Challenges …

Today has been a bit of a challenging day in one way or another … I had back to back meetings in work and a headache so that just made it so hard to concentrate … so when I started on this evenings PhD work I found myself flitting around a bit so it has been a bit hit and miss.

Somehow in the middle of it all I decided it would be a good idea to revisit my CMALT blog ( another thing I am trying to get done ) and ended up faffing around with that for a couple of hours. ( Queen of procrastination) … What I should have been doing was trying to work on my proposal.

In fairness I did eventually try and work on my proposal but I didn’t get very far.

My stumbling block today is that I am struggling with identifying what I think my end ‘product’ will be at the end of the PhD. I remembered reading something that shed some light on how to work this out but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it.

I did a search of my Evernote notes, looked at my Notion.So database but just couldn’t find it. Then I googled it and still nothing …eventually I looked in my little pink sparkly note book that I usually use when I have had enough of the screen.

That’s where I found it … always the last place you look isn’t, but that wasn’t easy either … poor old notebook is a bit scrambled … a bit like my brain at the moment

I’ve now written a blog post so that I can find it again hopefully

but I am still no further on in working out what on earth I am actually supposed to achieve at the end of it …

one win I had was I remembered a padlet that I started ages ago where I started to pull together some stuff on emotional support – I popped this as a URL link on the side bar of the blog to remind me to actually look at it !

Hmmm…. off to cook kids tea now .. tomorrow is another day

See you Tomorrow

Establishing Contribution

You know that really frustrating moment when you know you have read something really cool somewhere but you stupidly can’t find your notes on it ? Yep I just had that… the good news is by some miracle I have now remembered that it was in a hand written note. I haven’t quite got around to scanning my handwritten notes in but maybe that is something I need to sort out quite rapidly !

Any how what I was looking for was a great article that helps you work out how you might be contributing to knowledge. I should have guessed that it would be by Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega @raulpacheco his blog is just so cool. He does some really great twitter threads where he posts stuff and integrates this with his blog.

The blog post in question is called Developing the core elements of a research proposal: Finding a gap in the literature, mapping contributions to scholarship. There is a ton of really helpful stuff in this article include his suggested 5 questions for what PhD Candidates need to be able to answer about their own research and questions that help you identify the gap in the literature.

The bit that I was trying to find is the bit where he talks about the sorts of contributions that might be the end product of the PhD ( at least I think that is what it means).

He suggests things like …

An Innovative Framework

Integration of Literature

Generation of new data or collecting data that wasn’t available in the present form

~ Dr Raul Pachego-Vega June 28 2018

So, food for thought …

Huge thank you yet again Dr Pacheco-Vega.

What Debbie Did …

So in my head I thought it would be a good idea to have a category that is just to record what I have done – hopefully on a daily basis as I have been trying to do something ( anything) each day for the last couple of weeks. I’ve mostly succeeded in this quest, but honestly I don’t know if it’s my age but I would really struggle to tell you what I have actually done and that is sooooo depressing ..

So just to kick start things off …

What Debbie did this weekend …

• Launched my new blog ( this one) and archived my old one
• Read some reports and papers from UNESCO covering COVID-19 – Web Page and Guidance on Open Educational Practices during School Closures: Utilizing OER under COVID-19 Pandemic in line with UNESCO OER Recommendation Rights and Permissions (Huang et al 2020)
• Worked on my proposal (again) to try and get it into a bit better shape
• Updated my new Notion.so database ( honestly this is really cool – I found out about it from Inger ( Thesis Whisperer) I’m gonna write a blog post about this soon ) Check this out – it’s got colour coding and everything !
• Oh yes I also discovered the Open Library – online e-books and it’s free ! never seen this before – managed to borrow Teaching Community : A pedagogy of hope by bell hooks !! I have 14 days to read it …

Quick screen grab of my Reference Page … each of these rows link to it’s own page with notes and stuff ..

• I also attempted to set up a google site – not quite sure why just have the feeling that a lot of my stuff is scattered all over the place ( might have been a bit of procrastination going on there ! )

Notion.so

If you want to know a bit more about Notion.so and can’t wait until I blog about it then check out this video from Sterling Osborne – he also has some templates that are really hand

References

Huang, R., Liu, D., Tlili, A., Knyazeva, S., Chang, T. W., Zhang, X., Burgos, D., Jemni, M., Zhang, M., Zhuang, R., & Holotescu, C. (2020). Guidance on Open Educational Practices during School Closures: Utilizing OER under COVID-19 Pandemic in line with UNESCO OER Recommendation. Beijing: Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University

My Research

My intention is that my research will explore the lived experiences of educators and their use of open educational practices within personal learning networks and whether or not this helps provide them with emotional support

Debbie Baff 2020

• I am blogging publicly because I believe in the power of open practice
• I will be writing about my journey and what I have done on my research
• I’d love to connect with other PHD researchers out there
• I would love to be in a position to have a draft of my thesis done by this time next year

Journey So Far

This is a copy of the the introduction that I wrote for my very first forum post when I started my PHD at Lancaster in 2017.

Hello by Debbie Baff – Monday, 16 January 2017, 13:39 

Hello everyone. I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s introductory posts. I have a feeling we are going to work really well together. 

My current role is as a Senior Academic Developer based in Swansea University in the Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching (SALT) in South Wales, UK.  My learners are my academic colleagues across the university in my quest to help them embed technology enhanced learning into their every day teaching   Prior to working at Swansea I project managed a national Open Education project in Wales on behalf of all the universities in Wales. I undertake a lot of volunteer work within the sector including being on the organising team for the weekly learning and teaching Twitter chats (#LTHEchat) . I’m secretary for the Association of Learning Technology Open Education special interest group (ALTOESIG #openedsig) and Co-Chair of ELESIG in Wales (Evaluation of Learners Experience of E-Learning ) committee. I’m also on several conference planning committees …

I’m also a course moderator /Facilitator for several different online community projects, for example this week I’m helping to facilitate the online bring your own device for learning course (#BYOD4L). Our topic today is Connecting so this very apt for all these introductory posts ! 

Im really interested in social and community online learning and how people are motivated to learn. I’m an advocate for Open Digital Badges and consider myself to be an Open Education Practitioner.  I love sketchnoting and trying out new things and meeting new people. I’m also slightly addicted to learning having done most of my education part time and online (mostly with the Open University ) 

Anyhow hope that gives you a little flavour of who I am for now …. looking forward to working with you all …in the meantime Here is a picture of one of my cats ‘helping’ me with my course work ! Enjoy …303 words

Things have changed a little bit. I’m now working as the Membership and Professional Development Manager at the Association for Learning Technology. I’m still involved in a lot of stuff in the community and I now find myself having passed all the modules in Part I and at the point where I am trying to get my proposal finalised.

I have decided to set up a new blog in an attempt to focus my mind on the next 18 months. The theory being that if I blog regularly it should help sort stuff out in my head ! I could have carried on with my old blog but if truth be told I just fancied starting afresh …

My old blog can be found here

Who am I ?

My name is Deb Baff and I am a PHD Student at Lancaster University. I’ve been doing my PHD since 2017. I hope to finish at the end of 2021.