Group items tagged

"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 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

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.

"As a time management life coach, I've found that many of my clients have a dread of finishing that they keep hidden away-hoping that no one will ever notice that they get a lot of little things done while never quite completing the really important stuff. Whether it's due to a rabid perfectionism, an aversion to criticism, or just an inability to maintain enthusiasm for the long haul, we all have challenges and fears we must overcome to produce work that matters. But pretending they don't exist won't get us anywhere. Here's a guide to diagnosing and treating what I've found to be four of the most common barriers to completion:"

Ph.D. students are particularly prone to some of these behaviours, I think, so perhaps this will help someone.

The nature and structure of scientific theories, Moulines, 2010

Thanks for posting this Heather, I found it useful in clarifying what is/isnt theory, and differentiating between theories that get referred to as weak or strong