Presenting my research

I presented my work to a range of folks at the weekly CoCo seminar last Wednesday, and was very happy with how it went. I received some great feedback from the folks present, and felt very encouraged. The recording should be online soon, here.

Some of the issues raised were:

• timing: it was mentioned that it was still early days, and I shouldn't be surprised at the lack of uptake. Also, that I should take into account how my releases interact with existing timetables (are students on break, or busy with exams? Will starting afresh with a new batch of first years next year mean I have a new cohort with a fresh perspective?)
• finding a champion: rather than promoting the system myself, would it be possible to find a student (or students) who might promote the project among their peers? Could the students' society perform this function?
• other studies: Karen mentioned a range of other studies she has read about that deal with similar situations - using social networking tools in medical education.

It was a very friendly, positive session, and I was very grateful for the constructive and helpful attitudes of all present.I've got a good amount of food for thought - I'll have to listen to the recording myself, and make notes on what followup actions I need to take.

Thoughts on Design Research

I had a very interesting discussion with my supervisor about Design Research today. He pointed out what should have been a bit more obvious to me than it was; that the problems I'm facing are kind of inherent in my methodology, Design Research.

Design Research is one of the various flavours of Design-Based-Research (a good taxonomy of the various kinds of DBR is given in Wang & Hannafin (2005)). What I'm doing seems to be a bit unusual, in that most DBR seems to be conducted in a setting where the participants have to participate - it's in their classroom, or they have been signed up to participate for some other reason. Not participating in the research has to be done actively - the participants don't just have the option of ignoring the research, they actually need to refuse. In my study, I'm providing tools in a system the students are using, but they don't have to use my tools.  I haven't found anything in the literature about Design Based Research under these conditions. I'll need to conduct a more exhaustive study, to see how other researchers have tackled this problem. Another difference from traditional DBR is that the teachers aren't pushing it; the teachers don't even see my system, and aren't out there in lectures encouraging students to use it, so I'm missing the Teaching Presence component of the Community of Inquiry framework (a model that attempts to explain the success of failure of online learning communities, introduced by  Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (1999)). Part of what I was hoping to do was show that these systems can work well without the Teaching Presence component, if designed well enough, and if the barriers to usage were low enough.

My study is meant to be based around analyzing the usage of the system in order to improve it. My current situation, however, is that I'm getting very little data (and what there is seems to be indicative of students exploring a system to see what they can get out of it). This means I have nothing on which to base judgements about useful functionality. So, it seems I have two choices (I was loosely aware of this, but today's discussion clarified it):

1. Keep trying to improve the design, until it gets good enough that students want to use it.
2. Promote it to students (perhaps with bulletins, or a visit to the lecture, where I can give a ten minute intro to the system, and encourage them to use it). 

Option 1 is risky - I run the risk of the students just not choosing to use the system. Option 2 means injecting some Teaching Presence into the experiment, which I'm not sure I'm ready to do yet.

Social networks (rather obviously) are built around network effects. In other words, the usage of a social networking tool depends more on whether other people you know are using the system, than on the qualities of the system itself. I don't use Facebook because it's the social network with the best set of features (it probably isn't); I use it because my friends and family are using it. The reason I almost never use Google+ because pretty much no-one I know uses it (I visit it once a month or so for my good friend Evelyn's excellent rants). To kick-start the use of my network, I need to get some initial usage going, and then not only will I be able to improve it based on analysis of that usage, but that initial set of users will draw others in. Of course, I'll have problems separating out the two effects - the snowball vs. the improved interface - but that's the kind of problem it would be good to have.

One last possibility is that the current cohorts see this as something that isn't much use to them; they survived perfectly well before it was introduced, and therefore don't have any real drive to explore it. There's the potential that next year's incoming first years might take it up to a greater extent, since as far as they're concerned, it's just another part of the system, and it has always been there.

So, where to from here. Firstly, some more thinking about this situation - even without much usage, I might be able to pull together a perfectly decent thesis about the methodological issues of DBR in this unusual context. Certainly, I need to delve more deeply into the literature to see who has tried DBR in similar contexts, and how they handled it. Perhaps even into literature around software development, and how usage of software takes off - what is more effective: having the best software, or having the best publicity?

References:
Garrison, DR, Anderson, T & Archer, W 1999, ‘Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education’, The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 2, no. 2-3, pp. 87–105.
Wang, F & Hannafin, MJ 2005, ‘Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments’, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 5–23.

Presenting my work

I'm learning that actual research is only half the job of being a researcher. The other half is explaining what you've found to others - in publications, conferences, seminars, and so on. Research doesn't magically disseminate; it's the researcher's job to push it out into the world, and make people take notice. The most successful researchers aren't necessarily those with the best ideas - you need to be able to convince others of the ideas as well.

As part of my PhD, I have to present my work. I have to present it at least twice at conference-type settings (including the research student conferences within the Faculty). I'm also expected to present once or twice in the CoCo seminar series, which is the seminars being given within the research group I'm studying in.

I presented this year in June at the research student conference. It was good - I wasn't yet in The Rut, and it was good to talk about my work to other students (and a couple of staff). I had my usual public speaking nerves, but nothing too much. My next presentation is at the CoCo seminar, and I'm wondering how I'll approach it. I don't want to give the same presentation, since the audience is different. These folks are all very smart, and are experts in the areas around my subject area. I'll need to present some of my data (what little there is), and what I'm doing, but apart from that I've got a lot of options:

• Focus on social networking
• Focus on Design Research
• Focus on design
• Focus on my data
• Give a broad overview, and skip details

It's a tricky set of choices. I should be approaching it as a way of getting good feedback, and therefore exposing all my weaknesses; but as a PhD student, I've got a reasonably strong dose of Imposter Syndrome (heh, I just had a quick read of that wikipedia entry, and it actually says "It is commonly associated with academics and is widely found among graduate students"), and in the annoying recesses at the back of my brain, I'm worried they'll tar and feather me and run me out on a rail. I know it won't be that bad, and folks there will be supportive, so in a way I'm also looking forward to it.

Oh well, I'd better start working on my slides...

The Rut

Things have been progressing a lot more slowly over the last month- two months ago I wrote with all the excitement of a giddy teenager's first crush about productivity. I'm now experiencing the flip side of that - full cognizance of my lack of productivity. Having a weekly schedule of what I need to do means I'm much more aware of what I'm not doing.

In a sense, I'm not too worried (though maybe that's a symptom of my malaise). I know what is causing this rut:

1. Work-related stress: my new role at work means I'm learning a lot of new things, and management makes me feel like I'm failing a lot. The annoying thing is that I don't think they'd satisfied regardless of my actual performance; it's just that their motivational method is to tell you you're not performing well. Sadly, that's almost the ideal way to make me feel awful all the time. It's exhausting, and I've felt ill for most of the last three months because of it.
2. The lack of uptake my students of my system:
   that's right, no posts for four weeks. The download graph is a little less depressing, but not much.
3. Oddly enough, my annual progress review (about a month ago). It felt good as I did it, as my productivity systems were working well, and I could report that I was making good progress. In actuality, I am making good progress; I'm the equivalent if 1.1 years into a 3-4 year PhD, and I'm gathering data, I've passed my Thesis Proposal, completed ethics etc. Technically, that's good progress. It just doesn't feel that way
   

So, it feels like I'm in what The Thesis Whisperer calls the Valley of Shit. I seem to be struggling my way out (I've had two productive evenings of the last four, and I'm PhD blogging for the first time in a month, even if it is just a giant whinge). I've got better data analysis happening (though I'm way behind where I'd hoped to be). Hopefully, I'll be posting here in another week. I've got to go and plan the next release of my software.