Research
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Your career is a research project
I must confess, I have a mild warning klaxon that sounds when I see “action research” in a thesis. This is not to say it isn’t a valid methodology, indeed the only way to conduct some research, but it’s one of those fashionable terms that people apply rather loosely. If in doubt, call it action research. That thing you did where you gave them a different text book one year? Action research. But this isn’t a rant against lazy methodology terminology, as I am now going to co-opt the term for my own use. Rather it is to say that ideally academics should view their own careers as an action…
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Open researcher open course
Led by Beck Pitt, the OER Research Hub has developed an open course (don’t use the M word) on P2P University on being an open researcher. It is four weeks long, although you can study it anytime and it’s all available at once. The weeks cover: Open research Ethics in the open Open dissemination Reflecting on open It’s based on our experience of running the OER Research project as an open project. There are a number of interesting things that happen when you try to operate in the open. For instance, what ethical considerations are there to releasing data? What communication methods are most effective? The course explores these, using…
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Art of Guerrilla Research workshop
On Monday I ran a workshop with Tony Hirst on the Art of Guerrilla Research. This was a vague idea I'd floated a while back, and Rhona Sharpe of ELESIG got in touch, asking if I could run one of their masterclass workshops on it. This was a good opportunity to think through the idea with others. With tongue a bit in cheek I proposed a manifesto for Guerrilla Research which was: It can be done by one or two researchers and does not require a team It relies on existing open data, information and tools It is fairly quick to realise It is disseminated via blogs and social media…
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Open research ethics – the puppy killer scenario
Yesterday I ran a workshop called "The Art of Guerrilla Research" for ELESIG, along with Tony Hirst. I'll blog it later but basically it was about what sort of research can you do without permission and funding, eg asking questions of open data (hence Tony describing the things he does). One issue that was raised a few times was that of the ethics of it. The assumption has long been that anything openly available is fair game. So for instance there is a lot of research that uses travel blogs as its data source, and they don't require the permission of these people to analyse them or interpret them. In…
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Design responses to MOOC completion rates
Well, my previous post on data for MOOC completion rates caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter. It was interpreted by some as saying "ONLY completion rates matter". And also of not taking into account other factors such as what learners who don't complete get from a MOOC. That seems rather like criticising Alien for not being a rom-com to my mind – they're doing different things. This research was showing one aspect with the quantitative data available. It is part of a bigger picture which ethnographic studies, surveys and more data analysis will complete. It wasn't attempting to be the full stop on MOOC research. Anyway, here is…
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Completion data for MOOCs
As I mentioned in the previous post, I am doing some Gates funded research on MOOCs. My part was learning design analysis, while Katy Jordan has been looking at factors influencing completion rates. All this work is Katy's, I take no credit for it. She would blog it, but is about to have her first baby any day now, and strangely that has taken priority over blogging about MOOCs, so she said I could blog it on her behalf. There will be a paper that details the full results and methodology, so I'm just giving some highlights here. Katy collected completion data from 221 different MOOCs. The range was limited…
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The iceland of Dallas
<Dallas deathstar in the snow – this may, or may not, be a metaphor> I was at the MOOC research initiative conference in Dallas, Texas last week. As Jim and others have reported, we got caught in icemageddon, but that's a whole other (war) story. I'll be doing a few posts about the conference. It was a fantastic meeting, well done George Siemens, Amy Collier and Tanya Joosten for putting it together. I got to have some great conversations, and meet people I've know online for years. Which is by way of apology for my first post being a bit negative. This one concerns one aspect of the conference…
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The art of guerrilla research
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/5981013497/> In my presentations on digital scholarship I often make the claim that we have the opportunity to rethink the form that research takes. We are accustomed in academia to thinking of research as being of a certain 'size'. Usually this means it is funded research or something with a traditional output (research paper or book). But digital, networked technologies allow us different ways of approaching research. As I am forever saying, this is not to say they supplant the existing methods, or are superior to them, just that we have a richer mix of options now. I've started calling the 'just do it' approach 'guerrilla research'. This term has…
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What do all these numbers mean?
<image – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmorgan8186/5946796450/> Bloggers, or anyone who maintains an online profile, have an ambiguous relationship with visitor stats and data. On the one hand we like to dismiss them as meaningless, but then secretly feel chuffed when we can outscore someone. I’ve tried to promote them as one way of measuring impact, but with the caveat that context is important. For instance, if you’re a blogger in a relatively obscure area, such as Barry Town football club, then your range is limited and unlikely to compare in absolute numbers with, say, a blog reviewing Apple products. I recently passed 300,000 views on this blog, over about 700 posts – that’s not…
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The random REF
<Image from gringer http://www.flickr.com/photos/gringer/5096129532/> As a senior member of staff (I know, how did that happen?), part of my duties currently include reading papers for the UK research assessment exercise, the REF. I've moaned about how this reinforces traditional publication models previously. This is a more general moan. I think the REF has muddled objectives. It aims to make academics accountable to some extent, but primarily acts as a means of allocating research funds. It may have some secondary aims, or you could classify these as indirect consequences, such as reinforcing the position of the main publishers and maintaining the status of Russell Group universities. When you have multiple objectives the…
