Approaches to Internet Research (& My Paper)

This is the session where I will also present my paper, Public Transformations: Adult Learners Who  Use Social Media to Express and Understand Their Identities as Developing Researchers.

Alas, the room was just changed, and I fear many people do not know it was changed as not everybody looks on the notification board or follow Twitter. That is ok, we will go with the flow.

As my paper is not about liveblogging, and I need to get into the frame for this presentation, I will not liveblog my own session, sign off, and focus on my research at hand.

3 thoughts on “Approaches to Internet Research (& My Paper)

  1. Here’s a aliveblog in the comments section 😉

    Jeffrey Keefer
    Public transformations, adult learners who use social media to express and understand their identities as developing researchers
    Very interested in blogging and transparency. Interested in how people develop their thoughts and how this connects with identity. Not a lot about this in the literature.
    Limited study about the role of social media within higher education studies.
    How can we support that? What will we teach doctoral students?
    This is an exploratory ethnography. Uses frameworks about threshold contexts and transformative learning.
    Threshold concept is a concept within your field that you need to understand to move your work forward. An example is hegemony.
    Transformative learning is about when our world view no longer fits what we are learning.  This can happen immediately, or it can happen over time.
    Seeing blogging as an empowering experience of processing and sharing your own learning without having to gain formal approval for it.
    Carried out an ethnographic pilot study. Request for participants on his blog and through email distribution lists. Mainly contacted social scientists (in our research we have encountered the view that perceptions of the value of research blogging vary by discipline. Some scientists are very wary of revealing or discussing their data.)
    Wanted open blogs rather than people who were doing this in dark blogs or through password-protected posts.
    Carried out interviews through Skype and phone interviews.
    Interviews brought up seven main themes, top two related to blogging as a reflective and transformative practice, and also struggles with issues of belonging and not being understood (hmm, I focused on those two themes, and didn’t pick up on the other five that were on the slide.)
    Importance of comments and dialogues that helped the learners to make meaning of their experience. (literature about learning through dialogue. See Neil Mercer eg Words and Minds)
    This has been a pilot study. Short on literature (I have a ref somewhere for someone who wrote a PhD on the process of writing a pHD. That seems relevant in this context. I also make reference to the literature about the value of reflection and of research journals).

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