When interviews are conducted, there is the assumption that the researcher is receiving information from the interviewee. The interview is a staged conversation that will be interpreted by the researcher, who is sometimes placed in a position of superior knowledge. The outputs of an interview are usually a recording and some kind of transcript that is then interpreted by the… Read more →
This is a post from Paul Cairney, outlining notes for his talk to the Scottish Government during its evidence and policy week. The talk’s abstract is as follows: A key aim in government is to produce ‘evidence based’ (or ‘informed’) policy and policymaking, but it is easier said than done. It involves two key choices about (1) what evidence counts… Read more →
I’ve read quite a lot of papers on professional learning over the years and with the best will in the world I have to say that not many of these have been very funny, or at least not intentionally so. This seems a shame, and not just because a bit of entertainment would brighten up the drudgery of academia (though… Read more →
As a researcher, have you considered how the many things assisting you with your research—laptop, wireless internet, email, data analysis and visualization software, digital recorder, voice recognition software, digitized transcripts, multimedia files, academia.org, backup systems, digital calendars—may also be silently shaping your scholarly practices? Cathy Adams (University of Alberta, Canada) and I are interested in how such thingly gatherings… Read more →
When I was a physicist, studying the structure of atomic nuclei, I needed to listen to the language spoken by the nucleus – the emission of radiation and matter, high energy pulses of light and protons, neutrons and alpha particles – and learn to read from those signals insights into the internal structure and behaviour of nuclei. The interrogative tools… Read more →
In a recent chapter myself and three of my doctoral students decided to discuss our different sociomaterial approaches to doing our ethnographies of professional practice and learning. We found ourselves really grappling with thorny issues of how to trace the material and social entanglements of the settings that we were enacting without (1) killing the tangles or (2) getting bogged… Read more →