Analysing Blogs is Messy But That’s Ok:
In my opinion the research community does not talk about mess often enough, creating the perverse impression that research is effortless if only one has enough experience and talent.
Not true.
For that reason Pat and I are sharing our ‘warts and all’ experience of writing a paper together. Our paper is attempting to make a provisional taxonomy of blogging practices amongst academics. We don’t want to know everything about academic blogging; this analysis is a way for us to start asking some interesting research questions about it.
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I have my own views, but my decision about how to proceed with the analysis was not informed by my epistemological world view; it was informed by how much time I had on my hands. Time routinely shapes how research is done, but it’s a bit of a dirty secret.
Yes, that is true. Time does shape how research is done. And not just time either. Energy. Money. Folks willing to participate and/or respond.
I think it’s not just that time shapes how research is done, though. Time also shapes how teaching is done. As does energy, money, and participation.
Maybe teaching and research are far more closely aligned (at least for some of us) than I had previously thought.
Since I work within the scholarship of pedagogy primarily, I look at what happened when and what worked with in terms of teaching.