The Panel!!

OK - i don't have much to say tonight. Ithink all of my musings are more general and should be kept to my more general blog. This is one of the problems with doing thematic kinda blogging. You fragment yourself and your thoughts and forget the fact that things actually interweave.

mmm - maybe this is my being influenced by all of the panel stuff. I have put together something that is very different from before and i don't know if that was a good idea. It's definately got the academicness to it but does it have the congruence with what i'm actually doing. In many ways this doesn't matter because I can just get on and do what i want anyhow, but presently i have no idea what will happen with the proposal.

Tomorrow i have a meeting with kooth who are the people i am doing my research with. Actually that's interesting.... I create this proposal and I don't mention the blogging. I just mention what people will want to hear and that sounds thorough. I know this is playing the game but i think it a) states where i feel that others see blogging and b) highlights that i'm a little unsure about blogging myself. I feel that this will be helpful as it appears as if it will be useful, but will it fit into my phd. If it does or doesn't it will still be happening - i guess - unless i get bored.

Time to go and get distracted by the football on the telly. Later this week I will begin to unpack this whole blogging thing and see what i have said.

Reflections on previous blogs

Ok - so an area that i have forgotten to mention is the previous blog that I created. So here i will reflect a little upon the process of creating that.

firstly - choosing a name!!! how do you do this, what is the focus going to be. Do you create something catchy and attractive, or something that sums up exactly what it is? I guess there is something abou the motivation for creating the blog in the first place.

secondly - therapy? is blogging similar to writing therapy? well inevitably there are overlaps. My experience is that it's quite therapeutic. Now would be a great time to have a rant abou the phd panel process that they have at manchester, but i won't go there this time.

thirdly - task focussed blogging - all of my blogs have been set up with a particualr purpose in mind - eg this one to reflect upon blogging. This seems different than more creative blogs, but maybe there's a big fuzzy line between them.

forthly - do you add pictures/can you add pictures . I haven't quite worked out where pictures go here. MSN had a good picture book facility that gave a nice visual element to the blog. So far all i've put here is a pic of myself. I guess this is something abou thte type of space that you're using.

fifthly - using blogging in my previous research didn't really inspire me a great deal. In fact the idea of doing it proved much more entertatining than doing it!!! Also i never really found the data that i generated by doing it to be particularly useful.....well not in comparison to that generated using forums anyhow. In contrast doing this seems at least a little useful.

I'm sure is more to say but it's sunny outside - i'll try and capture more thoughts later - in fact there's one - wireless access in parks may make blogging more appertising on sunny days. Although i guess you can use blackberries and stuff like that already if you want to. Ahha - therefore it's kinda a minority technology, and only really available to those with some computer knowhow.

:)

thinking allowed?

k so another few thoughts on using blogging as a research tool.

cons
techy issues - what happens if 'blogger.com' doesn't let you into the website - maybe you forget your password
typing speed!!!

i saw a newspaper ages ago sugesting that one blog is created every second - this sounds like a good place to start with a presentation!!!

cons#2
for me, i type here pretty much as i would scribble in a journal - what about those who read it - is this really accessible. True it fits with literary traditions such the Keroacian stream of consciousness but I ain't no Kerouac :).
spelling mistakes - again linked to the accesibility side of things

mmm - it's difficult to think of positives today. I'm note sure why coz i am actually finding blogging is proving pretty useful at the moment. A space to concentrate the mind on a specific topic. So there's a positive.
Also - hypertextuality works too (I may have mentionned that before) - however i'm presently beginning to change the links down the side of this blog to include useful resources (websites, links to papers and other blogs). There's a positive that I have begun to encounter in a small way - Community. Even though I have only had one posting from Gudrun (hello there) it has give us a common goal. Maybe if there were more people involved in this it would become kinda addictive (here i think of my friend who blogs all the time and has loads of people reading his postings). mmm maybe there's something there.

staty posted for more meandering musings (now i'm wondering who should stay posted, me, gudrun, the imaginary audience.....)