Penworks.Net

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

04/06/2019

Tips for Transcribing

This article outlines my experience of transcribing 24 interviews with international participants, all speaking in English. Interview duration is between 35 minutes to 60 minutes. As part of qualitative research many of us end up with lots of interviews. The number of interviews needs to be controlled depending on the size of the study, and the chosen methodology, but we...

Blog/PhD/Words

25/05/2019

Digital Literacy Lists

Digital Literacy Teaching digital ‘skills’ and competences is about… (A summary top 20) Verbose naming conventions, (preceded by date) Minimal folder trees Shorter file names [also not using whitespace in filenames ever] Date form: year/month/day, always, no exceptions Never use generic file names like ‘meeting’ as the first word of a file name Use a single note making app that...

Blog/Learning & Teaching/Social Media

18/05/2019

Let’s talk about phones

I’ve just upgraded my phone, so thoughts about phones have been in my mind, on a personal level as well as the research. I’ve had a fair few phones over the years but this article isn’t about my historic ownership of phones so I won’t go into the awesome BT fold up phones of the mid nineties (though they were...

Blog

15/05/2019

The Moment of Clarity

Another in the series of posts on analysis of data and finding clarity I’d covered my floor with printout tables from a variety of papers to help conceptualise how I would achieve what I was supposed to achieve. I didn’t know what I was really supposed to achieve beyond what it should look like. That was the key. I knew...

Featured/Ideas/PhD

06/05/2019

Radical Candor, Radical Constructivism

In a professional environment it’s difficult to speak out and say what you really think. Often you might wait until bursting point and then everything comes out under the cloud of a bad temper ‘emotional outburst’. You get a reputation for having tantrums, and anything you’ve said gets very likely dismissed without a second thought. I speak from personal experience,...

Blog/Ideas/Learning & Teaching

27/04/2019

Refining Analysis

This post is in a series of posts about simplifying and clarifying the analysis system. As I’ve moved forward, more clarity comes to light. How to actually define units of meaning (eg Reed, 2006, Marton & Pong, 2005) for the intended outcome spaces (remember, there are five, a main one, and four subsidiaries, if you like) is the major challenge....

Featured/PhD

12/03/2019

Doctoral Thinking

I’ve been working on the analysis system now for some time. That means I *still* haven’t yet fully clarified how I will analyse the transcripts and then how I will in some way interrelate the other data sets, that is, the other data that aren’t transcripts. I’m well on the way but have a distinct feeling I must streamline, make...

PhD

09/03/2019

Meme Me

Ideas for the Internet culture wars. These came about as a result of seeing what people said in tweets or Facebook posts, and are cut up snippets.

Blog/Ideas/Images/Social Media

01/02/2019

Right Click, Refresh

I once had an acquaintance who had a saying: “right click, refresh”. This was around 2003 or 2004, maybe even earlier. It was before flat screen monitors were common, when they were still expensive, back when we all used to have big white PC towers, hand built by friends and full of pirate software and hooky operating systems. It was...

Blog