Keep calm and trust yourself

Looking around peoples blogs seems like everyone is getting into the momentum of starting back - Great.

Module Ones have got their blogs going. Some people are on Google+ it is like another world when you are used to using blog spot!! I noticed less comments on Google+ blogs. Remember to visit across hosts!!!

Module Twos: you don't have to pin your question down in detail; just have an idea of the area. Then move on to Section 5 ethics and then the Research tools section. These sections are design to and SHOULD affect your question. So no point having it all mapped out to the letter - because you will feel  reluctant to change anything. Also you need to move on because Module two covers a lot of things!! You need the time. Your question is stewing on the back burner and you are feeding the fire under it by starting to read literature about the area you are interested in. Its like getting all your ingredients together for the final proposal you have the question ingredient for now you need to get the ethics ingredient and the data collection ingredient and most important the how to analyse it all ingredient. Some tasks in the module might feel like they are taking you away from your question. But the module is about developing a line of inquiry or planning research NOT about answering the question. In fact just don't link questions with answers. (tell answers to take a hike close things down, half the time you don't recognise them until we are well past them anyway). Questions should lead to better, more in formed question NOT answers. So you can see you may never get the perfect 'question' just a better understanding of the area.

Module Threes:
OMG don't worry about the artefact yet!!! You cant know what the artefact will be before you know what it is about. Think of it this way.
1) you have a question you want to know more about...
2) you look into it.. thats what you are doing now
3) you look closely at what you found when you collected data and all the reading you have been doing (the literature) and all the conversations (in other words you analyse)
(3b) You realise something... (it might be pre-verbal, non-verbal) it's an idea.
4a) You want to tell others in your life (profession) about it and about the process you took to get to it - it and the process will have an impact on how you share it...How you share it is the professional artefact
4b) You want to tell others in the university about it and the process to get to it ...You have to do that in university language (the final reflective report). This is an artefact also an academic artefact.

Let your research reveal itself to you - don't decide what it is or how it is or what it has to say before you have done it. Trust you will know when you know.

OK then keep going everyone!!
Adesola

What Sam and Billy say

Hi I am going to address a question Alicia asked on her blog “when quoting my interviewees, how do I do it..?”

The idea of a citation for a book etc... is so that when we read your work we can then go and find the book (journal etc...) you had in your hand that you cited from. But the interviews are data you collected and we cannot go and find them somewhere. You are using quotes form interviewees as examples of something you are writing about, so it is a bit different from a citation for book (etc...) which is pointing us towards further reading or bringing to mind a theorised idea by someone else. So assuming you have given an outline of what you research looked like. [ie you interviewed six professional dancers. Billy works in UK, Jamie in Mexico etc... and any other relevant information we need to know about them while respecting their anonymity.] Then when you write about something they said you can write

'it's a long way to go to go to an audition' - Billy

So now a notes about quoting people in terms of the above:

First: the decision to give them names – many people say participant (1) or participant B. This is ok but think about the topic of your research. If it about people's experiences or feelings etc… then it is ok to present them as real people. Not labelled like test-tubes. If it’s a test-tube based data collection process then naming them A, B or C makes more sense. If you use names think about the implication of gender and cultural background a name can give.

Second, as I mention above take a moment  in the overview of the research project in your account to let us know who and where and how you collected the data so we can see any comments in the context of the inquiry. For instance some of my interviewee might be college students and other professional dancers and other teachers.

Third,  DO NOT use the quote to make your point. Make the point and then use the quote to give an example of what you are talking about.

'Most dancers I spoke to talked about the importance of auditions in terms of keeping current with what was going on, but also pointed out that there needed to a balance between the keeping current and the expense of preparing and traveling to an audition. 

'I live in Gistone (small village in the North of England) and most auditions I am interested in are in the South. its a long way to go to travel to an audition.' Billy (professional dancer)

Billy's comment underlined Smiths (2009) theory that dancers in the outside of major cities are disadvantaged when it comes to audition experience. However, Sam the other professional dancer I interviewed from the North of England saw a trip down South for an audition as part of a larger goal. Sam used the time to also meet up with friends and visit museums.

'I try to make going to auditions only part of what i do in a day. That way I feel less pressure in the audition. Otherwise I'm like thinking if I don't get this I've wasted the fare down here and what-not.' - Sam (professional dancer). 

Smith (2009) has said that professional dancers start to see auditions as away of socialisation. It seemed that the professional dancers who lived outside of major cities..... 

Smith quote....'

The quotes from Participants should be indented but I can't see how to do that on the blog post page and my computer keeps crashing, so I'M trying to get this posted before it dies again - but enough of my problems!!!!

Back to the quotes-- as we read more and more quotes we also start to get a sense of the personalities of the participants - that is also why its nice to give them names; it is easier to remember who said what.

As you start to write what you are handing in for assessment in any of the modules start to let go of the drive to make a point (tell the truth) - and think of the actual document you are making as also a work of art. how you write, structure and form the essay is an art too. It is not just about what you are saying because how we understand what you are saying is more subtle then just the idea, it is how the words are put together. I am very aware of this as a dyslexic - and it often seems like a magic trick to even get words together in the first place but every now and then you might read something or see something and think that was really well done. Think about what you think is well written and why. Alan did a post about truth, that was interesting to read. I guess I am saying the same thing. Let's suppose there is more than one 'truth'. What you are thinking about when you write should not be presenting the 'truth' of what you found but capturing the nature of what you found or experienced.   

(Sensitivity to the whole process not just an account of past.)

What do you think? Does this help with the quote question?

Adesola

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