Nia Wearn's Research & Tech for Teaching

Since coming back from Maternity leave in March I’ve found it a little difficult to get back on track – a little out of the loop on a lot of things (not having project students etc) and not all of my office colleagues are in all the time, or they’re off teaching or what not. So I’ve been catching up no the phd stuff I stupidly though I could do on maternity leave, but couldn’t get my brain in gear when I came across a tweet that mentioned a group for parents studying phds – Since I now tick that box I though I’d join, and I’m glad I did.

Its very nice to have a big group of people, doing a similar thing to you, that you can call on for advice, enter into discussions with a generally get along with. There’s shut up and Write Sessions, questions on the true nature of pedagogy, lots of discussion on methodology etc (what’s also nice that unlike real office colleagues you can ignore them if you want to focus on something else) – I’m much more on board with what I was doing, and I’m starting to find the headspace I need to write.

It’s part of a trend I can see of more and more things drifting into the sphere of Facebook – group projects, staff groups, interest groups are all there and used, daily – which means switching off from everything else is increasingly hard. I don’t want to make a separate staff account. I like being able to interact with students, and it’s so useful when they don’t check their e-mails. I just can’t help wondering at what point it will all come crashing down?

Literature Review MindMap for RDC-1 Form

Again, I’ve been playing around with phone apps and web tools to try and manage all the papers, books and articles that seem to be relevant to my Phd.

Currently everything is being held digitally – mainly in my Dropbox folder and copied over to my Kindle to read (I can’t yet seem to be bale to read pdf’s straight from my dropbox folder although I think it may be possible with newer version of the kindle) – and the details of everything are held on my Mendeley account – and it’s there I’m going to sort everything out into tags or folders – and then I just need to write it up, easy-peasy. (although writing it on Google Docs is helping with the catching a few mins here and there to write up bits)

I was however amused by this xkcd comic – it seemed very pertinent…

Because I decided to do an MA, and not a MSc, I have to make good the research bit of my post grad study – which is cool since all I really recall from my MA in Digital Games was something to do with Pikmin and slavery, Tetris is a allegory for modern day office workers and Mario is all about Capitalist acquisition of wealth. I also made this instead of writing a dissertation – which was a great idea at the time and it cemented in my mind the fact the last thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life was 3D modelling. (The irony that I’m doing my PgCert in Research Methods with AMD isn’t lost on me)

So I’ve spent the day preparing for my day in Stoke tomorrow by gathering my bibliography together – currently spread around my Kindle, Dropbox, a bookmarks folder and in my head. Even though I’ve downloaded the pc version of Zotero – it’s not in work. Instead I decided to explore using Mendeley instead. What I thought was just a bookmarking tool turns out to be a kind of Linked In for Academics – not to be confused with Academic.edu – which is also a social networks for academics (I bet it’s the same people on all 3).

I’ve been impressed so far with my ability to pull in bibliography references from the web, or from folders – using the desktop application – but I’m just dipping my toes into the group side of things. I’ll report back.

Anyway – wish me luck for tomorrow, even if it’s so I don’t get lost on the Stoke campus 😉