Writing for Research

In response to Joanne Logan’s fine blog entry, I submit these thoughts:

Blogging has enormous potential for research activities, but I think the focus may need to be shifted from scholarly publishing and peer review to an earlier phase of the creative, research process.

For me, blogging offers an excellent tool for information management and idea capture. I crafted my own personal blog to be a collection of “learning objects” which would help me capture my ideas in a systematic way and allow me to publish those ideas in a more efficient and timely manner.

Reflections

My goal was to submit a co-authored paper to a peer-reviewed journal out of the UK. I use the blog entries to capture ideas as I engaged in the preliminary literature review. Even if time passed between article readings, I had captured my immediate responses and could locate them readily due to the archive feature of all blog software.

I was able to blog each article and presentation (while attending conferences) and so had wonderfully detailed entries when it came time to craft the article itself for submission. The blog allowed me also to work efficiently with my co-author, Dr. Patricia McGee from the University of Texas at San Antonio. I sent her the links to my blog entries so she had access to my thoughts on our topic as the paper progressed.

As an information management tool, the blog allowed me to digest research efficiently, capture my thoughts on the key ideas economically and when time permitted, and it allowed me to accumulate valuable detailed experiences. Let’s transfer that to the realm of science (I am an English teacher, by the way). If I am conducting a series of research experiments, I could blog my thoughts on the process itself, explore my own understanding of the experimental research process, and reflect on how the results might fit into a larger scientific picture.

The benefits of blogging (and this will not be true for all researchers and writers, of course):

• Enhances recall
• Document retrieval is simplified – the archive stores and dates them
• Offers opportunity for new insight – read and blog an article on a topic unrelated to your selected theme. Read your blog entries in order or randomly.

Sparks may fly.

Collaborative blogs offer enormous potential for a research team working at a distance from each other. Thought processes, experiment results, and brainstorming can happen effectively within the rich virtual space that is a collaborative blog.

Research ideas often begin in a single thinker’s brain. Begin the research project there, with the blogging tool as an idea capture and information management tool to facilitate the research process.

Posted by kbennett at August 27, 2005 01:27 PM | TrackBack | Links to this post
Categories: Interaction & Collaboration