{"id":40287,"date":"2017-08-28T13:03:38","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T20:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=40287"},"modified":"2017-08-28T13:13:08","modified_gmt":"2017-08-28T20:13:08","slug":"blogging-research-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/blogging-research-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging research projects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-40291\" src=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/researchblogging.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"698\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/researchblogging.png 698w, https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/researchblogging-250x143.png 250w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 698px) 100vw, 698px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I am often asked about the ways in which I use blogs for research purposes. I take this question to mean I should talk about something other than the usual blogging that I do. So here goes.<\/p>\n<p>I have played around with various research-related blogging strategies. Here are two that seem to have worked fairly well for me and colleagues:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Blogging a serial-style literature review<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Research partners are invited to tune in each week to a shortish post which is one section of a literature review. Over time, the full literature review is posted.<\/p>\n<p>An example \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/performingimpactproject.wordpress.com\">the performing impact project<\/a>\u00a0looked at the ways in which community theatre companies might learn more about the impact they had on participants. We invited a small group of community theatre practitioners to join us in thinking about how formative evaluation might be a useful way to do this. Our first step was to generate ideas from the literature which might be used for thinking about the various stages of developing a play and a performance. We blogged these ideas each week and suggested that our theatre partners might like to read some of the posts before they came to a workshop. They did. And while no one had read all of the posts, everyone had selected those posts which seemed most interesting to them. We discussed their chosen ideas in the first part of a two-day workshop, before going on to think about the practicalities of actual evaluation.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Blogging appreciative stories<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An example \u2013 a current project, <a href=\"https:\/\/researchtale.net\">TALE<\/a>, funded by Arts Council England, is a three-year study of teachers and students engaged in performing and visual arts. Our partners are the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsc.org.uk\/education\/impact-and-research\/tracking-arts-engagement-and-learning\">Royal Shakespeare Company<\/a>\u00a0Education team (who direct the project) and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/learn\/teachers\">Tate Schools and Teachers<\/a> team. As we visit our thirty schools we write a short impressionistic post about an aspect of the visit. These snapshots are intended to give an idea of the interesting practice going on in each school in and through the arts. We know that our funder finds these posts interesting, as do the schools involved. There are also some other arts researchers and school practitioners who read the posts.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s important to note that we did not set out to reach a wide audience using these research blogs. But both examples do have a <strong>very clear sense of audience and purpose<\/strong>. They both aim to engage partners involved in the research, plus an immediate and small audience beyond. The posts are frequent enough to be anticipated, perhaps be a novelty \u2013 and not so far apart that our partners forget about them.<\/p>\n<p>Each of our two blog types is tightly focused and the posts are also similarly narrow in content. Each performing impact post for instance addressed one idea in the literatures. Each <a href=\"https:\/\/researchtale.net\">TALE<\/a> post describes a particular school and an event, conversation and\/or practice.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/performingimpactproject.wordpress.com\">performing impact project<\/a> blog also now contains a report of the final workshop and, as the project has now well and truly ended, it has become an <strong>open access archive<\/strong>. The site still gets a few visitors each week; visitors seem to find the posts germane to their interests, as they usually look at more than one post and page. Our\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alternativeducationresearch.wordpress.com\">quality in alternative education <\/a>research\u00a0project took \u00a0a similar approach \u2013 we posted a literature review and case studies \u2013 and it gets similar continued, but minor, ongoing traffic.<\/p>\n<p>These two kinds of blogs have modest aims. They aim in the first instance to\u00a0<strong>support the community engaged in the research<\/strong> itself, rather than a more general public. They are an ongoing means of communication about progress. They do what we might once have tried to do \u2013 less successfully in my experience \u2013 through a project newsletter. The posts are intended to create interest as well as share some initial ideas with the research project community. The blogs are also<strong> a form of accountability<\/strong> to the participants, and to the funder \u2013 they can see what we are doing and where.<\/p>\n<p>But we are\/were also clear about what these kinds of blogs are <i>not<\/i>. The two examples I\u2019ve given were not research blogs concerned with organisational questions about who, what and when \u2013 we manage logistical concerns via email and telephone. Nor were they to garner public interest. Some research blogs do aim to publicise events, but ours weren\u2019t\/aren\u2019t those kinds of projects. We weren\u2019t\/aren\u2019t concerned to build up a huge network or to inform public opinion during the research \u2013 that comes later in the case of TALE.<\/p>\n<p>The key questions we asked of ourselves as we established these research blogs were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What specific community do we want to engage?<\/li>\n<li>What aspects of the research do we want them to know about?<\/li>\n<li>What aspects of the research will they be most interested in?<\/li>\n<li>What format is most appropriate?<\/li>\n<li>How frequently do we need to post?<\/li>\n<li>What off line conversations do we want to support via the blog?<\/li>\n<li>How will we let our community know about the posts when they publish?<\/li>\n<li>How will we tell other interested people that the blog exists?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We do the obvious things to<strong> let people know<\/strong> about the research blogs \u2013 we tweet about each post, and we notify our friends and colleagues via facebook. We put the links on our email signatures, and publicise posts through our university twitter accounts and on our university home pages and school websites. Our partners also tweet and make the links available on their own websites.<\/p>\n<p>The <strong>archive function<\/strong> of research blogs is also important. While there is a lot of fretting about personal blogs becoming dormant, completed research blogs are more like any other completed research project \u2013 their reports are available as a resource for those interested in the topic.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes archived projects are useful in other funding applications and in related work \u2013 they act as <strong>evidence of previous activity<\/strong> that is being built on. Our <a href=\"http:\/\/getwet.org.uk\">GetWet <\/a>website for example is an archive of two-year action research project: it stems from a long-term partnership with a local museum. Other subsequent water and museum projects always refer back to this original archived activity. Ditto our research on artists working in schools, the \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/signaturepedagogies.org.uk\">Signature Pedagogies project.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>And, it has to be said, as we start to put together an <strong>impact case study<\/strong>\u00a0(REF, UK) for our overall arts education research, the combined \u2018effects\u2019 of all of the research websites and blogs come into play. While a blog or website is not in itself an impact, it can be an important step along the way.<\/p>\n<p>But research projects always lead to other forms of publication produced in addition to blogs. And when the books and papers and more mainstream media articles appear, the blogs then become a kind of<strong> multi-media appendix<\/strong> which can be explored by interested readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am often asked about the ways in which I use blogs for research purposes. I take this question to mean I should talk about something other than the usual blogging that I do. So here goes. I have played around with various research-related blogging strategies. Here are two that seem to have worked fairly [&hellip;]\n&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/blogging-research-projects\/\" class=\"more\">learn more&rarr;<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":40291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[12383],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-40287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-blogging"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Blogging research projects - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/blogging-research-projects\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Blogging research projects - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I am often asked about the ways in which I use blogs for research purposes. I take this question to mean I should talk about something other than the usual blogging that I do. So here goes. I have played around with various research-related blogging strategies. 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The past 28 years have been involved in publishing to the education sector in print and the internet. Kevin has a degree in Education and has a many years experience in developing companies and projects.\",\"sameAs\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/world.edu\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/world.edu\\\/author\\\/kevin\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Blogging research projects - World leading higher education information and services","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/world.edu\/blogging-research-projects\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Blogging research projects - World leading higher education information and services","og_description":"I am often asked about the ways in which I use blogs for research purposes. 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