23 Research Things - Thing 2

It's Wednesday and that means 3 things:

1 - My legs hurt from doing squats and deadlifts at the gym this morning,
2 - I'm getting ready for my weekly cycle out to West Cambridge to be the roving librarian at the Whittle Laboratory and,
3 - It's time for another installment of 23 Research Things!

Thing 2 is about reflective blogging. Hooray! A Thing I do anyway!

Self five!
(30 Rock via https://lockerdome.com/6956494474193729/6944414779055892)

I've had personal blogs off and on since the early 2000s, back when LiveJournal was the place to over-share your feelings with strangers and obsess over which 100x100 pixel profile picture best expressed your mood. I started this blog in 2014 as I was starting think more about career development. My first post is still unpublished and is ironically titled "Social media: are we just talking to ourselves?" It was going to be a hard-hitting piece on the echo chamber effect, illustrated by quotes from Brave New World. Looking through my list, I've started and abandoned almost as many posts as I've published.

This assignment is to talk about how we feel about blogging as a tool for reflection and obviously I can see its merits. But I want to point out that it isn't always comfortable for me and I can certainly empathise with people who have serious reservations about sharing non-academic writing in such a public setting. After all, even if you are sold on the benefits of reflection in the learning process (which I am), why do those reflections need to be posted where anyone can see them? The paradoxical doubts of, "Do I really want strangers to be able to read this?" and "Probably nobody cares what I have to say anyway" can silence many potential bloggers. It's perfectly valid to write and reflect privately, and I certainly do that as well. I am a paper and pen journal writer and those notebooks will hopefully be consumed by a fire as soon as I die so that I don't have to be posthumously mortified (no pun intended) by the thought of people reading about my more navel-gazing moments.

The benefit of blogging over private journal writing is that by changing the audience to whoever it is you think might read your blog (Hi, Mom!), you are exercising a different voice. It's not the free-flowing stream of consciousness of a personal journal, nor is it the rigid structure of academic writing. You are communicating in an informal but public register, which is a crucial thing to practice as a researcher. I think of it as a format for complete thoughts, hence the unpublished blog posts sitting in my list. I was obviously thinking about a particular topic and wanted to get it written down somewhere, but I didn't have enough to say to share it. That's fine. The writing process itself is the valuable part. The public nature of this format simply holds me accountable; I feel guilty when 6 months go by with out a post, not because I think my eager readers are clamouring for it, but because I know people can see how little I've been writing and I like to challenge myself to write complete thoughts.

Reflective writing is valuable for a few reasons. First, it reinforces things you've learned. Writing about what you've recently read or attended classes in is part of the alchemical process of creating deeper understanding. Second, it allows you to clarify for yourself how you feel or think about particular topics. Third, it's just another chance to practice writing and communicating. And finally, it frees you from the burden of hanging on to whatever is on your mind.

That last one's a bit odd. Let me clarify.

You may recall from my Thing 1 post that I'm on a bit of a productivity kick at the moment. While working on some pre-planning for my first Bullet Journal last night I came across this video of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, doing a Ted Talk on stress-free productivity.

In it, he describes how people feel that they could be more productive, if only they had more time. But too little time, he argues, is not the problem.

"You know what you’d do with two more hours? You’d have two more hours of overwhelming stickiness. Actually, for most of you, it’d be a good thing you don’t get two more hours. Because the issue is not time.

How long does it take to have a creative idea? Zero time.

How long does it take to be inspired? Zero time.

How long does it take to recognize an opportunity you could leverage and take advantage of? Zero time.

Time is not the issue for those things. There is something required for those things. What’s that? Psychic bandwidth.

You need space to think."

Creating that space to be truly present and focused, he says, requires that we get rid of all the other stuff cluttering up our thoughts by writing it down. Anything you're thinking about, from jobs you need to get done to the relationship between social media and Aldous Huxley novels, is taking up bandwidth that you need to focus on what you're doing right now. Furthermore, he says, it helps you identify the task at hand. If you're mulling over a course you just took or a conversation you just had, write about it and figure out what action you need to take. "What exactly is the work you need to do?" That is the chief value I see in reflective blogging; it's identifying the "What now?" as Georgina put it. Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but if you can figure out what you can change as a result you will get more out of it, and maybe free up some bandwidth to have some great ideas.

Book notes #2 - Vision

Andy: Do you have a vision for your book?
Me: ...Yes? As in do I know what I want it to be?
A: Not what you want the content to be, but what you want it to accomplish.
M: Yes.
A: Have you written it down?
M: No.
A: You should write it down.

Andy got this piece of advice from a book he's reading on software start-ups and entrepreneurship. The point of writing a vision down is that the particulars may change as you develop  your company, write your book, change your professional development plan etc., but if you have a consistent vision to refer back to, you will always be progressing in the same direction. The same is true, of course, with strategic planning within existing organisations. While you're slogging it out with the details, getting frustrated, getting sidetracked, you always have the vision to refer back to.

This will probably also help those of you that actually read my previous post figure out what the heck I was on about, and potentially provide me with a useful way to succinctly answer the question I keep getting: "Oh, you're writing a book? What's it about?" This has up until now been followed by a resigned sigh from me as I prepare to launch into a rambling explanation beginning with, "Well, it's a bit complicated to explain..." So I thought I should do this sooner rather than later.

At the most grandiose level, I suppose I want to live in a world where everyone capable of making decisions (especially through voting but also in general) is armed with the tools of critical analysis and information literacy in order to make informed and ethical decisions. I also want readers of my book to question the compartmentalisation of disciplines and not be afraid to make inquiries in unfamiliar territory, transferring the skills and knowledge they have to new contexts. In doing this, readers will challenge the idea that learning takes place only in academic spheres and instead feel empowered to explore and learn independently, and to ask good questions of experts such as teachers, journalists, writers and politicians.

At a more practical level, it should give readers of many different learning styles a primer for understanding how knowledge is constructed in many different disciplines and how it is used in many different formats, so that an artist can pick up a neuroscience article in a newspaper and can understand whether the conclusions are valid, and a mechanic can listen to a political speech and know whether there is an attempt at manipulation, just as two random examples.

The audience I have in mind is explicitly not an academic audience, though it could benefit people in academia. I haven't decided if I want to write it specifically for pre-teen students or keep adults in mind as well, but I think that's a challenge I can face later. The main thing is that I want it to be engaging, visually interesting (part text book, part infographics, part graphic novel), full of activities and humour as well as really challenging and surprising.

On a personal level, I just want to try to write a book that makes people as excited about learning and investigating as I am. I want to inspire the kind of wonder about learning and information literacy issues that books like the classic Dorling Kindersley books and other such books inspired in me when I was a kid. I'm looking forward to the challenge, and even if it never gets off the ground I'll have had a lot of fun researching it. But some day I want to hold this book in my hands, regardless of what it looks like, and know that I made it.

I hope this makes sense. I'm sure I'll write more on this soon as I appear to be a little bit in the groove of thinking about this stuff.

Book notes #1

In the autumn of last year I got an idea for a book. It's a book I want to read, but it doesn't exist, so, as many writers before me have done, I'm setting out to write it myself. I have only just begun really sitting down to think about it since my course ended at the end of December so these represent some of my first notes. I've written them out by hand and I think I might just transcribe them directly by way of backing them up somewhere other than a flimsy, eminently lose-able Moleskine notebook, in a city where Moleskines outnumber people 3 to 1. (Probably. I'm just making that up.) Feel free to skip this - it's for my own safe keeping, but together these entries may provide an interesting insight into my writing process, or a black box if the project fizzles out.

HWKWWK [my abbreviation for the working title "How We Know What We Know"] - 16/1/14

I spent the evening combing over the shelves of Waterstone's in Cambridge, looking for something useful, relevant or inspiring in some way to my endeavor, but found very little. In some ways this is comforting - apparently there is a niche, and given the prominence and recent proliferation of books on infographics, I think my book will look appealing to fans of that trend. However, I had hoped to draw inspiration from somewhere fairly directly. In the spirit of viewing nothing as a failure as long as it teaches you something, I did at least refine what my book is NOT, and the sort of sources I can safely avoid. I spent a lot of time in the popular science section, systematically disregarding books of 'facts', books about the internet, books about the brain etc. Dawkins' Magic of Reality still looks intriguing but perhaps more comparing science and mythology. One I did consider buying (and stupidly forgot to write down or take a picture of) was a collection of writings by scientists about their discoveries and claimed to be as much about the cultivation of a scientific way of thinking - insight into the scientific mind for 'outsiders'.

Overwhelmingly, however, anything that looked likely was either a compendium of scientific 'facts' designed to sell to the "Brainiac: Science Abuse" crowd with titles like Why Do Men Have Nipples? and taglines like "What your science teacher DIDN'T tell you!" The aforementioned books on infographics have a similar feel: dense with very visual information but with little to link them. It's like reading a novel abridged and posted on Twitter. Are you learning something? Sure. But is it deep learning you can transfer to other contexts? That is doubtful. In some ways, not only is this what my book is not, it's what my book sets out to remedy; the shallow, passive acceptance of facts presented in uncomplicated ways, which authors assume is okay because it's for the 'uninitiated'. Though I suppose it's likely to end up shelved here (or with philosophy?), my book should give people the tools to question this, social science books, news, political arguments, art criticism etc. Emma used the colourful phrase 'crap detector', which is partly true, but it is also about breaking down the idea/assumption that if you aren't part of the discipline you can't deconstruct an argument.

Emma helped me clarify what I mean by this. She said it's about allowing/enabling people to deconstruct an argument by a scientist, for example, on their own terms. As in, it isn't about a mathematician reading a social science paper and saying, 'Well, that was a logical leap and therefore invalid.' Rather it's saying these are the conventions and criteria for validity that this discipline has established. Does it meet those criteria? Y/N Where does the argument break down? Tied to this are the epistemological questions: are there really 'facts'? If so, why do 'facts' change over time? What is knowledge? What can we know? But there's also the practical element of giving people a key to the maps of different disciplines and conventions, such as academic writing, journalism, infographics etc.

This feels like an absolutely monumental undertaking and it is ambitious in the extreme, but it isn't intended to be a definitive work on any of the topics; I intend to provide a lot of suggestions for further reading. However, it should be a useful and engaging starting point. My own starting point may be with something like intellectual histories of disciplines - historiography, history of philosophy, history of science, history of criticism, etc. - as well as books on conventions for journalism, academia etc. and books on rhetorical techniques. I want to break down the imaginary barriers between disciplines and make readers feel empowered to investigate and question ANYTHING.
...
[Written later:] Rather than 'peering behind the curtain' [of other disciplines], [the book is about] arguing that the curtain is a false construct and the only barriers to understanding linguistic and conventional assumptions perpetuated to protect specialist knowledge. This is not to say experts are useless or don't exist. On the contrary, [I believe that] they should have the confidence in their own expertise to both allow their work to be questioned and to be able to explain it clearly to individuals who are not aware of the assumptions made in that discipline [e.g. 'outsiders'].
...
[In a list of areas to research:]
- History of epistemology: shows us that what we consider knowable ([within our] paradigm) shapes not only what is 'known' in disciplines but the very idea of disciplines and their relationships to each other [(their layout)]. Removing the assumptions that place FACTS at the centre of knowledge and disciplines at odds with one another allows one the freedom to investigate first principles and underlying assumptions within any framework. However, it's a 'threshold concept' and therefore very difficult to come to terms with, rather like identifying and subsequently questioning privilege. One could say that the current dominant epistemological paradigm privileges expertise and facts over trans-literacies, experiential learning etc. People working w/in that paradigm, e.g. academics, need to question that privilege.
...
"How we know what we know" : The mechanisms through which knowledge is created, both within the current paradigms and how those paradigms came to be.

Time management: Pay yourself first

Where does the time go? Image by cmcbrown on Flickr

The title of this post comes from my High School Economics teacher, Mr. Shannon. From his list of what I'm sure were very astute financial tips, most of which are long-forgotten, this one has always stuck in my mind most firmly. I found myself thinking about it while considering how I'm going to balance my time over the coming year between work, roller derby, my personal life and working on career development and my book.

The idea behind "Pay yourself first" is this: as you earn money, no matter how small the amount, always put something aside into a savings account before spending it on the month to month costs, a new outfit or whatever (I've not been brilliant at doing this lately, but that is beside the point).

Time management is all about priorities. Of course some priorities are non-negotiable. I will always need to turn up to my full-time job, and I will always need to get exercise. However, it is the negotiable, unstructured time that needs to be carefully managed, particularly if you have some kind of non-work project, skill, etc. that you want to make progress with. It is extremely easy to lose hours to surfing the internet, watching TV, browsing in a bookshop etc. All of that is fine, even necessary sometimes, but it can be the enemy of anything you want to do outside the normal spheres of work, home, friends and clubs/sports/organisations.

That's why I think it's a good idea to "Pay yourself first" - make regularly scheduled time for those other projects like professional development reading, writing your book, perfecting your cooking, practicing piano, or whatever it is you want to make progress with in your own time - and STICK WITH IT. Treat that time as non-negotiable. You may feel like you're missing out on time with friends, or TV you want to watch (seriously, just binge watch it when it comes out on DVD, guys), or whatever, but you picked your priorities so you only have yourself to blame.

My partner suggested that we have a "professional development hour" once a week where we read or write something tangentially job-related and then discuss it with each other. I'm hoping we actually do this because it means that is time during which I can't do anything else but make progress on my own things and I'll have the chance to reflect by talking to my very smart and sympathetic partner about it. Hopefully I'll be better at that than the financial version.