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Tech Learning TL Advisor Blog and Ed Tech Ticker Blogs from TL Blog Staff - TechLearning.com Some alternative options to wordle

Using blogs as a diary in research

Thanks for this Bex, it's always good to get references to this sort of material. I have had a research blog since Nov 2008 and see it as a way to strengthen 'the researcher as research instrument' that is me. I wrote a guest post on thethesiswhisper.wordpress.com blog a couple of months ago on social media and the phd and there are a few more references in that. See http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/social-media-and-your-phd

Blog by a PhD student (not me).

Useful tips for making a webpage engaging and giving the right message from the off. Useful tips for research blogs!

Thanks Bex, to this i would add http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html people scan online in an F shape, so position whats there accordingly

Why the value of a PhD is much more than the salary you earn at the end of it!

I completely agree with this article - if you're doing a PhD just to get a bigger salary at the end of it then you're probably doing it for the wrong reasons!

I think the value of a PhD is "personal growth" and improvement (no matter how slushy that sounds). For me that's been the most noticeable thing and by far the best. Bex, I agree - I doubt the financial rewards (if any) would keep me going!

blog post on writing up that sounds like voice of experience - think might come in handy over the coming months

Can be interesting, complex, and experimental in themselves. Realities is part of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, based in the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Live at the University of Manchester. Here we find out what Realities Toolkits are, and give links and abstracts for a small selection of the resources. Text taken directly from an email sent by the Morgan Centre, to the 'postgrad' academic JISC email list:

The notion of researcher as research instrument is a central one to most qualitative inquiry. This is a blog and readings I posted after giving a presentation to the QI SIG at RMIT in May 2009.

Bex Hewett posted a link from this journal earlier on blog diaries. This is the home page. I've just got some useful information about using a case study from here (vol 3, issue 4). Useful journal! Thought it was worth posting again :-)

"I recently boiled down some of the advice I try to give students about how to carry out searches and formulate research questions, which I'll reproduce here. I start with the basic insight that I've picked up from Swarthmore's library staff, that the point where many students struggle in research is not with finding credible or authoritative sources once they've settled on a topic but with understanding what is researchable or knowable within the constraints of the assignment, the resources, the disciplinary framework and so on. I feel as if too many of my colleagues are still focused on the former issue rather than the latter one, still too worried that students aren't finding the "right" sources that have scholarly legitimacy in favor of Wikipedia or whatever they can find on as full-text at 2 a.m. I don't think this is a big issue both because I have a much higher opinion of Wikipedia and such than many of my colleagues and because I find that students actually have fairly good skills for finding properly authoritative sources and material. As long as they've gotten the research framed correctly at the outset, that is. So what I focus on is processes of discovery that students should use to find out what's known and knowable, how researchable a particular question is, what the shape or character of information about that question looks like, and how to make smart decisions about where to invest labor and time in developing a research assignment. "

Using Scrivener for academic writing, including how to use Scrivener to manage the literature review.

"So, my lessons for the year: You can't read everything You already know a lot Your ideas are interesting Research is fun Collaboration is a very, very good thing. Not bad for one year."

Lessons a Ph.D. student learned in their first year. Good read and good advice too.

"Editors of journals suggest that one of the major problems they see in submitted articles is a lack of focus. They observe that too many writers try to say 'everything', and this means that they end up saying 'nothing'." Common problems with journal papers related to lack of focus are described. How many are you guilty of?