Phdchat

"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?

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.

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!

Useful and challenging overview from David Mellor. Interesting points on critical theory.

Online survey tool (similar to surveymonkey) but allowing for 200 participants in the free package!

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

Really interesting slides that explore differing approaches to the Grounded Theory method

This looks like one for those of us who can't work out what we're doing :-) Actually, it is more useful than that and I think worth a read.

good lit review on communities of practice

useful summary of CHAT

Links to lots of stuff Becker has written, etc.

Attempts to combine the strengths of 3 orientations (symbolic interaction, exchange theory, and structural functionalism) in accounting for social interaction to generate a framework for the analysis of interaction. The paper draws heavily on the concept of structurally patterned resources both for constructing meanings and facilitating exchange. These processes provide the concrete rooting of structure itself. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

"Your librarian tries to ensure that what goes on the shelves is authoritative, but it goes without saying that you will be much more of an expert in some aspects of your field. This means you have to accept some of the responsibility for checking out your sources. Are they fit for purpose? Postgraduates should think about authority too. When you're researching a subject, you need to be sure that your sources are authoritative. This is of paramount importance when you come to write your literature review or to cite references in the body of your thesis."

"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. "

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:

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