Penworks.Net

14/04/2020

The topic of a doctorate

I’m jotting down a few reflections on how you choose a topic for your doctorate. I think for many of us it isn’t as simple as ‘something I’m really interested in’, or ‘what I’m good at’, or ‘what I’d like to specialise in’. Care must be taken in your choice, yet focusing on what you’re most interested in or have...

Blog/PhD

28/03/2020

Teaching online from home

This post is about some of the issues you might encounter when teaching online from home, especially without much time to prepare for this transition. We are in unprecedented times, and us who teach (school, informal, non formal, tertiary) have had to move our practice online at very short notice. Many of us are inexperienced at doing any distance learning,...

Audio/Blog/Featured/Learning & Teaching/Video

12/01/2020

Alexander Supertramp

A few days ago I watched a film called Into the Wild, the story of Christopher McCandless, and this film has made a very big impact on me which I hadn’t really expected at all. I was going through those lists that you do after Christmas when you’ve watched a lot of films, looking for some good action or adventure...

Blog/Words

31/10/2019

Progress towards completing

This is a difficult stage, everyone says so. I’m deep into chapter five, where I outline in detailed terms how I went about analysis of data. In phenomenography this is a crucial aspect of the reliability of the findings. We don’t pursue ideas about replicability, because it’s impossible to replicate individual experience. What we do is to build communicability of...

PhD

19/09/2019

Blog, for all our sakes

This post is about how important it is to blog. Perhaps people think it isn’t important to blog, that it’s trivial, it doesn’t matter, it’s duplicating other work, it’s pointless. So I feel it’s useful to list a few reasons why blogging is vital as part of debate and information online. Of course blogs play different roles for different areas...

Blog

31/08/2019

Laughing Men and Data Libertarianism

This post is about hacker activism, disruption and social iconography. Images used in this article are without permission, serving their profound duty as another link in the chain of hacker identity proliferation. Today’s news about Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account hack drew my attention to Chucklingsquad. I’d not heard of them before and of course their hacking exploits are designed first...

Blog/Images/Social Media

05/08/2019

Ok, we got here, so where do we go next?

Inspired by Trevor’s FB post 5/8/19. He’s watching the Great Hack and is ruminating on behavioural modification, achieved via smartphone ubiquity, attractiveness, addictiveness and so on. Wendy chimes in with good points about advertising since the C20. I’ll take some quotes from each and raise my own points. I’ll begin at the end, where Wendy says “We need to understand...

Blog

16/07/2019

Learner Experience Variables

This post discusses an idea I’m working on as part of further implications arising from the PhD. The idea is the potential to develop learner experience variables data values that could be used to help machines see more complex kinds of learning experience present in digital interactions and learner generated content within emerging technology mediated smart learning contexts. In turn...

Blog/Ideas/PhD

18/06/2019

NVivo and categories of quotes

This post briefly describes my experience of using cases and classifications in NVivo, to help form categories of data. In my research I use phenomenography methods, but any qualitative analysis would benefit from this. I’m only a beginner, so probably have a lot more to discover in this technique. Ive investigated using cases and classifications with attributes to compile the...

Blog/PhD

06/06/2019

The World At War

When we were kids we’d watch The World At War, a hugely popular documentary series on TV, narrated by Laurence Olivier. Anyone of my generation will have seen this, we will all remember the authentic grainy black and white footage of the second world war, scenes of total devastation, thousands of refugees traipsing across icy wastelands escaping occupied territory or direct...

Blog/Featured