Holidays, networks, tools and be led!

This week’s blog is a little late, in that I try to post each Thursday. I had a test on Thursday and then had to watch a few hours of 'Glee' to calm back down.

So how is it going? The Easter holidays are upon us but I know for some people that means having more time to work on your module since work obligations are not as intense over the holiday. As the term comes to an end really meeting your own scheduling targets for your study is important. You might use some of the time to assess where you are in the module and re-schedule how you will approach the activity of the last few weeks. Always leave yourself a couple of weeks to write and re-write what you are handing in. In some ways you need to think of writing the work you are handing as an experience in itself that will teach you more. Having written it you might find that the experience of writing it completes the module activity for you and helps you have a full perspective. At that point you will have a kind of clarity of completion that will in form the whole process and will mean you can go back to what you wrote and improve it in terms of order, or clarity of the points you make or seeing where you have left out something important.

I am not going back on what I am always saying about thinking. I am not saying that thinking is IN the writing but knowing the whole event is helpful for organising understanding of it. The whole event is doing the tasks AND writing about the learning. It is like the way if you are learning a dance sequence even if you don’t know how to do it all yet knowing how it will end helps you to start to internalise the sequence so you can learn and remember it. I always find while I am being taught a sequence it seems really long and overwhelming, but once I know the whole thing where it goes I can start to manage the parts of it much better and it don’t seem as long at all.

Module Ones are thinking about networks. This is am important idea because it is about how you connect to things and how you see yourself in the context of your professional activities. The last part of Module one is different from the first two parts because it is asking you to expressly look beyond yourself, to position yourself in the field of your activities. This is the first time we ask you to expressly do this. The reflection part of the module asks you to look in and the network part of the module asks you to look out. By doing both you get a sense of where you are, what your position is now, where you come from and how that has influenced you and the trajectory that moves you forward that will be the energy you use to engage with module two and then later three. I have a number of posts about ‘positioning’ and ‘YOU’; have a look around my Blog at posts from the past.

Module Twos are looking at tools of inquiry. The pilots are trying out tools to see what they do in practise in terms of the kind of information you get from them. Then think about whether this information is in the form that addresses the approach you have taken to inquire. Does it create data that is relevant to what you are interested in. In other words if you piloted something and found you got data in numerical form, (six people thought that, seven thought this) is that useful if your topic is about personal experiences of people? You might have piloted another tool and found you got a massive amount of thoughts from two people this form of data might be much more useful. NOW why do you need to have useful data?... because the inquiry is not about generating data (information) it is about what you do with the data, it is about your analysis (see last weeks blog). If how you are going to analyse is to compare numbers, you need data in the form of numbers to do that. If you are comparing or looking at feelings you need to have documentation of feelings to do that. How do you know what kind of analysis you will undertake? You know because in your inquiry question you indicate what you are looking for.
Module two is about making the ‘framework’ of your inquiry - all the bits fit in and support each other. The art of the module (and research in general) is to be sensitive to the life of the inquiry / the question itself and not to impose your own expectations and assumptions on to what will happen. This is to allow the research to lead you NOT for you to lead the research. This is a lesson for Module Threes also as they begin writing-up there research now.

What do you think?
Adesola