TEASER: Benefits You will receive after participating

As part of my doctoral studies, members of staff from UK universities who participate will have access to a number of useful free resources. Here is a sample (teaser) of these resources:

Reviews of Useful Tools for use in Education

Nowadays, there are many tools and technologies that can be used by both teachers and students in universities or even schools. Therefore, I developed an interactive website where I write short reviews of some of these useful tools and technologies and give examples of how they can be used. Here is an example:

Many tools/technologies are reviewerd and categoried into different operatnig systems

Each tool/technology will have a summary along with any useful links (such as education discounts)

and specific rating

From 0 to 380,000 Fans: Can we use Social platforms in Education?

There is no more doubt today that social platforms can be used in education or to enhance learning. There are many examples of such social learning platforms including YouTube Education, iTunes University and much more.

I have been personally interested in how Facebook can be used to enhance or disseminate learning and useful resources. Therefore, back in 2009, I started an Arabic sceitfic research Facebook page. Now, I have over 380,000 fans and conting. This is all a personal effort! The Facebook page gained quite a lot of attention in the Middle East and it still do.

It is been almost 4 years now and I have gained quite a good experience from this. Therefore, I created a rich presentation of the good practices and lessons learned which I would like to share with you.

If I, as an idividual, was able to get this far and help educate thousands of people from over 15 countries, I am sure universities can benefit and achieve much better, especially since this can be used for marketing as well!

Use of Twitter in Education and Research

In addition to the two resources I have prepared for you above which I will share with you after taking part in the study, I would like to go ahead and share with you NOW some useful resources I came across recently. They are focusing on the social platform Twitter and how it can be used in education and research.

To thank you in advanced for participating in the study, here are the links:

• An extensive and useful guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities published by LSE.
• Using Twitter in Research by Salma Patel.
• Using Twitter in the classroom. Also, here is a similar one for the use of Twitter in Education.

If you are a member of staff working within any UK university, please go ahead and participate in the study to receive access to the rest of the free resources:

Participate in the study (Link will be updated soon)

: 22 Feb 2013 16:39 |  Tags: Benefits Doctoral Research Study |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Qualitative Research related blogs

Writing about web page http://merlien.org/news/qualblogs.html

A great list of qualitative research related blogs by Merlien institue. Can be found here.

Do you have any similar excellent resources? Share them please!

: 27 Jan 2011 18:00 |  Tags: Blogs Qualitative Research |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

NVivo 9 Tutorials

One of my friends told me that his friend suggested that he uses NVivo for management of sources and qualitative data analysis. I have never heard of NVivo before so I wanted to give it a try. I downloaded the software and installed but still didn't really have the time to give it a try.

Furthermore, while searching for relevant reviews. I found that there is a good number of people who have suggested the use of NVivo in Academic Research and most certainly by PhD students.

I am really interested in finding what others who have used/are using NVivo think about it. I know that there is a need for some coding, but since I am going through the new journal papers I am downloading I will probably scan be able to code quickly.

One of the advantages of using NVivo is that it allows me to see all the sources related to one node (Theme or topic). Which really saved time especially if you are talking about having 100s of papers in your library. Being able to assign certain parts of papers to different nodes/topics is a really nice and very helpful feature!

I don't want to waste a lot of my time learning about NVivo 9 and testing it until I know for sure that it can help. Therefore, I haven't started using it.

I am actually hoping that some members of staff or some visitors would shed some light as to if NVivo 9 is indeed helpfull for me as a PhD student or not.

So, if you have any experience using NVivo 9 or any previous version, please let me know how it was. Did it help you get better results? Was it worth it?

Below are a number of videos that explain certain basic parts in NVivo 9, in case you wanted to learn more about it.

Introductin & Overview

Importing Sources to NVivo 9

Linking Cases to Attributes in NViv

Connecting Sources to Demographics in NVivo 9

: 09 Dec 2010 00:09 |  Tags: Nvivo Qualitative Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Get Your Research Library Organised with Zotero

Writing about web page http://www.zotero.org/

Zoter.org:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Honestly, I find it one of the best tools available for researchers. really!

Zotero video:

Check Zotero's website for more information.

Zotero's features:

• Capture Research Data
• Archive the Web
• Store related PDFs, files, images, and links in your library
• Take Notes
• Drag and drop bibliographies anywhere: into an email, a blog post, or any word processor
• Plugins for Word and OpenOffice make it easy to drop in references on the fly
• Zotero comes preloaded with all major styles, and thousands of additional journal-specific styles are freely available
• Get the best of both worlds: Work locally with your research materials and automatically sync your data between multiple computers
• Even without Zotero, you can access your collection from any web browser. You can even view your collection on mobile devices like the iPhone.
• Share your research with the world and make your library and collections public
• Create group libraries to collaborate with other Zotero users
• And Many more...
  

So, What are you waiting for? Get Firefox if you don't have it and give Zotero a test drive :)!

: 05 Dec 2010 06:07 |  Tags: Bibliographies Citation Management References Research Tools Zotero |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

البحث العلمي

Writing about web page http://drhariri.com/blog/links/

قمت في موقع د. حريري و البحث العلمي بإنشاء دليل البحث العلمي، و الذي يتم من خلاله جمع العديد من الروابط للخدمات و المجلات و المنشورات العلمية المختلفة و أي مواقع علمية، و التي أقوم بزيارتها شخصيا أو يتم إقتراحها من قبل زوار الموقع.


إذا كان لديك أي روابط تود إقتراح إضافتها إلى دليل البحث العلمي، لا تتردد في زيارة دليل البحث العلمي، حيث ستجد في آخر الصفحة نموذج لإقتراح رابط جديد.

الأقسام المتوفرة في الدليل حتى الآن:

• المجلات و المنشورات العلمية
• مكتبات و محركات بحث الرسائل و الأطروحات
• مواضيع و توجيهات في جمع البيانات
• مواضيع و توجيهات في البحث العلمي
• محركات بحث عن المراجع العلمية
• أدوات مساعدة
  

: 03 Jul 2010 11:58 |  Tags: Arabic Links Research Resources |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Online Questionnaires (Arabic)

في موقع د.حريري الخاص بي، قمت بكتابة موضوع سيكون إن شاء الله من ضمن سلسلة مواضيع تتحدث عن الاستبيانات الإلكترونية.
سلسلة المقالات سأستعرض فيها إن شاء الله أحد الخيارات المقدمة من أحد المواقع القوية الرائدة في تقديم خدمات تصميم و نشر الاستبيانات أون لاين. سأحاول تكملة باقي مواضيع السلسلة في أقرب وقت إن شاء الله.

: 13 May 2009 04:26 |  Tags: Arabic Online Questionnaires Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Issues in designing my Questionnaire

I am trying to find a way to design my questionnaire for my MSc project, however, I am having some difficulties and wanted to post on my blog to see if there is anyone who have any suggestions for these.

Snap Survey Issues

Jeff Jones told me about how I could use Snap Survey software on any computer inside WMG to create my questionnaire and that it is possible then to publish it on the website. This is great, but to me, there is some issues here:

Two Different languages

Firstly, I am planning to create 2 versions of my questionnaire, one in English which will be sent to UK organisations, and the other one is Arabic, which is going to be sent to organisations from my country.

I was thinking about having an English version only but after asking around and thinking about it I realised that if I have an English version only, I would have less response from employees working in Saudi Arabia.

The reasons might be because they might not really understand the questions even though some of them might understand English.

I decided to come up with an Arabic version and try to do that and only decide not to do it if i could not find any ways to do it.

The first thing I need to do is to test Snap Survey to see if it can actually design questionnaire in Arabia. However, to do that, I need to try the software on a PC that have Arabic language installed.

I went to the guy in charge of licensing and he told me that it is not possible to get a copy of the software to install it on my laptop to test if this will work as the license is a network license. I asked him if there are any way to install the Arabic language on one of the PC's in WMG to test the software and thankfully he said I will check and I gave him my e-mail and hopefully this will be solved.

Website's Encoding

Secondly, there is an issue of publishing the questionnaire on WMG's website. I know from Jeff that the person in charge of this is called Peter, I could not meet him today but hopefully i will be able to do that when he is back. I will need to ask him about the possibility of publishing the Arabic version of the questionnaire on a webpage that uses the encoding UTF-8 rather than the current encoding ISO as Arabic will not be displayed using the later encoding.

Online Survey Services Alternatives

Graeme (Supervisor) suggested that I should try and search for other options that could support Arabic and English. I started searching and I found some Online Survey websites that offer some powerful and nice features, however, hopefully some of them will have support for Arabic language which could solve my issues and I would end up using them instead of Snap.

I took a look at Snap today in WMG computer lab. Maybe I didn't know how to use it yet, but some of these Online Survey services provide a very easy interface to design & create questionnaires.

The only issue with the online survey services is that I might need to pay for a 5 month's plan if I needed advanced features which are not probably available on their free testing packages.

I don't have a problem with that. but for the future students, I believe a solution for this should be implemented. Maybe specify some PC's in one of the computer labs and install all the languages on them. Like Indian, Chinese and Arabic or something like that which won't really cause any problems or take any space.

I am open for any suggestions or input!

: 02 Apr 2009 15:02 |  Tags: Questionnaire Research Snap |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem