Nia Wearn's Research & Tech for Teaching

I’ve talked before about Facebook groups for research I find super useful (There’s a PHD Parents one and #WIASN) – I’ve asked a lot of question and had some amazing help and support on them – and just for once a question came up  that I could actual help with.

And I do – and this is how I use it:

I love trello boards – I’ve been using them for year to manage big projects (music videos) , home projects (our kitchen) and academic projects – and currently I’m using it to manage my phd:

Here’s the board – individual cards are either things I’ve seen that have been posted online / things I need to look at / Things I need to do or update or check later

And as I do things I move them to done – so I have a track of that.

Other things I love:

• You can e-mail directly to your trello board – in my case these e-mail go straight to ‘Other Stuff’
• You can set deadlines – that feed into my Google Calander
• I’ve connected up this trello board to my Google Drive so it can easily access files on there and shows previews (but other cloud services are available
• Trello works really well on my phone too (via the app) – which means I can add thoughts, on the fly and access them in a more dedicated space when I have time to look at them
• I have a Google Chrome add on that snips websites to Trello too

I’ve tried a few other things to keep tabs on things (Google Keep which I use for everything else) and Evernote I don’t use as much since I moved to Keep but I’ve not found anything as comprehensive as Trello for keeping tabs on everything – and seeing where I’m at.

I’m a member of a few facebook interest groups – and there’s a few I’ve set up myself. The latest of which is one for the Postgraduate students of Staffs Uni – born out of a few conversations at the 3rd annual conference about how alone many of us felt.

The key thing I’ve learn’t so far from other groups I’m members of is that Australians are having a lot more fun with their phd’s then we are. Thesis Haiku competitions, Dance your PHD’s – even the #3MT (Three Mniute Thesis) idea hails from sunny Down Under. I hope a little that we can create a support network within the university – cross faculty and maybe aligned with this mythical graduate school we keep hearing mention of. Maybe we can inject some fun into it as well, even just to let off some steam.

Who knows, I might even try and form it into a proper post grad society at some point in the future (once we’re moved to Stoke I suspect)

It’s been a little bit busy of late – marking, planning for September , graduation etc all gets in the way of doing research so it’s always good to have a chance to get my head back into #niaphd mode. Our annual Multi discipline postgrad conference was just that this year.

I’ve uploaded my presentation here – http://www.slideshare.net/Wormella/3rd-postgraduate-research-student-conference

What’s nice is it outlines my 3 main research questions:

• What are the skills that our students use to make games
• How do we know that our students use these skills to make games
• Could we use a Game Jam type thing to asses our Games Courses