this new online teaching environment without very much training or support particularly on the teaching aspects rather than those just relating to the using the technologies. This raises challenges and anxieties for academic staff, who are often very confident and proficient face-to-face teachers, but feel overwhelmed by this new environment. My research involves trying to unpick what these challenges and anxieties really are and how we can best support staff in the transition to online teaching. I feel that time/workload issues and technological issues are often reported, and whilst I recognise that these are real issues for many, they can also often mask deeper issues to do with role, identity, power, insecurities and approaches to teaching. These are all things I would like to explore with my research.

25 Research Things Summary

On the whole I have really enjoyed taking part in the 25 Research Things, it introduced me to some new tools, some of which I will continue to use, others not so much, but it gave me the motivation, purpose and support to check them out, when I probably wouldn’t have got round to it otherwise.

I very much enjoyed reading other people’s blogs, seeing what their thoughts and experiences were of using the tools and seeing if they had discovered something different about them, without having the other blogs to read it would have been a lonely and much less interesting journey, and other people’s posts and comments on my blog really gave me the motivation to keep going with it and get to the end. I have got to know some new people who I hope we can keep in touch via Twitter etc, and they have really made the journey a lot more fun :).

Having said that I am glad it is the end – it has been really good, but it has been a lot more time-consuming then I originally thought, especially if you wanted to read other blogs as well. I thought it was very fast paced and I had used or had come across the majority of tools. To give people a bit more chance to explore the tools and realise the benefits, I think it may have been better to spread each week over 2 weeks, as it was amazing how quickly Monday morning came round each week, and I found once you moved onto the next set of tools, it was hard to keep persisting with the ones from previous weeks. Most of the tools really need time to explore the functionality, build a supportive network and realise the true benefits.

In terms of what I will carry on with – my favourite thing before and still is Twitter – I have already raved about it in my previous blog post, so I won’t go on about it much but I still can’t get over how useful it is and how much I get out of it. I think if there was one tool I would urge people to put a bit of time and effort into and build a network with – it is Twitter. My second favourite tool is Delicious, which I use very much in conjunction with Twitter, so was sad to see that it may disappear. In my blog post I talked about using Diigo instead, which I think is definitely worth exploring more. I think I will also use Mendeley a bit more, I think it integrates with more things now than when I originally tried it, so would like to keep up with it. I would very much like to do more with Google docs – again it is something I have dabbled with before, but would like to invest some more time exploring its potential. I also love SlideShare, Wikipedia, and Flickr, so will continue with these. I have learnt more about RSS Feeds and the image generators, both of which I will be using in the future.

Things I probably won’t explore more are Prezi due to the travel-sickness aspect and potential accessibility issues; the Book Thing, as I saw that are more of a leisure book readers thing than one for academic purposes; and MyExperiment and arts-humanities.net because I couldn’t find anything useful in my research area. I think I will dip into citeulike occasionally but not regularly.

Possible new Things to consider would be Dropbox and Diigo, perhaps Evernote?

So in summary the 25 Research Things has been time-consuming, fast paced and a lot of fun, but I have found a really useful course to take part in, I really liked the format and the support from the other participants, and I have achieved my goal of starting to blog more frequently – so thanks very much to all involved :).

Youtube

Youtube is fantastic, I love it. It is useful for teaching and learning and for social stuff as well. It is great for sharing funny and useful clips. Showing a youtube clip can be a very effective way of getting a teaching point over, and is far more interesting and different to the students being lectured at. I have favourited quite a few youtube clips in my delicious account. Here are a few of them and why I like them:

This one I like because it is a very clever way of showing the great potential of social media for marketing:

This is another one about the power of social media – the stats are amazing:

And finally – this one is worth watching if you haven’t seen it before – it is project about kids teaching themselves, just by being given a computer:

So youtube used well can provide an excellent teaching and learning tool, and gives practical help at the point of need. I am sure there are many youtube videos on topics connected with all of our research, so definitely one to keep referring back to.

Wikipedia

I like Wikipedia. I know the contents could be written by anyone and may not be 100% accurate, but I love the fact that it is continually evolving and that everyone can add to it and shape it. I think it has the potential to be a fantastic resource if people are happy to contribute their time and efforts for free in keeping it updated and as accurate as possible. I think the fast pace of change in today’s digital society means that any paper resources are usually outdated before they even go to press. If you look at journal articles – even though may are available online, the whole process from doing research, writing it up, getting it accepted (or not) etc means that it is often at least a year out of date if not a lot more. Wikipedia gives us the platform for instantly publishing research findings. I think students need to be aware of its limitations and be critical in what they read (as they should with any resource, print or electronic) but otherwise be encouraged to use and more importantly feel they can contribute to Wikipedia.

As my research is case study I thought I would look that up on wikipedia to see what it offers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_study_research. On the whole the information is academic and as far as I can tell accurate. They do seem to be  quite a few key authors of case study research missing, so may be it needs some editing and updating. Am I confident enough to take this on? Probably not :).  Iwould be worried about updating something that is not correct or altering the page of an expert who may get upset if I edit something. Is this how all students feel?

Analyse your Blog

Thanks to Andy for the link to analyse your blog (http://urlai.com/) – I thought it would be interesting (and a laugh) to see what it came up to for my 25-Research Things blog and this was the result:

I was slightly amused to see they think a male wrote this blog (only just though!) which made me wonder how they decide that – it is just the vocabulary used (and I didn’t mention perfume or make up once!) or colour scheme i.e. it is not pink :). The bit I did like a lot at first was the age bracket of the writer, as I fall into the next bracket above, until I started to think may be my writing style is immature :). The balance between personal and academic is probably right – it is probably more personal just because we are offering personal views on different tools, so bound to be less academic than other types of blogs. I am glad also my blog was predominantly happy. Anyway it was a bit of fun – so thanks Andy for passing it on 🙂

My Experiment and arts-humanities.net

I had a look at both these sites, however as my research is to do with education I found neither to be of massive use. The My Experiment looks like a really good idea but is very scientific, so not as useful to research in the social science field. In theory it is a great idea to create a virtulal research environment but I wonder how many people and particularly inexperienced or first time research students are willing and comfortable to share what they have found so far. I think they will be reluctant for two reasons: firstly due to the fact they feel like amateurs (I know I do!!), so will be worried about exposing their lack of knowledge in a particular field as well as to do with the research process itself. Secondly I think they will be worried about IP rights just because all doctorate level research is supposed to create new knowledge, I think they will be therefore nervous about putting any ideas out in cyberspace in case their research ideas are picked up and possibly developed by others. It is a shame really as research would develop a lot quicker and more accurately if people could collaborate and pool knowledge, share their findings, ideas and resources however doing a doctorate is a very personal and individual thing. I think until this is addressed research as a whole will continue to develop very slowly and individually. The arts-humanities.net resource looks really useful for those working in arts and humanites fields, it seems to have loads of really useful stuff in their but I found very little (on a quick browse) on educational research, so for me personally not as useful, (unless I have missed anything – please let me know if this is the case!). I do think it is amazing how many resources are out there that we are not aware of….

Alternative to Delicious

There have been lots of rumours on twitter that Yahoo are going to axe Delicious – which is one of our previous 25-research-things. This would be a massive shame as I love delicious and have collected over 1000 bookmarks over the last few years. It could be just a rumour as sometimes happens with twitter, but it does seem to be confirmed by various sources. They could also change their minds as there is a huge uproar and lots of ‘save delicious’ campaigns and petitions going round. However if it does turn out to be true an aternative you could use is Diigo. This offers the same bookmarking facility as delicious and other feaures as well such as highlighting and making notes on particular web pages. It also has the sharing and community aspects that delicious has. You can also import your delicous bookmarks to diigo – so I would suggest you do that as a backup whilst we see what happens to delicious. I have already done this – it did take overnight to import my 1000+ bookmarks but they have imported fine and kept all the tags as well which is good news. This is a link to how to import your boomarks from delicious to diigo

Online Image Generators

I love the Spell with Flickr – would be great for presentations. It is very clever, simple to  use and extremely effective 🙂

Also tried the Face your Magna – was fun creating an avatar – this is the best I could do:

I also tried the Book Cover Maker – you could have hours of fun with that… how about buying my new book:

Finally I thought I would search and try and find another online image generator that wasn’t on the list – I found cooltext which allows you to create a logo by specifiying the type of text, background, font style etc. Again great fun to play with:

 

Mashups – Tag Galaxy

This mashup combines two things we have looked at as part of the 25 Research Things – Flickr and tags. With Tag Galaxy you put an inital tag in and it finds images with that tag and looks for related tags, you can then specify more tags by clicking on the planets – each one being a related tag. Once you have selected the tags you want, click on the centre planet and it will pull in the first so many photos with those tags and put them on the planet. You can rotate the planet to see the photos at the back, and you can move onto the next set of photos. It is fairly fascinating to watch and play with :). Here is a screenshot of one set of tags – I chose Kenya, safari, wildlife and animals, it found 4799 photos on Flickr with all those tags and creating this collection of the first 232 photos:

Flickr

I really like Flickr, I already have an account and have uploaded some of my photos, but haven’t really got into the sharing aspect much. Not sure if that is selfish of me, but most of my photos have my kids in, so I want to protect their privacy. This photo above is one from my account from when we went to Kenya last year, and went on safari. We saw this baby elephant just roaming round on its own. The safari was awesome, and Kenya was a lovely country with really friendly people, I would love to go back some time 🙂

I have used Flickr to try to find images for presentations, and try to  use the Advanced Search to find the photos which are licensed under creative commons licences for re-use. I think Flickr is a great site for storing and sharing photos, and it is easy to use and you can make all or selected photos private so they are not available for others to see, or just able to be viewed by people you have said are friends and family. I have an app on  my mobile phone so that I can take photos from my mobile and upload them straight to Flickr.

Below are two photos I added to my Flickr acccount today that I took during the recent snow – I took one of myback garden and one out the front 🙂 .