Fin de la nuit

I can see some positivies and negatives about writing up my first experience with Ning. It was a practical attempt to understand the platform and to see whether it would appropriate for teaching and learning. So in terms of usability I learnt something (which included recognising how powerful Bb is in terms of forum management, even it is not very user-friendly). There was no actual research goal. But who says that action research can reflect back as well as forward? The contributors were not 'representative' in the sense that they did not look like a normal cohort. They were representative in another way: they include past, current and prospective students. The activities were not traditional learning activities (ie no learning outcome planned), but a gathering of views on the level of interest in social media for organisational purposes. The experience made me aware of the need for a social media policy for universities. It's all very well to have uni policy (not at ...

Last night in on the train, I had an idea about my PhD work. Since it is an action research project, there will be different cycles. Who says where the cycle starts? So I thought I'd include my experiences with the online focus group that I held last June. In many ways, this was 'square one' since the group discusssed the potential and possible issues for the then proposed SMUO module. Obviously it wasn't set up to be part of the PhD work, so it was a 'naturally occurring event', but still, it is was gave me the PhD idea in the medium term. Here's what I wrote in the SHU CoLab Ning by way of analysis of this first Ning experience. I used Ning last summer as a platform for an online focus groups that brought together a group of past, current and prospective students. The point was to find out their views on a proposed DL pg module, which with their help, ended up being named 'social media uses in organisations'. I hadn't done that kind of on...