Category: Research

Liveblogging 101

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 – 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

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Interpret Qualitative Research; Don’t Analyze It

I heard a great statement today, though I do not recall exactly who said it (I think it was an autoethnographic mailing list I follow), but I have been thinking about this all day:

We don’t analyze qualitative research, we interpret it. Only quantitative data can be analyzed.

That is one of the reasons I am so much fonder of qualitative work–interpretations can be very rich and can be done from a variety of perspectives. After all, how many interpretations have there been of the Bible or Shakespeare or even the Tarot? So much depends on experiences and assumptions, among other factors, that interpretation itself can even be interpreted.

Try doing that with quantitative research!

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Disciplinary Perspectives on Evidence-Based Practice: The More the Merrier

Research and Theory for Nursing PracticeAnother editorial I wrote with two of my colleagues, Joanne Singleton at Pace University and Rona Levin at Pace University and Visiting Nurse Service of New York, was just published in the current issue of Research and Theory for Nursing Practice, Volume 21, Number 4. Entitled Disciplinary Perspectives on Evidence-Based Practice: The More the Merrier, we considered the question:  What does evidence-based practice mean and how is it defined and used by various disciplines?

Do I smell a research thread around evidence-based practice, especially in the area of scholar-practitioners? Let’s see, where is my copy of Donald Schon’s Reflective Practitioner?

Is HRD Research Making a Difference in Practice?

Human Resource Development QuarterlyThe first article I have published as the lead author just came out in the Winter 2007 issue of Human Resource Development Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 4. HRDQ is the research journal of the Academy of Human Resource Development. The editorial is entitled Is HRD Research Making a Difference in Practice?, and I wrote it with my writing colleague, Robin Yap.

As scholar-practitioners, we are very interested in the bridge between research and practice, and how that affects organizations and how people function within them. We discussed the value of scholar-practitioners, those people who seek to bring the findings of research into practical use, so that decisions and processes within organizations have more than simply best practices to follow–they are supported by sound research that is in turn built upon applicable theory.

Our conclusion is that it is critical for the field of HRD that research positively impacts practice. After all, if it does not, then it belongs in the fascinating and grand but practically useless world of Plato’s Forms.

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Northern Voice 2008

I am considering attending Northern Voice 2008 in February. This is a Canadian blogging and social media conference that is very personal and personable. I met wonderful people there and had the opportunity to learn from many people who are very active in blogging, educational technology, and technology / social media consulting. I am considering proposing two ideas for discussion for the conference, both issues that I would like to discuss with others and learn more about (not to mention eventually research):

  1. Liveblogging – lots of people blog about events and conference while they are happening in real time, but there is little research about it. What do we know and what can we learn about this? Are there standards we can follow? Is there a way to make this more efficient or effective or useful for people? Are there limits in and around this?
  2. Tagging – we can tag blog posts, images, and even personal information. Are there any standards out there that can universally help people find this information? Should there be? How are people handling this now, and what else can we learn about this to make it more useful for others in our increasingly “social media” society? This issue was recently raised during a session in SCoPE, and I hope we can continue it F2F with others who could not join us online.

I hope others are interested in these two topics as well! I will propose them and hope for the best.

Northern Voice 2008

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