All entries for Sunday 24 January 2016

Research design, Research Conference, Conference Paper and Upgrade Paper!

Research Design: getting there!

When exploring learning processes there is a need to develop activities for the participants of the research so that the data can be generated for analysis. These activities need to be appropriate for the participants, relevant to their interests and have the design that encourages participation and therefore generate lots of data. The design of these activities therefore must be grounded in existing empirical literature. Thinking about and designing these activities have begun this past week, starting with a rough outline and what I want to achieve with them. I have thought about the topics, now what I need to do is explore these topics further so that I can create interesting scenarios within which learning processes can be assessed in ways that have not really happened before. These activities therefore are in their early stages of development and they need to be experimented with and amended as necessarily. What exactly shall be measured and assessed shall be partly presented in a conference paper at the next Post Graduate Warwick University conference, along with the Upgrade Paper and Upgrade Presentation, and also a full elaboration, justification, and critique of existing relevant assessment processes in the Thesis and future research papers.

This has led to an interesting observation in that there appears to be quite an interesting approach taken to designing a Ph.D. project in the sense that there appears to be some sort of ordering to the decisions that are made, and that each decision that is made influences the next decision or in some way guides the next step in the design making process of a Ph.D. research design. I have indicated something like this in previous blog posts where I discussed the relationship between Ontology, Epistemology and Methodology but my ideas of this are developing and I think I will come back to this in a future blog post.

Research Conference and Upgrade Paper

Had an email the other day saying that planning and organising of this year’s Post Graduate conference at Warwick University shall begin soon, which means that I shall be starting to write the conference paper from the day that planning begins. Well, I say write but it’s more like planning the outline and structure of the paper first before actually writing it. As I have mentioned before, the conference paper shall be in part based on ideas that were presented in the second ARM assignment and relevant ideas were appreciated by the supervisor therefore these shall be more fully explored in the conference paper. The conference paper and the presentation at the conference shall relate at this time more or less exclusively to the questionnaire, and there are plans to transform it into a research paper but this is something that I shall have to investigate further soon.

Construction of the conference paper shall occur along with the construction of the Upgrade paper and work has continued on this during the week. Even though it is due in September, it is such an important document that it is best to start planning the paper early along with writing rough drafts of various sections of the paper just to get ideas down of what is going to be explained in which section, and therefore setting down quite early some of the directions of the paper. The word requirement is around four thousand words and there is a fair bit to do in preparation of writing some sections of the paper so an early start is fine. The paper is important because it is part of the Upgrade process, the result of which shall consider the suitability and feasibility of my research and therefore whether or not the research project is worthy of being upgrading from working towards Master of Philosophy to Doctor of Philosophy.

That’s it for this post so ‘till next time: Easter eggs are starting to roll out!

Alex Darracott : 24 Jan 2016 23:09 |  Tags: Conference Design Upgrade |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem