Campus session Tuesday 19th

Hi All,

Just a little blog post regarding the key points of Tuesdays campus session if you were unable to attend and also to try and write up my scribbled notes!

• I hadn't realised up till how completely unique and individual our projects are, understandably I knew everyones data and ideas would be different but i thought that each chapter and methodology would follow the same format. How wrong I was, just listening to the advisors conflicting views on what a Case Study is, highlighted for me that there is NO WRONG OR RIGHT with this project or research in general. Peter re-inforced this noting that no definitive opinion is concrete and is open for speculation, therefore we had to be careful we didn't use the word PROVE in our work, his example of the world being round, for hundreds of years it was percieved to be square and that was that, then researchers discovered that it was round, and that was believed, looking further into it now researchers believe it may be oval. What i drew from this about our research is that to make it coherant we must critically evaluate literature alongside our data.

• Literature review was another part that was a little foggy for me, Rosemary helped explain what it must contain….

'Think of it as a dinner party, invite all the interesting documents to dinner, whilst enjoying dessert throw in your research questions, and listen to the conversation created from all the documents, the conflicting arguments, the agreeing nods and raised eyebrows…'

That is how we must think about our literature review, Summarise the KEY ARGUMENTS, TELL A STORY, DEFINE TERMS AND INTERPRET OUR SOURCES. There is also a chapter on this in the Bell book.

• Chapter 5, Project findings…the big one…! What I learnt, What I didn't learn, HOW DID THIS EFFECT MY PROJECT.

Key Finding --> Evidence ---------------------> Conculsion

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- > Compare to literature <-

• Oral Presentation, Yes this is still happening, and yes we do get marked on it, but listening to the advisors it is highly unlikely that it will make our grade for our dissertation lower, it may help them understand certain points which were not made on paper and therefore raise our marks. It will be at the Campus w/c 10th January, a slideshow with us commentating, there will be questions asked by our peers who are watching and the advisors and if you are not able to attend other options can be followed.

Now back to chapter 4….!