Writing about writing
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I 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
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As 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
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As 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
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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
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As 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,
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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
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In 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
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I’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
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Digital 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
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This 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
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In 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
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This 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
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A 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
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One 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
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One 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
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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
