The 2016 iPads in Higher Education Conference is happening soon in San Francisco. I will be there presenting my experiences of this blogging journey.that has facilitated my learning and writing for a PhD research study. The iPad is an extension of my being and becoming-researcher, affording a potential of creativity with and through the many image-making options. The process of making-images with blogging has enabled me to explore my thoughts and ideas in dynamic ways.
This materiality of the images and the iPad continues as a force that shifts me in the blogging process, opening up connections. The blogs map my rhizo-thinking that leads to further connections with unexpected moves. It has been an experimentation into an unknown territory with a purpose to foster my reading, writing and thinking skills -- my nomadic wandering. This “rhizomatic zigzagging flow” has happened as ideas “link, connect or collide with another, and produce something new or different” (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer 2013:675).
Looking back through my blog posts over the past 16 months, I am reminded of the highlights at different stages and the shifts in my thinking as new encounters contributed to new knowledge. My objective of blogging as a tool to assist my personal research journey is different to the many blogs that aim to market educators’ knowledge or to share ideas and information. While the google analytics related to each of the 55 posts is an interesting reflection of viewer’s choices, these statistics are not relevant to my study. What is striking is that the most viewed blog was Sketching my approach in DBR. Now, six months later, I am planning to move away from Design Based Research as I take up a critical posthuman stance where categorization of human-centred activities is not relevant.
A challenge to me in this process was considering whether I ought to enter into conversations with comments made related to my blogs. I resisted doing this online. Is this non-responsive-ness a responsible action?
Above is a collage using the PicFrame App on my iPad. This collection of images created for my weekly blogs illustrates the wide range of Apps used and topics covered that are associated with my research on student learning in Obstetrics. Some of the images were published on the blogs and others not, such as the central swimmer who is only publicly visible now.
Like the students who sometimes feel that they are “thrown into the deep end”, this study has left me simply treading water at times wondering what we are doing as educators of student learning. One student interviewed felt that the theory taught does not readily equip them for “being thrown in” where “they just have to deal with it”. Yet learning to swim still does not fix the upstream problems (in a struggling health system) that trickle down, like the unavailability of equipment (such as tape measures for checking the baby’s head circumference) and certain essential medications.
Lenz Taguchi, H. & Palmer, A. 2013. A more ‘livable’ school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls' ill-/well-being with(in) school environments, Gender and Education, 25:6: 671-687. DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2013.829909
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