Research conversations

Hmmm, it seems that being too busy to write and not having much to write about at the forefront of my mind, I'm resorting to a lot of audio blog posts. And also blog posts about teaching.

Anyway, the feedback I get from my distance learning (and on-campus students for that matter) is that they love the wealth of materials, including my teaching notes (which I'll make OA this year, all being well) but that they really like the small bits of more multimedia stuff I do and would like podcasts. Now, the trouble being I really don't want to record my lectures. This is for two reasons. Firstly, Tara Brabazon's horrific account of poorly recorded lectures in the University of Google and secondly my classes are reasonably small, and thus very interactive, which doesn't lend itself to recorded lectures.

However, I had a bright idea. I bring in colleague's research expertise to help teach my course, so I figured I could interview them, or have a conversation with them, and other colleagues who are research experts, and record these as podcasts. I did recorded my first two over the summer and have only just got round to editing them. The first is with my colleague Dr Jenny Roe, now predominantly at the University of York. In listening to it while editing it I was struck by how good and interesting it was, IMHO. So, I thought I'd share the pleasure and upload it for you all to enjoy:

Reflections on teaching practice - seen exams

In a continuation of my series of dull, quickly written, Friday evening blog posts that get very little attention, I thought I'd include this. A lot of my colleagues are having to move to exam-only assessment in their courses (don't ask). When I started here I was given a course to teach which included an exam. I didn't realise I could change the assessment method, so stuck with the exam. However, to assess a broader set of learning outcomes I used a seen exam instead.

I discussed my experience of using seen exams in a short talk as part of the research institute seminars I organise recently. Now, firstly, I'm not clever enough to match up the audio recording to the slides (or have enough time to do it) so you'll have to listen to the audio, listen out for the pauses while I change slides, and follow the slides here. Secondly, I was last of four speakers and we were running late, this is why I'm talking so fast it's like my life depends on it.



Enjoy! (you also get to see what I look like and hear my voice)

The paper that never got there

The very wonderful Kean Birch, (well worth following on the Twitter) does something very interesting. On this page on his blog he puts up PDFs of papers that were rejected by journals and the referees comments.

When I first came across this I was quite inspired to follow, but also a little bit scared. To be frank, I was ashamed of my rejected papers as I could see they had been rejected on valid grounds.

But, I'm not with it this afternoon, so I've created a PDF of one of my papers that was rejected entitled "Ways of Seeing". It's on Google Drive, help yourself, but drop me a line if you want to cite it (don't know why you would, mind). As you'll quickly gather it was heavily inspired by this paper co-authored by my PhD examiner Dvora Yanow. Basically, I took their painting metaphor, which I thought was useful, and certainly helped me a lot, and took it further to also explore reflexivity through a metaphor of art appreciation.

I also submitted it to Organization Studies. And, well, basically, it didn't even get to peer review. The editorial board knocked it back, primarily because I'd missed a load of papers in OS about reflexivity that I've never found the time to read. I was also getting quite rusty on the literature by then. Frustratingly, I do wonder if it would have got published if I'd got it to the journal in say, 2009, straight after my PhD, rather than in 2011.

Anyway, make of it what you will.

Planning failures