Open Research Online and new blog

To pluck the fruit from the next tree, I'm looking for new opportunities and blogging them at http://carpediempostdoc.wordpress.com/.

Before I go, remember that I've uploaded my PhD thesis to the Open University's Open Research Online (ORO) repository.

Then continue here.

Academic blogging

The AOM conference included a session on using blogging as a tool for bridging research, teaching and practice, with speakers who'd used blogs in these various ways.

• Brayden G King
• Teppo Felin
• David Levy
• Karim R Lakhani
• Maxim Sytch

Maxim spoke first of how his university (Michigan) had worked for a year with the Washington Post hosting a blog site for the MBA class. The students had tasks to post and to comment on posts, not unlike what our OU students have been doing since 1996, but these were public postings, and members of the public could also join in. The blog became journals of participation, with 26 questions set by the academics and over 200 participants. Reading all that sounds a lot of work for the academics to mark and assess, but students, like our OU students had to cut and paste their own contributions into their assignments.

Karim, at Harvard started his blog as a doctoral project for his work on the open source software community and also twitters with his students. He made a boo-boo on his Phd blog, commenting that an important paper was not seminal, and incurring comments. Consequently, he has now deleted that blog, and advises not blogging when you're a doctoral student because potential employers could see what stupid things you've written! I'm going to carry on this blog, so I can if I've improved, and so that I can get feedback and encouragement from my readers.

David Levy writes http://climateinc.org/ on sustainability issues, and has invited bloggers. To get exposure he trawled related blogs and left comments that linked to his blog. That sounds like trolling, and a bit rude, but it depends on what sort of comments he left. Sensible comments I would welcome, but leaving comments like "Great blog - see mine at xx" I would call trolling, and delete. So David's advice on getting exposure generated some debate.

Teppo Felin writes at orgtheory.wordpress.com and why blog? Because

• it's fun
• to exchange ideas
• for access to invisible colleagues
• for feedback

Yes! I blog for those reasons too. He gave us a couple more slides of advice on blogging.
Why not blog?

• You can look like at idiot
• Worries - what if no one reads it
• Tenure and career issues
• Waste of time?

Successful blogs have

• content
• mix
• "voice"
• emergent
• guest bloggers

Daniel Beunza from London School of Economics writes on socializing finance - what a wonderful idea! He writes on the sociology of finance, and has done ethnological studies of financial institutions.

It was a great session because so interesting, and encouraging to bloggers, of which there were several in the room. Consequently, people are emailing contacts and web sites for each other's blogs. Look also on the AOM OMT blog.

Here are some other bloggers to know about:

• Bret Simmons Positive Organizational Behavior http://www.bretlsimmons.com/
• Bob Sutton Work Matters http://bobsutton.typepad.com/
• Terri Griffith Technology & Organizations http://www.terrigriffith.com/blog/
• Michael Roberto http://michael-roberto.blogspot.com/

CV Harquail writes
These four bloggers are great examples/ role models. While obviously nobody can be Bob Sutton, he's got the biggest blog going and hosts a terrific conversation. Terri exemplifies a senior scholar putting her theory into real life situations, and Michael shows folks how to be timely, topical, theory-relevant, and to-the-point all at once. Brett's blog and online activity is exemplary-- he is theory based (rarely about a current news topic) and very approachable.

I'll blog more about blogs another day, after I've had time to explore them.

Weekend writing

I haven't posted for a week, but I've been writing. I've rewritten all my case studies, and three of them I've sent to supervisors. Who've cancelled next Wednesday's supervision meeting. :(
So I'll have time to send them the last two before the rearranged meeting. :)

Rewriting each case study takes a long morning, with the computer off, a pencil in hand, scribbling over the last printed copy. Sometimes, when working at home I can stare down the garden, if the hop plant isn't dribbling over my window blocking the view.

I find as I write that some words leave me wondering, as if they're not quite right, not quite saying what I want them to say. Focusing on those niggles helps sort them out. Perhaps rewording or reordering helps, or finding a reference to support a point. In one case study, my interviewees knew their management theory and talked about it, so I'm looking up the relevant literature, and the less obviously relevant literature to turn the argument the way I want it. Looking up literature takes time, and means switching my computer back on. I try to delay that because the computer distracts me to email, or here blogging, so my time is less productive. The productive time leads to more than just rewriting, but to analysis too.

To check literature, I search my Endnote database to see I've already read and what notes I've added and occasionally I search this blog to find where I'd remarked on some literature or commented on analysis a year ago or more. I surprise myself that I'd thought that and find the blog more useful than I'd realised.

Now, no more blogging. Rewrite.

On intellectual craftsmanship

Some months ago, I read of this classic by C. Wright Mills, called "The Sociological Imagination". Though it didn't seem relevant to my research, but whatever I was reading recommended its appendix "On Intellectual Craftmanship".

It's terrific! Why didn't I read it earlier! These few pages seemed to be aimed at the apprentice researcher, which is what a post-grad is. Wright Mills starts by commented that:

"Only by conversations in which experienced thinkers exchange information about their actual ways of working can a useful sense of method and theory be imparted to the beginning student."

Yes - I need those conversations. He reports on how he does what he does. Guess what? Despite being written as long ago as 1959, he recommends keeping a daily journal about

"personal experiences and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned."

Advantages of such a journal include:

• relating experience to work in progress
• serving as a check on repetitious work
• capturing 'fringe-thoughts'
• "keeping your inner world away" to draw out implications from events or ideas
• building the habit of writing
• developing powers of expression

Well, isn't this what a research journal is, or what I'm trying to do with this blog?

This appendix comes in six sections.

Part 2 explains how to use the file of writing for intellectual production through maintaining and rearranging it. He gives examples from his own work.

Part 3 is about empirical projects.

Part 4 suggests seven techniques for getting ideas, for "stimulating the sociological imagination".

1. re-arrange the files
2. play with the phrases and words
3. classify your notions
4. consider extremes - think of the opposite
5. invert your sense of proportion
6. "get a comparative grip on the materials" - that's what my supervisor recommended last month - compare public sector case studies with case studies in other sectors.
7. arrange materials for presentation, identifying and sorting the main themes. Cross-classify them.
   

Part 5 explains how you might write in clear and simple languages, even on complex subjects. He advises clarifying your answers to three questions:

"(1) how difficult and complex after all is my subject?
(2) when I write, what status am I claiming for myself?
(3) for whom am I trying to write?"

Part 6 advises that you order what you've found out, that "thinking is a struggle for order"

Part 7 advises trying to understand "men and women as historical and social actors".

Part 8 is on keeping "your moral and political autonomy". Thus:

"the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time"

This is an inspiring appendix to read and reread.

---

Mills, C. W. 1959. SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.

Technology I use for research

Research uses technology:

• Microsoft Office (though I could use Open Office - it's Microsoft available on campus). I use Word for writing, reports, chapters and Excel for my plans.
• Phone - not Skype though
  
• Blogging software - this, and I have tried the OU's Assistive Publishing System (APS) to create an internal web site.
  
• NVivo for qualitative analysis
• SPSS for statistical analysis, though not much since I completed the Master in Research Methods.
• Virtual Private Network(VPN) - very useful for accessing my files on the server at the OU when I'm working at home
• microfiche - once for a PhD thesis that the library got hold of for me.
• Digital recording software - for recording data and playing it back
• Digital photography software - used to edit photographs for the poster I created for the competition.
  

Thoughts to journal

I need to write a research journal so I can use its reflections in my methodology chapter, or maybe in appendices. Some things you can't and mustn't write in a blog, and I don't just mean personal comments on other people, but when you're researching you may have agreed with people not to reveal names of individuals or of organisations. So you can't blog them.

Blogging research

Fascinated to read a conference paper on postgraduate blogs, found here (pdf). It's in paper 1150 by three fellow OU post grads who are a couple of years ahead of me and in a different faculty. But their experience is similar to what I'm finding. The blog is a

• space for writing, reflection
  
• a research journal but with search and sort functions and links
• a "memory repository"

Sometimes I've used it to provide notes on a session that others have missed, so I can share. Because it's open, I'm a little more careful with grammar and spelling and readability, and like to include pictures, or links, or something other than pure text.

However, those three PG blogged together, even having a collaborative blog, and I am not in such a community; I'm the only PG student in the OUBS to blog. I do find other PhD blogs, but not physically close to where I am.

What I like most and most hope to have from my blog is some interaction. So I've appreciated the people who've commented or got in touch. The three PG authors conclude

• universities should offer a blogging facility to research students
• supervisors should draw attention to the potential benefits of this method of keeping a journal
• authors of books on research methods should cover this area in some detail.

I don't think universities should necessary offer a blogging facility. I've used the OU one, and it's not good enough because it doesn't have a comment facility, which is really important if you want feedback.

My supervisors may not know what a blog is - I'm not aware that they read this, but they haven't discussed my using a research journal so the subject hasn't come up for over a year.

But yes, to the third recommendation - authors on research methods should cover this area in detail, because there are advantages to blogging, and with more PG students blogging in a community I could see more advantages .

Ada Lovelace Day

March 24 is to be Ada Lovelace day.



If you blog, will you join in too.