Oxford English Dictionary e-, comb. form

Oxford English Dictionary e-, comb. form

Summer Update

Both Neil and I have been away in various hot climes during the past few weeks but now ... we're planning for the start of term. Also pleased to see that some of you have been thinking ahead and checking the WebCT area for news.

The first session back is a workshop on writing effective proposals: Friday 22nd September. This will give you some input to begin filtering the ideas you've been having/reading during the summer and focus them into a proposal. We'll also look at issues of supervision and the choice of supervisor.

So, keep reading, thinking, and refining your ideas. If there are any that you want to share remember to use the discussion board on WebCT.

'Til soon

Designing Questionnaires

Here's an interesting interview with with Michele Corrado from IPSOS MORI which was broadcast in BBC 4's Word of Mouth series.
You can find the interview at 13 minutes 12 seconds into the programme.

Word of Mouth 7 August 2006

Article on Research Diaries

Here's the abstract of an article from the Research Training Initiative (RTI), a project based at UCE Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD), entitled Diaries and Fieldnotes in the Research Process

It is common to hear people talk about 'writing up' research. Implicit in the phrase is the sense that writing is a stage that occurs principally when the research has finished and is a straightforward process of telling what was done and what conclusions can be drawn. However, the process of research involves many forms of writing, from letter writing and minute taking to academic papers and formal research reports.

The aim of this issue is to consider one form of research writing that has received relatively little attention, yet which is central to the research process, especially, but not exclusively, for those conducting qualitative or action research studies - the research diary. Research diaries are considered as part of a broad category alongside other methods of recording such as research logs and fieldnotes. Particular approaches to notetaking, the use of visual material in diary record keeping, as well as practical issues are discussed.

Printing the blog

I know some of you may be struggling to print your refelctive blog to include in the submission of the dissertation.
The problem is that the blog is defaulted to give the archive from present to past - so that when you print you get a story in reverse order. Better to start with the first blog sometime last year and the final blog .. the last couple of days when you say 'Yep, all done!!'
To do this you need to change a little code in the Blog template. It's simple. Here's an article that explains all:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=882

And here's another interesting post from someone who has printed out a blog in book form.

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/10/archiving_coyot.html

Online Qualitative Data Analysis

There is an extensive set of online resources for qualitative data analysis at
http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk/Intro_QDA/index.php

Well worth a look.

J Drive Update

The materials from the review workshop are now available on the J Drive.
Not much blogging of late because ... not much time! Hopefully things will settle down a little and I can post a little more. :)