Writing About Writing
-
Why I’m changing my license to CC-BY
Read more: Why I’m changing my license to CC-BYFor a long time now I’ve debated how to license my blog. Originally, I don’t say anything, which means it was copyrighted. Then I made the copyright explicit. At one point, and article that I co-authored was included in a compilation book after it had been published in a journal. We asked the journal about it, and…
-
Paradox of Patient Empowerment and Care
Read more: Paradox of Patient Empowerment and CareI find myself looking at all my past experience, and making connections between what I know as an educator, and PhD student, to what I have experienced as a patient with critical/chronic illness. Leading off from Autumm Caines’ post about Virtually Connecting focus groups, I want to chat a little more about the paradox of patient empowerment…
-
Intersectionality, Identity, and Health Humanities #healthhum2017
Read more: Intersectionality, Identity, and Health Humanities #healthhum2017The last couple of days I’ve been attending the Health Humanities Consortium conference in Houston Texas. The experience has been rather mixed for me, causing me to reflect on so many different things. One of the themes of the conferences was that of intersectionality. The idea that we all carry a variety of identities, and…
-
Visitors and residents in the healthcare system
Read more: Visitors and residents in the healthcare systemI’m currently reading Arthur Frank’s At the will of the body: Reflections on illness (1991). In it he recounts his experience as someone who has experienced a serious medical incident (heart attack caused by virus) and then a critical illness (cancer). He differentiates the experience based upon the idea of an intense but temporary interaction with…
-
Living Pathology – an Open dissertation blog
Read more: Living Pathology – an Open dissertation blogI have decided to brush off the domain I had originally setup for my dissertation. I have much better sense of where the project is going – so I’m using that blog as a way to share my writing as I write, and my field notes and ideas as they occur to me. It is…
-
Identity
Read more: IdentityAs part of the PhD process, I’ve been reading through my blog from the beginning. I wrote it, but I have never actually read it – at least not in this way. I am immediately struck by how my memory of the time doesn’t completely align with what I wrote. I know that what I…
-
Memories of illness
Read more: Memories of illnessAs I delve into my research, I am reading through my cancer blog (http://bcbecky.com) from the beginning. It occurred to me that although I wrote the blog, I had never actually read it. One of the things that jumps out at me as I read is how my memories of things don’t necessarily align with…
-
In a post-truth world…
Read more: In a post-truth world…In a post-truth world, I find it rather ironic that I’m studying the lack of a single narrative relating to the patient experience of breast cancer. We think of science has having a single truth – big t Truth. The laws of the universe behave in a particular way. However, the human body is complex…
-
Oppression, doctors, and immigration inspections
Read more: Oppression, doctors, and immigration inspectionsAs I mentioned in my previous post, I’m reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So far, I’ve only managed the first chapter (as well as all the front matter). The first chapter has been a bit of a challenge – but I did find that after a while the ideas and concepts were repeating themselves,…
-
Oppression?
Read more: Oppression?Maha Bali’s latest blog post on Unpacking terms around equity, power and privilege has got me thinking (actually, I was thinking about it just yesterday, but her post has prompted me to write more about it!). I’m slowly making my way through Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “But their perception of themselves as oppressed is…
-
Patient Health Literacies
Read more: Patient Health LiteraciesIn Arthur Frank’s (1995) seminal book The Wounded Storyteller, he cautions “On rare occasions when I have taught this book, students’ biggest initial difficulty is to stop reframing everything ill people say into a question of how some health-care worker might respond.” (Location 115) I often find myself falling into that trap. I find myself…
-
Primary versus secondary use of blog data in research
Read more: Primary versus secondary use of blog data in researchI’ve previously talked about researchers using blogs as data sources in their research. I have argued that since blogs are self-publication, then bloggers should be cited appropriately in research reports. When data is collected specifically for research purposes, we talk about primary data collection. When data is collected for a different purpose, but then later…
-
Critical Digital Health Literacy
Read more: Critical Digital Health LiteracyDigital Literacy – Read, Write, Participate (e.g. https://learning.mozilla.org/en-US/web-literacy) Digital Health Literacy – “the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem” (Norman & Skinner, 2008, para. 6). Critical Digital Health Literacy – the ability to seek, find, understand, and…
-
Growing your PLN
Read more: Growing your PLNThis summer I’ll be teaching a new course on Leadership of Learning in the Digital Age. I’m designing the course as a combination of leadership skills (emotional intelligence) and digital literacy skills. One key aspect of the course will be to have students work on defining and expanding their personal learning network (PLN). In leadership…
-
Health (Illness) bloggers
Read more: Health (Illness) bloggersIn my literature review for my research I came across a great article (Keating & Rains, 2015) on the social support health (illness) bloggers receive. The article does a good job looking at social support of bloggers over a three year period. One of the things that came clear in the article is the use…
-
Illness blogs as a data source for health sciences research – #ethics
Read more: Illness blogs as a data source for health sciences research – #ethicsThis post is a follow up on my post The ethical use of twitter and blogs in research as well as the series of blogs posts on the ways in which breast cancer blogs are being used in research. Today I want to talk about a specific example of what I see as a problematic use of…
-
The ethical use of twitter and blogs in research
Read more: The ethical use of twitter and blogs in researchA conversation happened on twitter today that began with the question: Do you have ethical concerns about researchers analysing your Tweets w/o your permission? (I ask as Chair of Research Ethics C'ttee) — Celia Kitzinger (@KitzingerCelia) November 20, 2016 I actually have the same questions when it comes to using blogs in research. The current…
-
What Trump means for academic conferences
Read more: What Trump means for academic conferencesOne of my first thoughts when I heard that Trump was elected was that it meant much fewer opportunities to hear diverse voices at international conferences held within the US. I attend a lot of conferences – many of them have international audiences. One thing that American’s don’t often realize is just how difficult it…
-
Tagging my posts
Read more: Tagging my postsOne of the first steps (I don’t have a linear process so there isn’t really one first step) in my research is to tag all my blog posts. I didn’t really use the tagging feature when I wrote the original posts. So now, I’m re-reading and tagging highlighting which posts provide insight into my experience…
-
Shifting my research question
Read more: Shifting my research questionIn 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…
-
Why I hate accessibility rules in online learning
Read more: Why I hate accessibility rules in online learningI 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…
-
Cancer Blogging: a Survivor’s Story
Read more: Cancer Blogging: a Survivor’s StoryYesterday, 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…
-
Seeing autoethnograpy
Read more: Seeing autoethnograpyOnce 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,…
-
Window Shopping
Read more: Window ShoppingI 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…
-
Book launch: Agony and Absurdity: Adventures in Cancerland: An Anthology
Read more: Book launch: Agony and Absurdity: Adventures in Cancerland: An AnthologyTomorrow (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…
-
Morals and ethics and IRBs with autoethnography
Read more: Morals and ethics and IRBs with autoethnographyThe 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…
-
How do you ‘perform’ a blog?
Read more: How do you ‘perform’ a blog?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?…
-
Abstract / Generalizable is just another context
Read more: Abstract / Generalizable is just another contextI 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…
-
The News
Read more: The NewsBumping 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…
-
Transcription as deep listening
Read more: Transcription as deep listeningBy 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…
-
Tears of fear
Read more: Tears of fearI 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…
-
Auto – Ethno – Graphy
Read more: Auto – Ethno – GraphyAutoethnography 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…
-
Do I need a new voice?
Read more: Do I need a new voice?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…
-
Autoethnography and blogging
Read more: Autoethnography and blogging“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…
-
Beyond Webinars – Let’s start conversations
Read more: Beyond Webinars – Let’s start conversationsI 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 –…
-
Making the private public – Why we choose to blog about illness #VCePt
Read more: Making the private public – Why we choose to blog about illness #VCePtOver 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…
-
Researcher’s use of Breast Cancer Blogs (D-G)
Read more: Researcher’s use of Breast Cancer Blogs (D-G)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…
-
Why we keep blogging #IHSRC35
Read more: Why we keep blogging #IHSRC35One 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…
-
Data collection in the open: Using blogs for research #IHSRC35
Read more: Data collection in the open: Using blogs for research #IHSRC35Yesterday 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…
-
You don’t know me, but I know you …
Read more: You don’t know me, but I know you …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…
-
Researcher’s use of breast cancer blogs (A-C)
Read more: Researcher’s use of breast cancer blogs (A-C)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…
-
When you use my data, please say thank you!
Read more: When you use my data, please say thank you!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…
-
public/private and vulnerable populations
Read more: public/private and vulnerable populationsThis 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…
-
Usage guidelines for researchers who use blogs
Read more: Usage guidelines for researchers who use blogsI’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…
-
Ethics and open data collection
Read more: Ethics and open data collectionI 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…
-
Courtesy when studying social media based communities
Read more: Courtesy when studying social media based communitiesI 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…
-
Of networks and communities
Read more: Of networks and communitiesAs 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…
-
Struggles when reading outsiders who write about the breast cancer blogophere
Read more: Struggles when reading outsiders who write about the breast cancer blogophereIn 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…
-
Digital skills, literacies, and citizenship
Read more: Digital skills, literacies, and citizenshipI 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…
-
How do you describe learning?
Read more: How do you describe learning?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…
