Writing about writing
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In the spirit of open dissertations, I figured I’d write a little more about where I’m headed with my dissertation. My last two weeks were spent up in Ottawa for the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies annual conference and a committee meeting followed by the Open Ed conference in Richmond Virginia. I have to say my…
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I know, this might be blasphemy, but I really hate it when policies are pushed down that require that all aspects of online learning are made accessible. I honestly think that these policies actually make online learning less accessible because they are written or enacted in ways that convenience easy measurement of compliance rather than actually looking at…
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Yesterday, I presented at the AIS 2016 Annual Conference. It was the first time I have presented using an autoethnography of a blog – so it was more of a performance of a blog than a paper presentation. Doing the presentation really helped me think about how I want to present the blog chapters in…
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Once I started blogging, I found myself becoming more aware of bloggable moments. I saw blog posts in the things that I do every day. I still ‘see’ blog posts, I just don’t always have the time to write them up! Now that I’m reading a lot about autoethnography and starting to write my dissertation,…
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I stepped on the stage with a little wobble. My stomach was churning. The audience of over 200 people sat there waiting for me to start my reading. The words start, but I can feel the mechanicalness of the words as they come out of my mouth … “I wrote this story …” After the…
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Tomorrow (Wednesday) at about 7:30pm Pacific I’ll be reading my chapter, titled “Window Shopping” for the launch of the latest Bay Area Young Survivors (BAYS) anthology titled: Agony and Absurdity: Adventures in Cancerland: An Anthology. I hope to have my reading periscoped – and if we manage that I’ll put the link in here. If you…
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The general consensus from the literature is that there is no agreed definition of morals nor ethics. “The best short definition I’ve heard, courtesy of my friend Stirling, is that morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.” (Walsh, 2015) I really like this very simple…
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I’m starting to write my first chapter for my dissertation (yay), but also I’m preparing to give a presentation at a conference. My first chapter is being writing in the genre of a series of blogs posts – including comments. What I haven’t figured out is, how do I perform this as a conference presentation?…
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I wrote this reflection a couple of years ago, but never published it. I think it is still interesting, so I’m publishing it now … I’m (re)reading Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives). At first I was resistant to it as a theory that might…
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Bumping and screeching, the plane finally lands. I’m operating on very little sleep. I’m exhausted and hungry. I turn on my phone. I try to text my Aunt letting her know that we have arrived, however, the text keeps failing. I wait rather impatiently as the phone reset and the plane taxis toward the gate. Finally…
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By Rebecca J. Hogue, Helen DeWaard, and Britni Brown O’Donnell This post was originally published on VirtuallyConnecting.org. [Helen] As a Virtually Connecting virtual buddy I’ve had so many great conversations that leave an impression on my thinking. The voices within the Virtually Connecting hangout from the Digital Pedagogy PEI with Audrey Watters and Jesse Stommel…
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I scan over the document that she hands me, and immediately my eyes fixate on one word malignant. An uncontrollable wave of emotion hits me. Tears start streaming from my eyes. Just at that moment, the ultrasound tech opens the door to the waiting room and calls my name. She introduces herself but I totally…
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Autoethnography is a research method that foregrounds the researcher’s personal experience (auto) as it is embedded within, and informed by, cultural identities and con/texts (ethno) and as it is expressed through writing, performance, or other creative means (graphy). More specifically, it is a method that blends the purposes, techniques, and theories of social research—primarily ethnography—with…
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I’ve been reading about autoethnography and wishing I had the skill to write dialogue well. It has never been my strong point because I have difficulty wanting it to be exactly what people say, but in reality dialogue isn’t exactly what people say. It is a cleaned up version of what people say. People don’t…
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“Generalizablity takes on a different meaning in autoethnography than in traditional social science research. The question we ask is: how does a particular story depicting a specific context–a story like mine–manage to acquire something akin to universal significance? The answer is through resonance. When a story resonates, it moves beyond itself by questioning, probing, and expressing feelings that…
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I recall when Virtually Connecting first launched, we (Maha Bali and I) published an article Prof Hacker title Beyond Twitter: Virtually Connecting at Conferences. I’m now working on Virtually Connecting in the ePatient space – looking at ways we can bring patient into conversations. I feel the need to write something called Beyond Webinars –…
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Over the last week and a half I’ve spent a lot of time meeting with people regarding my PhD research – it was one of the reasons I went to Ottawa and stayed as long as I did. Overall it was a very productive trip. One of my learnings from the trip was that I…
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This is my second post in a series on the ways in which Researcher’s are using breast cancer blogs. You can read more about this in my initial post. In this post I explore researchers with first author last names starting with D through G. Note that I may have missed a few in my…
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One of my biggest learnings of the phenomenology conference I attended this week (#IHSRC35) was some sense-making around interpretive research. My interpretation of all this was that one of the reasons we share our structured/analyzed/rigorous interpretations of phenomena is so that others can learn from our interpretations. Not learning in the sense of a transmission of…
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Yesterday I gave a presentation at the International Human Science Research Conference (#IHSRC35). I was a little nervous at the beginning because my presentation did not make any mention of Heidegger, nor any other philosophers for that matter. The keynotes for the conference appear to be mostly from clinical psychology and philosophy – where the presentation…
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I have been reflecting on the interesting difference between Virtually Connecting (sync small group discussions broadcast live and recorded on YouTube) and blogging. As someone who has blogged about health issues, a lot of people “know” me from reading my other blog. It can cause a bit of an awkward experience when meeting face-to-face because…
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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m doing a systematic review of how researchers are using breast cancer blogs. I’ve narrowed the focus to breast cancer blogs because that is the focus for my dissertation. It also helps to keep the dataset manageable, as a lot of review and filtering is needed to remove…
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I’m working on a systematic literature review based upon researchers that use breast cancer blogs. This particular review was inspired by a comment written by Caroline on my blog post about the Usage guidelines for researchers who use blogs. In the comment Caroline mentions that “I would never have thought my blog could be used…
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This post is really intended to further my thinking on the ideas I introduced in my posts on Ethics and open data collection and Usage guidelines for researchers who use blogs. There are two aspects to the conversation that I want to talk about – the idea of public versus private, and the idea of vulnerable populations. Some…
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I’m thinking of calling out to the blogging community (more specifically to the cancer blogging community – but I’m sure this extends to other blogospheres), in trying to create some way to signify to researchers how the blogger wants their blog to be used in research. I’m thinking something similar to what creative-commons has done…
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I started this question multiple times over the last couple days. Since not everyone is on Facebook or in the areas of Facebook where I had this discussion, I figured I’d start the conversation again here – hoping that people will jump in here with their thoughtful comments, questions, and suggestions. I will start by saying…
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I don’t know if it just me, but I find myself REALLY annoyed when research study social media communities and don’t both to tell the communities about the research. I understand that researchers may not want to affect the phenomenon they are studying. But once the study is finished and findings are published, I think…
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As many of you know already, I’m working on a dissertation proposal. I’m running into some interesting mental roadblocks, but also uncovering what I think are some very interesting things as I work through the process. One thought that I wanted to share was the idea of communities versus the ideas of networks. I have…
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In the process of preparing my ethics proposal I need to review the literature related to illness blogs. I am finding that because a lot of women with breast cancer write blogs, largely because it is one of the biggest and most accessible illness blogospheres (blogging communities). This means that a lot of researchers, when…
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I had a great discussion with one of my virtual office mates last night (thanks @autumm). One of the things I miss the most about having regular get togethers with my PhD cohort is a chance to talk about various things of interest to the academically included. In this case, it was a discussion about…
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One of the challenges my committee has given me is to describe how I view learning (Step 1 – Motivation). I began my exploration by doing some preliminary research (Step 2 – Research – actually, in many ways this was a reminder of the many years I’ve spent studying different learning theories! I wrote a…
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I have written before about going to academic conferences and finding my tribe. For a while I had found my tribe – in the Educational Technology world. I felt that it was where I belonged. I teach emerging technology and instructional design. I love online learning – helping my students learn what a good online graduate…
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On Wednesday morning, at the OLC Innovate conference, we (me, Autumm Caines, Maha Bali, Whitney Kilgore, Apostolos Koutropolous, Andrea Rehn, and Alan Levine) presented a 90-minute workshop on Meeting the Potential of Hybridity: Equity, Access, and Inclusion. Our presentation itself was both innovative and technically risky. We had some previous experience running a hybrid workshop at…
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In reading more about illness narratives from the perspective of medical humanities, I find myself struggling a little. Lampress & Braithwaite (2016) talk about teaching patients to write illness narratives. They compare illness narratives to that of the fictional hero journey, specifically outlining the standard trajectory of the narrative: In the narrative arc of the fictional…
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I teach in an area that would be served well by creating a decent eBook. One that has activities, is easy to update, and links to lots of resources available on the web. The problem is, it would take a fair bit of work to create said eBook. I’m in a position to do it…
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In a discussion with guest speakers in one of the courses I’m teaching, one of the guests brought up the issue about student blogging. She commented that she does not leave comments on her student’s blogs. This is in part because of the teacher – student relationship. There is an issue with a sense that…
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In preparing my new dissertation study proposal, I was tasked with reading a book chapter on narrative research – specifically: Josselson, R. (2011). Narrative research: Constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing story. In F. J. Wertz, K. Charmaz, & L. M. McMullen (Eds.), Five ways of doing qualitative analysis: Phenomenological psychology, grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative research,…
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When Dr. Michelle Schira Hagerman (@mshagerman) asked me to speak to her class about my experience as an ePatient blogger and my upcoming PhD research I thought it would be a great opportunity to facilitate an expansion to Virtually Connecting. I have wanted to do more in Virtually Connecting in the ePatient space since we did…
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Will my students think I don’t know what I’m doing? Will they think that I’m a fraud? That I don’t deserve to be the instructor of the course? ~ The impostor in my head Nothing like marking to bring about a case of impostor syndrome. It is funny. I teach online. I don’t have that…
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A pathography is an extended single-author narrative, situating illness and treatment within the author’s life and linking them with the meaning of that life. Pathographies provide the story of illness from the perspective of the individual patient. (Hawkins, 1999, p.127) One thing that I particularly like about this definition of a pathography – which is…
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I have been using Google Docs as a way to write collaborative academic papers for years now (e.g. Writing the unreadable untext), however, I had not come across the Research Tool before. This tool is changing the way I write research papers because I can easily Google Scholar search for a citation and immediately add…
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This week one of the themes of #MOOCMOOC, a free open online ‘course’ exploring instructional design from a critical pedagogy perspective, is subversion. It has me reflecting on scaffolding and the role it plays in my teaching. What is particularly interesting this semester is that I’m teaching two graduate courses in Instructional Design. One course…
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Today began an exploration into critical pedagogy and in particular taking a critical look at Instructional Design. What is interesting here is that I’m just about to start teaching a course on the Foundations of Instructional Design and Learning Technology. This is one of the first courses in an Instructional Design master’s program. It needs…
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This week my students in the undergrad digital citizenship course I’m teaching are exploring RSS feeds. It has been fascinating reading their reflective blog posts, as this is the one tool that has been transformative for many of them. Here is a Wordle of their posts: When I taught the Should I blog course, and…
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I’m looking for advice from both adjuncts and those who are in permanent faculty positions. I teach and have teaching experience at several universities. I’m fresh off of a great Virtually Connecting session, where there was a brief discussion about the working conditions of Adjuncts, which has me thinking even more about this. All the…
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Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person sense of where she is in life, and where she maybe going. (Frank, 2013, p. 53) I’ve been given the task of writing my biography – and it is due today. Not nearly enough time to write the book that I’ve…
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This semester I’m teaching a half credit course on digital citizenship. I didn’t design the course. I’m actually somewhat limited to the changes I’m allowed to make. The course is well structured, and I’m loving the opportunity to read my students weekly reflections in the form of blog posts. Having a blogger as a teacher…
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“While auto-ethnography is not a specific research technique, method, or theory, it colors all three as they are employed in fieldwork” (Hayano, 1979, p. 99) “ANT [Actor-Network Theory] cannot accurately be described as a single, stable or identifiable theoretical framework” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) “Educational design research can be defined as a genre of research…
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My new research is an exploratory study. I’m now in the process of reviewing the literature in a variety of different areas. In doing so, I have happened across a review study that presents what could be used as a framework for my inquiry into what people learn from breast cancer blogs. Of course, as…
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Last week Stephen Downes wrote a post about research – about how research often focuses on what is and not on what ought to be. For me, this links directly to the idea of axiology – what we value in research. It has me asking the question about what I value in research. When I…
