Tag: Research

My new work blog and other RSS goodies.

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Spurred by several things including our most recent JISC infoNet planning meeting and Will Richardson’s decision to quit long-form blogging at Weblogg-ed and move to Tumblr, I’ve set up a work blog at http://dajbelshaw.tumblr.com

The theme hopefully reflects how I want to use it – as a visual snapshot of my research. Rest assured that, unlike Will, I’ll still be blogging here as well. I love writing. My work blog is more for clipping and quickly commenting on stuff relating to Open Educational Resources, Mobile Learning and Digital Literacies (my 3 main research areas).

As a reminder, you can also find other posts by me at:

I’ve collated the RSS feeds for my research and original writing in two separate über-feeds (which you can also subscribe to via email if you click through):

Doug’s Writing Feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/DougsWritingFeed)

Doug’s Research Feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/DougsResearchFeed)

I’ve updated the sidebar at dougbelshaw.com/blog to make these quick and easy to find. For those people wanting to do something similar, RSSmix seemed to be lot easier and hassle-free than fiddling with Yahoo! Pipes…

From my research: New Literacies around the world

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

In case you’ve not subscribed to the RSS feed yet, I’m updating my new blog literaci.es regularly with the outputs from my ongoing Ed.D. work:

‘Digital literacy’ in Norway?

The history and status of digital literacy in Norway is complex. The term is presumed by English-speaking researchers and educators to mean, in a straightforward way, the same in Norwegian as it does in English. However, given the difficulty in translating words such as ‘literacy’ into Norwegian, and words such as ‘kompetanse’ from Norwegian, ‘media literacy’ is a term preferred increasingly to ‘digital literacy’.

New literacies (or the lack of them) in Singapore

In this standards-based, heavily-pressured educational culture – a society where, anecdotally, painkillers are stocked alongside exam-preparation books (Bracey, 2008) – it is unsurprising to find the dominant ‘new literacy’ to be Media Literacy. In addition, much of the available research literature into new literacies comes from, or through the lens of, Singapore’s National Institute of Education.

Digital Media Literacy in Australia

The seeming Australia-wide agreement on Digital Media Literacy as the accepted form of New Literacies is explained in part by Gibson (2008). He gives an overview of the ‘literacy wars’ in Australia, quoting Ilyana Snyder on how the press and professional journals keep alive the debates between conservatives and progressives (Snyder, 2008). The battleground over different forms and manifestations of traditional (print) literacy allows, suggests Gibson, Digital Media Literacy to show “some promise of a revival of educational optimism” (Gibson, 2008, p.74).

The USA: a New Literacies desert?

Due to the standards-based, testing culture in US schools, NYC’s approach is understandable. They have adopted the publication of an authoritative body who, in turn, have reacted to an environment created by US educational policy in the wake of NCLB. Such an environment stresses the importance of being ‘information literate’ and focuses on the traditional basics but, perhaps, at the expense of a cohesive programme for New Literacies.

5 free, web-based tools to help you be a kick-ass researcher.

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

I do a lot of research. Not only is my day job Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet but when I go home I’m researching and writing as part of my doctoral thesis. Quantity and quality are different measures, but I’d hope that I’m at least half-decent at something I spend a fair amount of my life doing.

Being a researcher before the internet must have been a very difficult occupation. Much less access to information but, I suppose, on the other hand, it must have been a much more ’embodied’ existence than spending hours mediated by several different kinds of screens. Without a focus it’s very easy to become confused very quickly and be like a dog chasing after shiny cars.

My focus at the moment, as shown by dougbelshaw.com/research is upon:

Open Educational Resources
Mobile Learning
Digital Literacy

I use several tools to stay up-to-date in these areas and to discover new resources. Here’s five of the best:

Twitter + Storify

This goes without saying: Twitter is my social dashboard and an absolute treasure trove of useful information. The important thing is that it’s a network (of networks) of people who have expertise, influence and opinion.

Recently I’ve started using Storify to, for want of a better phrase, ‘curate tweets’ about stuff I’m researching. Here’s an example for iPad mindmapping apps. Asking a question, getting replies, curating them and re-sharing helps everybody.

LinkedIn Signal

This feels like, in a phrase Ewan McIntosh used five years ago, giving away some kryptonite as LinkedIn Signal is truly amazing for researching specific terms. It’s based on your LinkedIn connections, which I’m careful to keep based on people I’ve met. It shows your relation to that person but also the most discussed links about that search term.

Try it. You’ll love it.

Amplify

Amplify is for ‘clipping’ content from websites and adding your comments to it. You can find my most recent clippings in the sidebar of this blog. The power of Amplify, however, is twofold: (i) the people you follow who often post things you wouldn’t come across, and (ii) the search functionality.

Futurelab’s EducationEye

The ever-innovative Futurelab have recently announced EventEye, a paid-for version of EducationEye for (unsurprisingly!) events. EducationEye is a service that pulls in posts from blogs (including this one) and arranges them in a visually pleasing and useful way.

Again, there’s a search function available but it’s also handy for serendipitous dipping in and out of in order to keep up with the zeitgeist.

Quora

I use Quora about once per week. It’s a social question-and-answer site where people can vote answers up and down and summarise answers once there’s plenty of responses. It can work very well and there’s an extremely diverse mix of people on there. It’s certainly worth ‘tracking’ questions to see what kinds of responses they get and from whom.

Conclusion

So there we are! Five recommendations of tools that help me be a better researcher. What have I missed?

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stuck in Customs