CETL conference

The OU ran its third teaching and learning conference yesterday and today. After the BAM conference it was splendidly practical, not academic with lots of ideas and words that I understood and appreciated, like blogs, quizzes, digital divide, JavaScript because this conference was for practitioners.

As well as stuff for teaching I picked up something relevant to my research when Shailey Minocha referred to tacit knowledge and concepts that she'd picked up when studying B823 for her MBA. This came from a paper by Marwick on Nonaka and Takeuch's model of knowledge. It might be relevant to building intellectual capital.

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Marwick, A. D. (2001). Knowledge management technology. IBM systems journal, 40(4).

Interview questions

This writing an interview proforma isn't getting done quickly. A matrix or table might be useful, one that related to consultant-consultant, client-client, consultant-client and client-consultant, like the table in the NAO paper.

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{NAO, 2006 #109}

The start of the Internet

Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet, spoke today about its future. We were at the Oxford Internet Institute. He started by showing us a toy, a toy that flashed, played music, waved its bits in time to the music, a toy that cost $600, maybe $800, but he says it's the toy that Japanese children are playing with, and you download the music and programs and choreography for it from the internet.

He talked about sending messages between planets - it takes some time, and by the time you're up and running the planets have rotated.

He pointed out how cheap hardware has become, a few gigabytes of hard disk that would have cost several million dollars in the seventies, now being less than a $100. Now he could buy 2TB of disk for, say, $100. Then he could buy 10MB for similar. 2TB is 2 * 10 to the 8 times as much so 2*10 to the 10 dollars or 20 G$ - I think…

He showed us, real time, how the internet could give him data on the humidity and temperature of his wine cellar now, in passing commenting on the variation in light that suggested someone had been into his wine cellar.

He commented that he'd thought IPv6 had such a large number of addresses that each electron in the Universe could have its own web page – but somebody had pointed out that the number is 50 orders of magnitude greater than the IPv6 address space.

He spoke quickly and absorbed us for an hour, answering four questions clearly and concisely and thanking us for inviting him and listening. Swell speaker. Lucky PhD students in the OII who are working on such a fascinating area.

Here are the details: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=215

Research design

Following Jennifer Mason I'm matching my research questions to the methods that I intend to use to answer them. For example, if a subquestion is:

How does engagement contribute to an effective project?

then I'll use

• Observation
• interview data
• shadowing

I'm getting a table for each research sub question with headings of data sources, justification, analysis and relationship to theory. I am changing some headings for the ethics proforma that I must submit. That includes practicalities and ethical issues.

The justification for interviews is that they will provide client manager’s accounts of how they and the users engage with each other and with the consultants. Observation will triangulate that data, though I don't know that I will have much opportunity to observe or shadow, depends on the access I get. So another column in my table will be practicalities, like access, time, equipment.

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Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative researching, (2nd ed Edn), Sage, London. 973

Interview questions from Nahapiet & Ghoshal

I'm splitting up the questions to match the different dimensions of social capital that Nahapiet and Ghoshal refer to, but then I have to work out how those questions help me to answer the research questions.

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Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266.

Devising interview questions from the literature

It's sensible to leave an audit trail that shows how the data you collected relates to the literature you read. So, I'm attempting to devising interview questions from relevant literature, like Nahapiet & Ghoshal's paper. Hence, for example, they had a theoretical model of different dimensions to social capital. One dimension is structural, so I'm trying to work out questions that related to structure, like

• who do you know. or
  
• tell me about who provides access to resources?
  
• what other people have you known at other stages of the project life cycle (which should tell me about network ties)

But creating something practical from a highly academic and theoretical model is taking a bit of time and thought.

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Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266.

Ethics

I was reading Mason's advice on qualitative design when I came across her advice on ethics too. She advises on layout - use a table with rows for each research question and headings for data sources, justification for using those sources, practicalities and consequent ethical issues. Then she has a chapter on each type of qualitative data source, like observation or interview, with advice on the possible ethical issues. So it's quite thought provoking.

Research questions	Data sources and methods	Justification	Practicalities (e.g. resources, access, skills)	Ethical issues [1]

I need also be aware of the ESRC framework held here.

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[1] Taken from Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative researching, (2nd ed Edn), Sage, London. 973