#SOCRMx End of Week 3 Reflections

This is the third week of the Introduction to Social Research Methods MOOC, which I am finding both very useful and frustrating at the same time. It is very useful, because the resources provided (as mentioned in a previous post) are really excellent, but unfortunately some of them are locked down in closed systems so only accessible to course participants. I wish there was more time to engage with them all properly. Their high quality has left me wondering whether I should spend time making sure I have seen them all or whether I should focus on the weekly tasks and trying to follow other participants.

The course is frustrating because there is little social interaction, or have I missed it? The majority of participants seem to be doing a Masters or a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, so completing the tasks and getting feedback from a tutor on those tasks must be a high priority for them and the tasks take quite a bit of time, not leaving much time for discussion. In addition, it’s difficult to respond to the task requirements in short posts, leading to long pages of text which are demotivating in terms of discussion. I find the design of the edX discussion forums terrible – very time consuming and difficult. I feel as though I have wasted time trying to follow what little discussion there is in these forums.

I wondered whether there was more discussion on participants’ blogs than in the forums, so I have spent some time collating all the blogs I could find. If blogs are going to be used in MOOCs, then my view is that it’s essential that these are centrally aggregated. This was realized as long ago as 2008 in the first MOOC – CCK08. This is the list of bloggers I have found.

• Ruhee – Identity and Clothes – https://identityandclothes.wordpress.com/ (I did write a comment on this blog, which seems to have disappeared into the ether!)
• Peter Tate – Brainy Training Solutions – http://www.brainytrainingsolutions.com/thoughts-topic-dissertation/#.WeiJAxNSzu4
• Rafael Morales Gamboa – https://whatsdigital.wordpress.com/
• Frida – https://researchmethodology290.wordpress.com/ and  https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/73679453/posts/1621618243
• Helen Walker – http://www.helenwalker.org/ (great post on ethnography in this blog)
• Sandra Flynn – https://eternalstudent587.wordpress.com/
• Heather Gibson – https://hegibson412.wordpress.com/
• Cathy – https://chillsresearch.wordpress.com
• Lisa Peel – http://lisajpresearch.weebly.com
• Alastair Gemmill – https://teachtechhighed.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/first-blog-post/
• Eli – http://www.eliapplebydonald.co.uk/SRM2017/(Eli)
• Paula Ortega – https://paobsoc.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/primera-entrada-del-blog/
• AnnaKumacheva – http://screenwriter.org.uk/my-academic-work/
• Steve – mydigitaled.wordpress.com
• Khadijambari – buziablog.wordpress.com
• Anortcliffe – http://rsearchmethods.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/week-1-research-methods-experience.html
• Mcgd10 – http://mcgd10.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/starting-to-think-about-research-methods.html
• Colin Simpson – https://screenface.net/can-i-get-a-method-the-edinburghx-socrmx-social-research-methods-mooc-week-1/
• Jorge – https://sites.google.com/view/wabisabiclub
• Nigel Hunter – https://reflectionsonsocialresearchmethods.wordpress.com/
• Liz Hudson – http://lizhudson.coventry.domains/general-blog-posts/a-solid-table-seems-pretty-hollow-if-youre-an-electron/
• Marcos Chein – https://goodvibesinteaching.tumblr.com/
• Mats – http://focusabc.blogspot.in/2017/10/social-research-methods-in-focus.html
• Dina Fajardo – http://dinafajardo.weebly.com
• Steve Durham – https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=198215

There are probably more than this. I am finding it very difficult to get a sense of who is doing this MOOC, from where and why. The map that we were all asked to add our names to in the first week, no longer seems to be on the site (or if it is, I can no longer find it), so I have no sense of how many people are on the course. From the forum posts that I have read, there seem to be people from the States, Latin America, Australia and Europe, but I’m not clear about whether they are students of Edinburgh University or not.

I am going to persevere with the MOOC because of the high quality of the resources and I will also try and follow the blogs I have found, although I suspect that not all participants are blogging that much.

However, on reflection I have decided that I probably won’t engage fully with the tasks. My response to last week’s task on Surveys was, I acknowledge, quite half-hearted, whereas I can see that some participants made a really good job of it. One participant has commented that it is difficult to engage in tasks for which there doesn’t seem a real purpose. I agree. I find it difficult to get motivated to write survey questions or complete some of the other tasks with no intention of doing this for an actual research project. This is not helped by the fact that I am actually, at this very time, completing writing a research paper, so my ‘head’ is in another zone.

Nevertheless this process and reflection have been helpful – because I have realized, even more clearly than before, that in all my research I have worked backwards rather than forwards. This means that I haven’t decided ‘I am going to go out and research that’, these are my questions, this is the methodology I will adopt, and these are the methods I will use. All my research has emerged, almost serendipitously, from my experience – mostly experience of participating in MOOCs. At the end of the MOOC (or equivalent experience) I find I have met people who, like me, have unanswered questions and want to probe further and then it goes from there. It is messy. The questions keep changing, the data is difficult and messy to gather and it takes months and months to make sense of. The survey we designed to research the use of blogs and forums in the CCK08 MOOC, took months and months of convoluted discussion. We didn’t concoct these questions from thin air, we drew them from our data, endless hours of trawling blogs and forums for what participants had said. We then spent further endless hours debating these statements, their language, whether they made sense and yet we have been asked in this MOOC to write a set of hypothetical survey questions in one week. In addition, all my research has been collaborative, so it feels strange to be working on the methods tasks in isolation, however half-heartedly.

To end on a more positive note, I have thoroughly enjoyed going through all the Visual Methods and Ethnography resources this week, which have been very informative.

And to end on a fun note, one of the participants, Helen Walker (@helenwalker7) has just posted an infrographics quiz on her blog –  The ‘who old are you? quiz shows me to be at the limits of my creative zenith, career and worldly success. Maybe that accounts for this post 🙂