Esquemas de Intereses Marítimos, soluciones y medios

Utilising social media is not entirely new to academia, with a growing number of scholars adapting and adopting its various forms for research (Collin & Hide, 2010, as cited in Gruzd, Staves & Wilk, 2012). In 2011, social media overshadowed email as a communication tool, and is continuing to reach new heights as the preferred method of communication (Henderson, 2011). To disregard the exponential rise of such a useful tool could be considered a fallacy. However, Brydon (2010) poses several interesting questions with regard to the use of social media, where she asks what it is about social media that makes humanists cautious about embracing its potential for the advancement of research, learning and teaching; and also where the caution is justified, and where the opportunities are missing for the advancement of our work. The stance that I took to using social media is one of simplicity. I do not divulge any personal information of any person who has contributed their thoughts to my ideas, other than state what is already available in the public domain. Any personal communication that is not public (i.e email, personal message, inbox, direct message) is first cleared by the contributor (i.e their consent is obtained), and they will be asked whether they wished to remain anonymous or be named in any presentation of data. As long as the rights of privacy and propriety are maintained, they should remain a non-issue in my research, as large quantity of it revolves around my own experiences and reflections.

In the course of my research, I utilised three forms of online social media, and they are Facebook, Twitter and my personal and PhD blogs. These tools were used in two ways. Firstly I used writing in them as a method of crystallising my thoughts, using Margot Ely’s (2003) style of writing as part of the research process. An interesting quotation in her writing attracted my attention as she was discussing the focus of her paper: “After all, why do I introduce this piece with thoughts on A and R when, clearly, I am writing about something else? Or am I?” (Ely, 2003, p. 216). This seemed such an interesting way to work out how thoughts connected to each other in the process of writing, and it was done in a way that was accessible and thought provoking at the same time, which is what I tried to include in my social media posts.

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Secondly, I also utilised social media as a means of collecting other people’s thoughts as data, as much as a questionnaire or an interview. These ranged from questions regarding people’s opinions regarding teaching techniques, to how to effectively structure a research chapter. An example of this can be seen below.

[Research related question]

I am a bit stuck in the writeup of my research at the moment, and wondering if any of my friends can help. I have a case study that I have divided into 2 parts - the pilot study and the main study. For the pilot study I have chosen to describe and discuss lesson by lesson as there are only 3 lessons. This is no problem.

Problem now starts as I am describing the main study, which has roughly 10 lessons running over the course of 3 weeks. How would you propose I describe and discuss them? lesson by lesson? thematically?

This is going to get even more complicated as I hope to do one final longitudinal study that will hopefully run over the course of 3 months. No way am I going to go lesson by lesson on that one. Would appreciate all feedback on this.

Keywords of my study are qualitative, reflective practice, reflexive, multiple case-study, action research.

Christopher McMaster Asmara Romola Rassool Manja Che Mustafa Lizee Wong Faizah Mohamad Nor & anyone else who can share a moment or two to give feedback.

Thanks a million!

Kofi Acheaw Owusu What was the case you were studying? For example, if you studied 4 teachers over the period you can treat each teacher as a case and describe what he or she did over the period. Or you can use the weeks as the cases and describe what went on within each week.

Like·Reply·February 14 at 11:35pm via mobile

Abdullah Mohd Nawi Oh sorry - forgot to put that in. I thought it was implied through the keyword reflective practice. To summarise, I am studying - 1) what happened in the classroom when I was teaching; 2) Me, my own observations on my practice; 3) the students' reactions; 4) the students' learning.

There are of course other complex things in between but for now these are the main things that I am looking at. Like·Reply·February 14 at 11:39pm

Abdullah Mohd Nawi In terms of the cases - I have 3 embedded cases. 2 completed, and 1 more to do. Each case gets its own chapter. Case 2 is rather complex as it is divided into 2 parts. The second is the longer part. And the division between weeks is not clear as some parts cross over to the next week, otherwise a weekly division would be quite a good idea.

Like·Reply·February 14 at 11:42pm

Kofi Acheaw Owusu You seem to have very nice themes already. Why don't you go along the lines you've enumerated? What happened in class, your observations, students' reactions and their learning. You can then lump the lessons together and bring out unique things that need to be highlighted.

Unlike·Reply·1·February 14 at 11:44pm via mobile

Abdullah Mohd Nawi Thanks for your suggestion mate! That would be one way to go about it! Like·Reply·Friday at 12:03am

Amir Sadeghi I think themes would read better. I also suggest to put a section at the beginning of the chapter as methodology where you explain how the data was collected (some info such as time frame and the number of the lessons). The lessons you have been through could all be pilled up as appendices. While reflecting, I think a couple of examples from the lessons would be great.

Like·Reply·Friday at 12:33am

Abdullah Mohd Nawi Thanks Amir.. I have already included (I think) what I was going to do in the methodology chapter. Do you think I should go over the points again in this chapter as well? If I were to do it according to themes, then it's going to be: Theme - what happens that supports this theme - detailed examples from the lessons? At them moment one of the questions that I am thinking of is how much detail? I know it sounds stupid, and that the appropriate answer would be 'as much as you need', but it's kind of hard to gauge, especially for cases that run over a lengthy period of time.

Like·Friday at 2:25am

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Amir Sadeghi Every chapter should stand independently but don't be repetitive (this would be either boring for your reader or would shift the focus of the work). A very short summary with ref. to the chapter you have explained these lessons in details would do the job, I think.

Like·Friday at 9:29am

Abdullah Mohd Nawi A short reference. Noted. Cheers bro. Like·Friday at 9:30am

Christopher McMaster For coherence and arguement it seems themes are the way to go, otherwise you would probably get bogged down. The lessons could act as an introduction, but what happened in each lesson is not what your study is about, its the themes like Kofi and Amir said.

Like·Reply·Friday at 7:50am

Abdullah Mohd Nawi Lesson as introduction. That sounds good. What would you propose? - I have 3 teaching models that I use. They aren't central to the thesis, but they are every bit as important as everything else. I guess that is one of the complexities if this particular research that I'm doing. It would have been easier to isolate the variables (if this were a quantitative research), and have 1 model, with 3 identical case studies. Here I have 1 teaching method with 3 models of application, win 3 case studies that are related but not exactly a duplicate of each other.

SO the selection of the lessons does get a bit complicated. Like·Reply·Friday at 9:40am

Figure 2: Using social media for collaborative feedback

The above illustration, taken from my Facebook page which was accessible to all my contacts, merely serves to provide readers with an idea of how the communication takes place. However, in the presentation of data and the ensuing discussion, the feedback and insights obtained will be presented in prose, and tied in with the immediate discussion at hand.

I also kept a blog that I wrote selected entries on, that was accessible to the general Internet community. Once I had written a blog entry, I posted a link on Facebook, inviting my contacts to read the blog. An additional reason for doing this was also that the blog invited readers to participate in discussion about the entry that I had posted. They became my critical friends, albeit at a slightly more random level. An example of this can be seen in an entry where I talk about my insecurity being a researcher and practitioner who found out that he did not know as much as he did. One of the responses I got was as follows (the response has been shortened and identifying markers omitted):

Thanks Bro Abdullah for this entry. It resonates with me because I have had a similar journey from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown’. The known in my case (as in your case) is English language teaching, as that is what I do professionally…I realised that there is an entire (ever-growing) field of literature on language ideologies, linguistic anthropology, and language & identity, and that I knew nothing about any of those things...This led to an almost debilitating sense of worthlessness…Now I am in the last six months of my PhD journey. I have got the help of a stats consultant for the stats part of my thesis, I have read a fair amount of the literature I previously knew nothing of, and I am constantly learning that I have more to learn. But do I feel as worthless as I did earlier? Probably not. Because I know I will finish what I began and because my supervisor believes in what I am writing (although most often I don’t). [Blog response 21.9.12]

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What was interesting about this response was that it managed to achieve two things: first, it helped to remotivate me and put me back on track; and second, it served as an entry point for me to re-examine my own lenses on not only my own research, but also on how my research was connected to other fields of knowledge, and with other people in the world. Nevertheless, I also had to be careful with what I wrote, as the blog had no restrictions of access. As mentioned earlier, the blog posts were selective, taking into account the sensitivity of the topic, and omitting any personal details of participants to ensure their anonymity.

While opinions of informed outsiders that were obtained from social media were important, they were not ends in themselves, but were used as a spring board to prompt my own thought processes into making new observations and conclusions about the data that had been gathered.