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.....)

after thoughts

ok so a few other things to consider

a pro
- it can be a way of doing an automatice thematic analysis - set up a new blog for each theme - even better in forums

other thoughts - where does link to existing theory - links to the reflexive work of etherington, general stuff about keeping a research journal etc etc

just wanted to keep a note of that

T

winding up

A quick entry but an entry all the same

in several weeks time i have to present at a research conference abou thte merits of using blogging as a research tool. So to try and bring together some of my ideas i thought well i'll attempt to blog them and then do a quick thematic analysis of it. Needless to say this is all a very embyonic idea at the moment.

Sohere's a quick start of some pros and cons

pros
- it's a good place to journal and capture thoughts/reflective space
- technological benefits - adding pictures, hyper links etc
- no need to transcribe!!
- others can contibute - could become like a focus group
- congruent with techy studies

cons
- propaganda - who is the blog for - do you censor/edit etc. This seems a major difference to a paper journal (in some ways anyhow)
- linked to the above - the lack of privacy (although i refer to the question posted before that gufrun proved wrong - 'does anybody actually read this?')
- waiting for the pc to wake up - i would never turn my pc on just to blog at the moment
- it's not for those who aren't very techy

i'm sure there are loads more but i'll add themas i think of them

T

#2

ok - i thought i should add to this.

this is kind of my own thematic analysis of thoughts as we go on. i state this with the meaning that i am rambling on specifically about blogging here and about other stuff in my other blog.

Some thoughts about blogging - firstly i have found a number of good articles about the process - needless to say i have found them and not yet read them!!! that's the next step.

I am pretty sure that no-one will read these posting which raises an issue about what a blog is - and when does a blog become a focus group or focussed discussion???? One good thing about thiking that no-one reads it - i'm sure i can probably check that somewhere- is that i can be free in what i write - if no-one reads it then no-one can get offended or try and sue me. But then again maybe i'll keep it tame anyway. As a young proffessional you don't want to piss too many people off - i'll wait until i'm established enough to do that.

Do i enjoy blogging - not really, although i've been enjoying typing this entry coz it's mainly a ramble it's not the same as scribbling things down and being able to doodle at the end of the page. Maybe i haven't really got into it yet - for instance i'm not really feeling inspired to put any piccys on here - although maybe that's also part of thinking that no-one i going to read it.

i come back round to what is a blog? is it useful as a research tool and when this thing says it's having difficulty connecting to the host does it mean that when i publish it, it will be lost - only one way to find out

Blog 1

This is the second blog that I've created for the purposes of my PhD research - the purpose of this one is to try and focus any musings that I may have (or others may have about the use of blogs within research). I'm gonna write anything more than that today but at least it's a start.

If you do have any thoughts please feel free to join in a discussion.