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Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Academic Writing Conventions

I was marking a student's research proposal the other day, when I came across this sentence in their literature review: "In this research paper Jenny and Charles interview 24 students from 15 countries".

Treating this as a learning moment, I began to write some fairly normal feedback about academic conventions, saying "It is ‘normal’ to use surnames when we are writing up the views of experts. So we would say 'Lee and Rice'". But I stopped short at this point, because that was when I started thinking.

I started thinking because it suddenly occurred to me how jarring it is in New Zealand whenever we read, hear or use surnames instead of first names. It is completely NOT 'normal' for Kiwis to use surnames. In fact, the use of surnames borders on the overtly rude in Kiwi society.

Yet our academic writing and referencing in New Zealand has been almost entirely driven by what happens in the USA, and this reflection of academic culture has been adopted here without question, as it has been globally.

It is a very interesting aspect of what is 'normal' in academia, and not something that I had ever thought about before.

It sparked lots of questions for me. Should we continue to do this? Should we try to stop doing it? Is it necessary? If so, WHY is it necessary?

Something to think about.



Sam

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Monday, 28 September 2015

Organising my Study

I recently completed a University of Auckland/FutureLearn MOOC on Academic Integrity.

In the course there was a question on how I managed my study time, and it made me really stop and think about the tools I used, so that I could share my tips and tricks with the group.

I use a combo of new tech and old tech.

Mostly I use Outlook, loading regular reminders into either calendar or tasks (PC/phone sync using IQTell), with links to any relevant documents that relate to each. I use Evernote for projects like semester planning, study and voluntary work which I can also access on PC, laptop or phone.

For daily detail planning I recycle the back of old lecture ppt note pages, printed with a "to do" list outline, which I keep on my desk and fill in for those things that crop up during particularly busy days, and take great delight in crossing them off, then binning when their job is done.

I also have just added two new tools: Quoll Writer and Qiqqa.

Qiqqa (pron: quicker) was developed by James Jardine in 2009 while doing his PhD at Cambridge because there wasn't a piece of referencing software that met his requirements. I am trialing the freeware version of this instead of Mendeley to see how it works.

I have just started experimenting with Quoll Writer, to see if it will work with mapping out the range of materials and so forth that I will need for planning and writing my PhD. Not quite sure yet, but it is fun to play with :-)


Sam
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Friday, 25 September 2015

Big Company Products equal Safety, not 'Love'

I was reading an article by Matt Asay for TechRepublic last week (18 September 2015). Matt proposed that people want to be locked in with software suppliers, because they want the entire solution provided for them by a successful company. He said "While companies sometimes complained about being locked into their vendors, there was also safety" (Asay, 18 September 2015). So if you are a 'safety man' (to quote Stickmen: Ward, 2001) you would go with the big software companies. IBM. Microsoft. Oracle.

Needless to say, there were many comments on Matt's post. Brainout said the issue is not "LOCK-in, but TRUST-in". Good point. Big firm products are not purchased because they lock the customer in, but because the customer trusts that the firm will deliver what they say they will, without problems. Safety, again.

Klwilcoxon said that people go with what is easy. If we trust there will be no hu-hu, we buy from you. Safety.

I too disagreed with Matt's article. Particularly with his view of 'feeling the love' with proprietary, locked in software.

Why? The market fights exclusivity (Seguin et al, 2005). There may still be dominant giants out there, but the very fact those leviathans exist ensures the creation of innovative, creative minnows who then push those leviathans to new standards.

Think Linux. Bitcoin. Ubuntu. CiviCRM. Koha. Text2Speech. Drupal. Apache. Moodle. VLC. Gimp. OpenOffice. Calibre. Audacity. Gnu... to name a fraction of the busy, busy people out there donating their time and skull-sweat to writing and smoothing software for the LOVE of it.

For me, 'feeling the love' is a factor of the open-source side of the market, not of the big boys.

And yes, the industry standard is still MS Windows (95% of the market) and MS Office. And, yes, businesses still want a trouble-free life, so that is generally why they stay with the tried and true. They know what it does, and what it doesn't do: and they know it fits with everything else.

But in my experience, as soon as the open-source cost:benefit ratio starts to swing the other way, enough to notice, businesses will jump.

I am on the board of an organisation which: has binned their proprietary website and gone open-source; runs a CiviCRM database; uses Google for all their storage requirements; and Hangouts for their comms. Those changes have saved them thousands of dollars a year, and the solutions are no more buggy than the MS Windows/Office ones were. Hmm. In fact, I should suggest that we run an internal comparison of helpdesk time. I suspect that the open source options are LESS buggy.

So no: I personally don't feel the love of proprietary software. I like to see just how much cost I can strip out. Going open-source leaves me with the ability to pay a softie to then create some add-on code for my business, so I can get exactly what I want.

And return some new functionality to the shared resources.


Sam

References:
  • Asay, Matt (18 September 2015). Lock-in is what people love, not open source. USA: TechRepublic. Retrieved 19 September 2015 from http://www.techrepublic.com/article/lock-in-is-what-people-love-not-open-source/?tag=nl.e019&s_cid=e019&ttag=e019&ftag=TREd47db54
  • Seguin, Benoit; Lyberger, Mark; O’Reilly, Norm & McCarthy, Larry (2005). Internationalising ambush marketing: A comparative study. International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, July 2005, Volume 6, issue 4 (pp. 216-230)
  • Ward, Nick (2001). Stickmen. Retrieved 23 March 2015 from http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/stickmen-2001
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Wednesday, 23 September 2015

Having to Translate

A  couple of days ago I received a copy of a journal article, and was excitedly reading the first paragraph of it aloud to some of the lecturers and support staff in our School's reception area.

I finished triumphantly (and the meaning was crystal clear to me) and a fellow lecturer said "But what the hell does that mean?"

"Oh. That case studies are a legitimate form of research."

"So why didn't they say that, then?"

Good point.

As I have previously mentioned, I am doing Inger Mewburn's MOOC, How to Survive your PhD. This week the materials are on the topic of frustration, and amongst them are resources on academic writing.

Academic writing certainly isn't - to the uninitiated - plain English. Lots of the language has such narrow meanings that if you aren't a member of the in-group, it is incomprehensible.

Like this from my Master's study "However, Fisher appears to be more of a qualitative empiricist than I, so his actual methods are less suitable for my epistemological approach. I am taking a qualitative, critical realist perspective, and want to observe what happens with my lecturers and students in their individual social construction, allowing the data to emerge." (Young, 2014, p. 56).

But this type of academic language does have value. It provides shortcuts to agreed definitions for some very specific ideas which have a huge raft of other ideas being towed along behind them. It probably took me my whole undergraduate degree to really 'get' qualitative and quantitative research; ten or so textbooks to understand what epistemology is; another three or so texts plus a dozen papers to 'know' critical realism; several years of conversation and reading for social construction; and still more targeted reading to understand the unnatural fit of empirical research with my own research design.

But. I had to search hard to find the paragraph above in my Master's thesis. I try to simplify... but it is hard work.

And the journals don't like it.


Sam
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Monday, 21 September 2015

What's happening in Leadership?

I was asked recently by a former colleague about what was new and happening in leadership.

A leadership scholar famously said once that they went out for a decade and when they came back, nothing had changed (I just wish I could remember where I heard that!).

I suspect that underneath, the good theory holds true, but the fads come and go like the tide.

It took me a wee while to think about it, but I came up with a list of what I think is doing a soft-trend at the moment, and is likely to hold its relevance for the foreseeable future.
  1. Authentic leadership
  2. Acts of leadership here and here
  3. Facilitative leadership here and here
  4. Shared leadership 
  5. Adam Grant on giving and taking
  6. John Parrot on Mindfulness
  7. Mindset - and download Carol Dweck's first chapter here
  8. Diversity in NZ from Sarah Leberman
  9. Brene Brown on vulnerability at TEDx Houston 
  10. Three brains research 
  11. Simon Sinek (edited) or in full
I don't tend to rush off and do the big trends too much: I try to stick with what looks like lasting the decade, more than the flash Harrys who burn flare-bright but disappear into cold ash in the light of day.


Sam
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Friday, 18 September 2015

So what's this Shared Leadership then?

So, shared leadership. Pearce & Conger define is as a “dynamic, interactive influence process amongst individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organisational goals or both” (2003, p. 1).

Allen, Morton and Li define it as the co-creation of an environment by a group of individuals, organizations, and communities with the intent to accomplish a common vision and collaborative goals” (2003, p. 4).

My personal take is a mash up of those definitions: "A dynamic, interactive influence group leadership process that achieves a common group vision and collaborative group goals". And what that means is a group of people who get together and share out the leadership role amongst themselves: including goal setting, responsibility, authority and getting-on-with-it-ness.

The components of shared leadership were defined by Moxley (2000) as balance of power (ie equal partners); shared purpose; shared responsibility; mutual respect; commitment (through both the hard and the good).

I like Moxley's writing. He says that for the partnership model to work, you need a very egalitarian balance of power, and everyone needs to use their personal power (our own “gifts and skills, our competence and our expertise”) to co-create win:win outcomes.

By the same token, no one in the group can use coercive or position power, else they will undermine the whole model. Everyone in the group has to be truly equal partners, and work hard at empowering each other. Creating a real balance of power is probably absolutely the hardest piece of putting together the shared leadership puzzle (Moxley, 2000, p. 96; Ferkins, 2007).

Every member of the leadership group has to believe in act on and follow the group's shared purpose. Individual’s have to suck up their differences for the good of the group. Shared leadership has room for different tactics, debate and working through conflict, but the purpose remains the same. The partners honour the opinions of all, but the shared commitment to the group’s intended outcome is always clearly in view and being aimed for by all (Moxley, 2000).

Responsibility and accountability for partnership work is also essential. This cannot be an “us and them” model; “it can only be us. There is no waiting for someone else to act” (Moxley, 2000, p. 76). Interestingly, Moxley also suggests that shared leadership needs to separate authority and accountability, regardless of position, so that every role in the organisation is where the ‘buck stops’ (Moxley, 2000).

Moxley also specifies deep respect for the” inherent worth and value” people as an essential element of shared leadership (2000, p. 76); embracing diversity, and assuming that all participants bring unique gifts, skills and energies. Respect also requires dignity, respect and truly valuing each individual.

Moxley’s final requirement is partnering in the nitty-gritty, with all participants work together, interdependently, to make sense of demanding, complex, real and concrete problems. Sharing in the tough times when change is mission-critical can be easier than creating shared outcomes when life is easy, where egos and agendas bloom. With a shared leadership model, no one will save you but yourself; there is no manager who will decide and tell the team what to do (2000).

When Moxley’s requirements are met, relationships transform into a partnership, inspiring a feel and tone of increased vitality and energy; even spirituality (2000).

And if you think this lot is easy to achieve, you aren't taking account of human greed! But if you can get this to work, this is a very powerful leadership style indeed.


Sam

References:
  • Allen, Beverlyn Lundy, Morton, Lois Wright & Li, Tianyu (2003). Shared Leadership. USA: Iowa State University. Retrieved 19 January 2009 from http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/pub/tech/RDI125.pdf
  • Ferkins, Lesley (2007). Sport Governance: Developing strategic capability in national sport organisations. Australia: Deakin University, unpublished doctoral dissertation
  • Moxley, Russell S. (2000). Leadership and Spirit. USA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Pearce, Craig L., & Conger, Jay A. (2003). All those years ago: The historical underpinnings of shared leadership. In C. L. Pearce, & J. A. Conger (Eds.), Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership. USA: Sage (pp. 1−18)
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Wednesday, 16 September 2015

Leadership Must Haves

I was asked by an academic colleague recently for a guide to a leadership "think piece" for a client who is migrating to ISO systems.

That is a darned good question, and it is hard to come up with a comprehensive one-stop-shop argument that covers the breadth of the leadership field.

Instead I replied with some ideas, which I thought I would rework into a blog post. These are my leadership must haves:

  1. For me, the MOST important aspect of leadership is creating, building and sustaining a positive culture. If you get that right, the rest looks after itself. One of the most terrible, negative and destructive things a leader can do is to think that culture is unimportant, or that it will sort itself out.

    Edgar Schein (1992, p. 5) said “Organisational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the most decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management and if and when, that may become necessary, the destruction of culture. Culture and leadership, when one examines them closely, are two sides of the same coin and neither can really be understood by itself. In fact there is a possibility, underemphasised in the leadership research, that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture and that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to work with culture”.

    Some previous posts on culture can be found at Managing Meaning, Changing Corporate Culture and Strong Cultures can be Negative.

  2. Second-most important for me is Phil Dorado's idea of Acts of Leadership (2007). Acts of leadership are those active and critical thinking actions that we take each day, rather than being a passenger in our own lives. I have posted about this before at Barriers to Leadership, Why Acts of Leadership and About on my blog.

  3. From that point, my personal affinity then lies mainly between two leadership styles: shared leadership and facilitative leadership.

    Facilitative leadership aligns well with teaching and coaching, being a values-based and supportive style ideal for development (Schwarz, 2002), focused on involving followers in the leadership process. I have a couple of blog posts on facilitative leadership and the components of facilitative leadership.

    Shared leadership works well with organisations where they can take ego out of the equation. Volunteer organisations, those focused on social good, places with embedded values will usually be able to work with this style. I wrote a case on Tennis New Zealand (on ResearchGate) which is attempting to provide organisational leadership in this way.

    I only know of two commercial organisations who embody a shared leadership style: Semco in Brazil and HCL Technologies in India. I am currently putting together a case on Semco, but just haven't had time to finish it (though once finished, it too will be on ResearchGate).

  4. Authentic leadership too is a transformative and modern leadership style, but this type of leader needs to possess the characteristics. Bill George (former Medtronic CEO, 2003) has done quite a bit of writing on this style, and on us doing personal work to grow into authentic followers (or authentic leaders if we are able to grow the appropriate traits).

  5. Also the leadership style discussed by ex-Stanford Prof Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership, is a very powerful and enduring leadership style that suits people who are non-charismatic, or who may be more introverted. Jim's book "Good to Great" explores this style (2001).
For more information, Profs Brad Jackson & Ken Parry wrote a great little primer about leadership called "A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership" (2011), which explores current leadership trends and various schools of thought. I use this as a text for my Year 3 Sport & Rec students.

As Professor Jackson says "But it is all about leadership, isn't it?"


Sam

References:
  • Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap... and others don’t. HarperCollins Publishers 
  • Dorado, P. (2007). The 60 Second Leader: Everything you need to know about leadership, in 60 second bites. Capstone Publishing Ltd
  • George, B. (2003). Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value. Jossey-Bass. 
  • Jackson, B.,  & Parry, K. (2011). A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership (2nd ed.). SAGE
  • Schein, E. H. (1992). Organizational Culture & Leadership (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass
  • Schwarz, R. (2002). The Skilled Facilitator: A comprehensive resource for consultants, facilitators, managers, trainers and coaches (revised ed.). Jossey-Bass
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Sunday, 13 September 2015

Can't access your screenr.com recordings? I have a fix for you

If you are one of the many people out there who used screenr.com as an easy way to create short videos, but are currently unable to log in to screenr, then this post is for you.

I use a lot of screencasts of my lectures, for both online and blended classes. Students use the clips regularly.

For the past twelve months I have been using YouTube to store and share my screencasts, editing them on my PC, and keeping an offline back-up copy of each clip.

From 2011 to 2014 I used Screenr to screencast and store all my lectures. However, I read with horror this weekend on a blog that Screenr is apparently about to close.

Eeek! I thought. I had better log in, and download all my clips and repost them to YouTube. OK, this would mean lots of extra time having to download and upload 395 clips... but hey. It was a free service. I knew that I could download the files as mp4s to my hard drive. I could then decide at my leisure which ones I needed to re-upload to YouTube.

And that is where the REAL trouble started.

I couldn't log in to screenr at all. I kept getting a "The URL you entered does not appear to be an OpenID" error when attempting to login using my Google account. And, of course, that was the only way I knew to login. I deleted my old stored passwords, used different machines, did forced browser refreshes, and used different browsers. No dice.

I searched screenr's help files (which always were absolutely inadequate), and, true to form, they yielded absolutely nothing. So I searched online for people having the same problem. It was then that I found that this problem of logging on had been hanging around for two years.

And the source of it? Using my Google login. Google no longer support their old pan-everything login... and, despite warnings that the old Google 2.0 ID was going to be phased out, screenr had done nothing at all about updating their site requirements. As a result, screenr - and their customers - cannot use the now defunct Google 2.0 ID, and didn't negotiate to use the new Google OpenID system. Oops.

So screenr users who logged on using their Google ID can't log on to screenr.

Frustrated and angry users have been posting on the screenr community threads about this for quite a while. Screenr keeps offering the same solution (just go to "https://www.screenr.com/user/username" and you will be able to access your files). And that doesn't work: we get a "Hmm... we don't know that user" message.

OK, I thought: there must be a way to download my files using a third party tool. I downloaded several tools that promised all... but none delivered. Nada. Zip. Zero.

However, after a few more hours of bashing my head on this problem, I found a work-around. Camilo MM created a piece of code that you put into a bookmarklet. You can access Camilo's code at http://camilomm.deviantart.com/journal/Download-from-Screenr-bookmarklet-352055598.

The next thing you need is your screenr link URLs. Hopefully you will have a list of links somewhere: or have sent links to others, and can forensically recreate your URL list. I kept a spreadsheet with the creation date, the title of the session and the URLs (thank goodness for pack-rat habits!).

After you have installed the bookmarklet, the process is:



Or, if you prefer your instructions in writing:
  1. Paste your screenr link into your browser bar
  2. Click the bookmarklet
  3. Under the right-hand bottom side of the video, a shortcut - "Download as mp4" - will appear under the view count (NB: if you get a "unable to obtain link" message, check that you have an 'http' link, not an 'https' link. Simply delete the 's' to enable the link)
  4. Click the "Download as mp4" link. This will launch the video in the same window as  almost full-screen
  5. Right-click on the video, and "save as" to your HDD location with your chosen file name
  6. The clip will download, and you can then upload to YouTube for relinking
  7. Repeat ad nauseam
This works in Firefox and Chrome: however, you may find that you can only download about 5 clips before having to swap browsers (I don't know about Internet Idiot because I don't have it installed).

I hope this fixes your problem. It fixed mine, and I have now downloaded all my files, and will spend the coming weeks transferring them to YouTube and redirecting the base links.


Sam



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Friday, 11 September 2015

Gathering Research Resources

I have always interacted with my lecturers and colleagues a lot, building good relationships where I can ask my thousand questions of a range of people (so as not to tire out any one person too much). I have built a LinkedIn network of people, have joined organisations such as the Academy of Management, and the International Leadership Association. I have also joined ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

This practice has grown my network well enough for me to be able to ask lots of people for articles, directly, or with one degree of separation; or to access journals through my memberships. Networking is great for accessing study materials. I also email writers of journal articles to ask if they have anything else in the pipeline, and have found academics very happy to share. Membership of AoM, ILA, ResearchGate and Academia.edu are great for contacting other academics.

My research habits are to gather as many resources as I can, as early as I can. If I need to order a book from an overseas university library, it might take two or three months to come. That means I need to do my due diligence as early as possible, in order to be best prepared. As I am about to embark on a PhD, my ability to find good quality research materials is more important than ever.

I use Google Scholar and Google extensively, as well as ERIC (Education Resources Information Center at http://eric.ed.gov/), the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) and the Open Library (https://openlibrary.org/), my own institution's library databases (though I loathe their fragmented and time-intensive nature - no pan-database database, if you will), and Gale's Opposing Viewpoints database (http://solutions.cengage.com/InContext/Opposing-Viewpoints/).

I am also lucky enough to have access to the Ministry of Education's library through the Career Development Association of New Zealand. The MoE's library (https://library.education.govt.nz/) is excellent, and they also possess a "OneSearch" function which searches nearly everything that they hold, all at once. They have an almost pan-database database, avoiding that up and down time-consuming database by database search.

I keep everything in softcopy so it is searchable: but that is a topic for a future post.

I thankful for those lecturers and professors who encouraged me to reach out to others, because they helped me to build good networks and strong research skills.


Sam
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Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Helping Others with Assignments

In a multi-choice quiz on the UoA/Future Learn MOOC that I completed recently on Academic Integrity, there was the question asking if was it OK to proof another's work. This is where that other person is a student on the same course as you. The answer that those running the course had set for this question, was that this was an OK thing to do.

However, I would always suggest that no, it often isn't really OK.

I think it is not necessarily OK because I think there can be a temptation, unless we have already submitted our work, to take on another's good ideas into our own work. We can put ourselves in the way of temptation.

Additionally, we also might lead another off course with our feedback, damaging their results.

I was always happy to discuss my approach to assignments and the route I had taken with my peers, but was careful not to get involved in the work itself. Also, I will happily ask non-studying colleagues, friends or family to proof my work for sense, grammar and formatting (not critique the content). I think there is dangerous ground when you proof another's work on the same course... it is a step too far for me.

While peer review can be powerful, it does raise a lot of confidentiality and expertise issues that careful treatment and consideration. We could open ourselves up to the temptation of tweaking our own work in retrospect: a dangerous place to be, academically-speaking. To be avoided at all costs, in case I turn out to be weak!

Not to mention that you are asking non-experts to review non-experts. You need to be very directed, clear and careful in doing this.

Too, there is another issue: that of our own learning. If others tell us the answer, we haven't had to sweat and dig in hard to work out the solution for ourselves. A quick and slick answer doesn't stick with us, long-term.

I suspect a better way of dealing with this is instead, when you are asked a question, to answer it with another question. Because it is only through bumbling our way through things that we usually come up with our own creative solution. Giving people the answer does not help learning. Showing people the process helps them. The whole fish and fishing metaphor.

Sam

  • Reference: Ritchie, Anne Isabella Thackeray (1885). Mrs. Dymond. UK: Smith, Elder & Co
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Monday, 7 September 2015

Giving help

There is power in learning, and much of it is in building independent thinking. The process is hard, painful and challenging. Learning is change, and change is not comfortable.

In an academic context, I would define 'giving help' as encouraging students to think for themselves by asking them questions, directing them to appropriate and enlightening readings, texts, articles or video, and suggesting activities designed to form or generate new ideas. 'Giving help' to a learner would definitely not constitute 'giving the answer'.

A fellow student, Andrew, commented on a recent course I participated in that when he was "paying an arm and a leg for tuition, then I should be able to ask for as much help as I think I need. There should be no end to the amount of help I am allowed to pursue during the work day. 'Help' is what I am paying for. There should be no 'allowable' limit to the 'help' I am seeking to complete my assignments. Learning to feel comfortable getting/demanding help during college will pay dividends later in life and career".

In replying to Andrew, I told him that, while I know there are some lecturers who treat student requests as if students are just being annoying and should just be able to intuit what the lecturer wants, that I knew of very few like that. The team I work with are - in general - very helpful, supportive lecturers. Additionally, we need to remember that as students we are paying to LEARN. We are not paying for our lecturers to tell us the answer: we learn nothing that way (or at least, I don't learn that way).

I understand that everyone's end and instrumental values (and the mix) differ. In my view, the academics I work with prize instrumental values (ie, learning) over the end values (certification) (Daft, 2015). Some students reflect instrumental values behaviour: others end values.
 
As students we are paying to build the body of professional knowledge, not to undermine it by short-cutting and being given the answer. There is a balance when 'giving help', that needs to fit well with lecturers' academic professionalism and that of their institutions.


Sam
  • Reference: Daft, Richard L. (2015). The Leadership Experience (5th Edition). USA: Cengage
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Friday, 4 September 2015

Why Writing Needs Citations

Each semester, I explain - clearly - to my students why academic writing (assignment work) needs citations and references.

There are some VERY good reasons as to why we should cite - and not just in academic writing. We often think that we can simply reuse something, without crediting who created it. So as a broader community, I think we could be more explicit where we have borrowed things from. With everything.

In my view, there are five key issues at play here: integrity, honour, honesty, understanding, and challenge.
  1. To me, integrity in this area is acknowledging another's work, ideas, words, images, concepts and IP when recycled in our work, when touched on in passing, when expanded or alluded to within your own work by citing. And if I use another's words verbatim, then I quote, using double quotation marks to clearly indicate these are another's actual words.

  2. Integrity is also in using another's work as it was intended by the original author.

  3. When we honour another's effort and ideas, we can then add our bit on top of theirs. It enables each of us to "build on the shoulders of giants" - to cite GoogleScholar (after Newton, 1686, citing Bernard of Chartres, 1189; Wikiquote, n.d.). It also shows that we are honest. We don't claim others’ work as ours. And that shows that any unreferenced work is our own creation.

  4. This shows that we understand our own field; we know who the experts are. It also shows our work is robust & can be relied upon, because we have our finger so on the pulse.

  5. In keeping a record of my sources (bibliographic references) and sharing that with my reader, I can be transparent. This allows others to read where my ideas have come from, and to engage me in debate about those ideas. To further challenge me.
However, there is an expansion on this idea of challenge that Christopher Sheldon shared with me on Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), in a MOOC we both attended in 2015. Christopher related that a "ground breaking" idea which Kuhn "put forward in the book is that [...] research does not necessarily proceed in a logical fashion, each step built on the one before. Instead, he makes a case for the role of such illogical elements in research as culture, social drivers, aesthetics and what looks astonishingly like ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ – although from memory, I don’t think he uses those words" (2015).

"To me, this conjures up a situation where a researcher might either reference other work to indicate how different their own thinking is from the mainstream, or perhaps even finds there are few ‘others’ to quote or reference because their idea is simply not explored by the current academic paradigms" (Sheldon, 2015).

I think that citing, and creating a bibliographic reference list, gives us an opportunity to have a conversation, and to grow.


Sam

References:
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Wednesday, 2 September 2015

Readers, Writers and Markers

When I am writing a blog post, you will have noted that I am a bit of a referencer. And bilbiographer. I don't know if I would go so far as to say prolific, but I aim to be conscientious, so my readers know what has shaped my thinking.

I have got into this habit from lecturing, as it is normal thing to honour the 'owners' of the ideas you have drawn on, and provide a map back to the sources.

I have got used to reading in text references and enjoy them, but I also like them combined with footnotes for the 'asides'. Any of you who have read the works of satirists, such as Terry Pratchett, will know the value of a great aside.

However, I don't enjoy endnotes. I find they are a bit annoying, as flipping in and out of the main body of work to get clarification is a concentration-breaker for me.

A bibliography adds so much extra depth to any written work, in my view. It gives you, as the reader, a clear map back to the origins of the writer's influences. If the writing has sparked your imagination, you can then go and read those original ideas, and increase your understanding.

Referencing and bibliographies are a form of indexing, which I find to be simple and elegant.

When I write, my references provide me with personal flags to help me remember where an idea came from, and what shaped my thinking at that time. So references aid both readers and writers, in my view... and, if you are a teacher, help you understand the shaping influences in a student's work when you are marking.

Sam
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