Online Counselling Research

2007-11-07T16:09:00.000Z

Probably the longest break in this whole project.....

So things have moved on. I have now written a first draft of my methodology. I'm pretty happy with this. I've also made inroads into my literature review (about 4k)... so if my maths is correct i'm at about 20k and am aiming for about 70. Almoooost a third done (at a push). I've also counted up how many qualitative interview i've done and there are about 12 that are long enough to be of use. i would like more but am starting to feel that there's probably enough if need be. I think up until december i will put a concerted effort into meeting people and asking them there views but after that call it a day.

so.. since my last post i have begun counselling again and have also completed most of my work towards getting chartered by the bps. both of these developments have taken up a lot of time and hopefully will calm down from now on - although i now cnsistently have 2 mornings a week taken up by my practice.

I'm trying desparately trying to work out what to write that would be useful. One interesting thing today is that those young people who have said hello have all been people i have met before. they have popped by to say hi and generally to say they are having difficulty reaching someone. this is nice and extends some of my interviews (reinforcing the temporal interview idea). i think there's also something in the way that the individuals felt comfortable contacting me again.. maybe a parallel to therapy.. maybe... the downside for me was it was hard to rem that i had met with them and it was only when i was saving the transcript that i noticed... mmm something to ponder.

see you in about 8 months!!

arseholes

2007-07-13T15:01:00.001Z

now i can't elaborate too much about the title of this posting - just in case someone actually decides to visit this site but there are a lot of arseholes in the counselling world. I suppose it's a bit of an occupational hazard being a lecturer in counselling but i just don't get it.

you know you read stuff about untrained people being to offer as an effective service as others who have received training and... well that's not really a surprise. Generally there seems to be something fundamental about being able to create a relationship with people and .... well ... be nice to others. I'm sure this is bound up in a load of cultural assumptions... and that probably i'm denying something or some other theotical stuff that i'm not paying enough attention but i struggle with it.

More specifically i struggle with ernestness and preciousness - sometimes masquerading as professionalism. Or power trips and self righteousness ... oh i'll stop ranting.

Things that have happened since i last posted. well i've got no idea when i last posted so i'm sure it's a lot. Mostly dominated by arthur geting bigger but with some counselling content. Plotted highlights include:

- getting a book deal and signing a contract with sage to put some words down on paper
- getting my feedback from the bps - this seemed incredibly inconsistent!!! and lacking in parity with my knowledge of other assessments - but who am i to question...
- presently i'm awaiting to hear about my challenges to the bps's feedback - singers crossed on that one
- i have looked into getting a placement again and had an interview with the student counselling service. this seemed to go pretty badly to me but it was fun to reflect on practice a little more - i felt that i kinda said 'well i'm only doing it because i have to and well i don't really feel that counselling is that useful after all'. Which is obviously true to some degree but not completely. I thik it would be interesting to get back into being a counsellor/therapist/counselling psychologist but it's a strange world!!! On the interview side of things i'll keep my fingers crossed too but again i feel it's a little unlikely really
- i begun writing up my phd a few weeks back too - this seems like the most positive happening really. i seem to have stopped for a while but after this hol (which i may not have mentionned i'm on) i'll get right back to it - honestly :)

back to singing nursery rhymes and banging things with bells in

mid interview

2007-05-17T16:21:00.000Z

ok - so i'm clearly interviewing someone who is chatting to other people. I thought i'd have a go at multi-tasking too. part of me thinks it's probably unethical, but with miutes in between each response it doesn't seem a great deal different than interviewing people using email. Kinda like we both know the score so it's ok? or at least that's wot i'm reading into things.

i seem to be generating loads of little pools of data at the mo - the quan stuff is ticking over but the qual suff is coming realtively slowly. it's difficult to grapple with as it consists of so many fragments. Seems to echo the power issues that go on in therapy online - ie i have to wait for people to contact me, they can choose not to turn up, they can dissapear or take ages to respond to messages that i send. i would say it's frustrating, but it's not really. the frustrations more about my eagreness to get stuff and 'make progress' and i'm not actually sure where i'm progressing at the mo - which seems to be a good place.

AHHH!!!! somehow i've just ended the interview and clicked back before saving the data!!!! am now logging off very annoyed at myself and writing an overview before i forget!!!

developing relationships

2007-04-19T15:30:00.000Z

Ok - i've just had a posting delete itself - bugger

but i want to capture some of today's expereince so i'll babble some more with the hope of capturing some of it..... firstly i am waiting.... listening to music and waiting to see if anyone wants to chat to me about the counselling service. There isn't really enough space on the screen to hold as many windows open as i've got but, it's working (well aprat from it being to blame for losing the last posting - mmm).

Anyhow i ust chatted to someone who noted that the service was a lifeline. This is becoming a common storyline. Also I'm getting fasicnated by the ongoing relationships i'm having with people. Although i anticipated the interviews would parallel the therapeutic process to some degree, I hadn't thought that this would mean they would spread over weeks. It's interesting that i'm getting people contact me more than once and know who i am on the site. Today i was welcomed with "hi you're the student aren't you". This seems great in several ways:

a) it means that people know what i am doing in advance - i was slightly worried that people wouldn't read my profile but comments like this mean that my motives are transparent and people say hello knowing i'm not a counsellor on the site!!!

b) the ongoing relationships mean i can follow up with more questions as they develop - great for filling out the stories that i'm getting

that'll do - no-one has come yet but i don't want to lose another posting........ no doubt to be continued

a month or two goes by

2007-03-15T17:20:00.000Z

Babies occupy a lot of your time. However, there would still be plenty of time to get on and do other things in life if it wasn't for the bloody muppets in call centres who keep taking you details and messing things up. I would list all the ones that have just been incompetent gits but it would take even more time so i'm not going to.

SO the phd - well it's happening. But so are a lot of other things. I've just been online interviewing people about using the counselling service, but again it was quite difficult to get a useful interview - HOWEVER again i think a lot of this proves really useful paralells to the counselling process. For instance the person i met today was contacting the service from work. She found it difficult to access it elsewhere and there weren't any face-to-face services available for her to use at the mo. This made it quite difficult to keep a conversation going, but not impossible. It makes me wonder about the differnces between free to access services and ones that people pay for privately - rekindled thoughts from working face-to-face with young people as a counsellor. I kinda feel that i should clarify that i don't see that as a bad thing but one that needs to be worked with.
This is the first week that i've tried to do any interviewing for ages!!! so that's not too good, but it's i still feel on top of the phd - i need to start writing - and for practice i've got 2 articles that i'm trying to complete - one is a very short article about kooth while the other is about online methods. I think that i'll actually enjoy writing the phd stuff more than the articles as i can see the point of the phd stuff at the moment - obviously i see the point of the articles (after all i'd at least like to have a few things from 2007 on my CV when i become a doctor :)). Where was i going - nowhere probably....

lets start somewhere else - i'm off to dublin in a few months - i've been invited to take part in an online conselling thing that's looking at putting in some funding applications to carry on research projects http://www.esfworkshop.eu/- it all looks very interesting. Also i seem to have ended up getting involved in the development of some virtual learning environments at the university but i have no idea what that means yet.

Mixed methods and pretty pictures seems to be the way forward - i'll start them just as soon as i've got the bastard window replaced in the kitchen

phishing

2007-01-21T14:14:00.000Z

OK phishing is generally a bad thing and generally refering to where annoying bastards try to scam gullible folk of their hard in money. HOWEVER it's also a term that seems to fit what i've been doing in research terms this week - although maybe not actually - for all sorts of reasons it's probably better to describe it as something else.

So what do i mean in this case - basically i've been opening up random chat rooms with the hope that young people based on the counselling site pop by for and tell me about their experience of using the site. This technique echoes what was done in the kidshelpline study last year and proved productive in taking advantage of the fact that the users of the site are generally happy to have a chat with someone while they wait to meet a counsellor/supporter.

So far this appears to have been a really positive experience and i've already had at least one more useful interview with a user of the site. Unfortuntaely a technical problem meant that one interviewee got lost - which was needless to say a bit of a pain but in many ways parallels the experience of counselling in this medium. It notably also come up in a recent organisational meeting of counsellors working on the site. In other instances people popped into the chat room and said hello and then headed off. This may have been because i said something along the line sof 'I'm not a counsellor, I'm a researcher trying to find out what young people think of the site - would you mind answering a few questions' - this could therefore scare people off - a feeling that i can simpify with when you get accosted in the street with the 'can i just ask you a few questions' question!!!!

The interviews themselves were again very brief - again this may have been quickened by the fact that i wasn't providing the service that they had accessed the site for (here i note that it does explicitly say that i'm a researcher on my publicly available profile but not everyone reads that). Despite this i still feel that the interviews will be really useful - my questions still seem to revolve around how do i get at the stuff about depth of relationship - particularly when the interviews are relatively brief and don't develop deep relationships wioth those taking part - mmm - something else to ponder.

Also this week i've spent a lot of time inputting sdq scores which has been really interesting (i say this with surprise). The results seem interesting in that they suggest that the people accessing the service are young people who fall out of the norms that the sdq suggests. It also suggests that in 6 weeks of using the site it doens't show a significant improvement for the users - but i guess this isn't a surprise as you can't undo years of peoples lives in 6 weeks. Anyhow i have a steep statistical learning curve ahead of me - not sure where my knowledge went on the subject but it seems to only be a faint glimmer in the distance at the mo!!!!

for now more sleepless nights of baby crying and hazy daytimes

a new year

2007-01-03T14:07:00.000Z

Well little arthur was born on the 17th of decemebr and this has kinda put things on hold for a while.

although i say this and things are still ticking over nicely. There have now been about 100 sdqs completed and from the last look about 30 follow up sdqs which should prove pretty useful. I've also had about 40 of the alliance quetionnaires completed. Now al i need to do is to work out how to analyse the whole thing - fun fun fun. I'm presently putting together a huge excel spreadsheet ready for playing about with using some fancy stats package that i don't fully understand but should get something meaningful from.

I have also conducted 1 interview that warrants some word as it was a really strange experience. I think it was really noticeable how much less is communicated through the written word than f2f. Although this is obvious and something i've been working with for a long time, i couldn't help but think there was a lot that i wasn't getting. it may have been that the contact wasn't long enough, but it wouldn't really be possible to get y/p to commit to multiple interviews of over an hour of length. It may however have been my interview style - to start with i have been pretty open with a slight focus based upon the different elements of working alliance theory - goal, task and bond. It makes me wonder if the bond bit may be the hard bit, but again i wonder if it's just my lack of expereince of doing what i'm doing where i'm doing it - mmmm - ie online interviewing. I have my second interview in 40 mins so maybe i will have more of an idea then.

Also trying to organise interviews has reminded me of working with young people. I have found it hard to contact some and had a dna that told very close to the time we were about to meet. In fact i waited for 40mins and then checked my messages and the cancellation was there. This obviously isn't a problem but it reminds me that what i am doing has lots of paralel processes with what i am investigating.

Anyhow - by the end of this year i hope to have considerably progressed in this work!!! i intend to have begun writing up and to have collected all the data that is necessary for a phd - so far this looks as tho it's not going to be a problem at all. The other element of the project is that i have been pretty slack in keeping the org themselves up to date with my work - i plan on getting a report to them asap (it was meant to appear in dec but arthur distracted me good and proper from that) - i'm aiming for the end of jan in my mind now - poss sooner dependent upon how the data inputting goes!!!!

Happy new year to everyone who passes by

Terry

considerations

2006-10-18T13:51:00.000Z

ok so - i've now been having a good play with the kooth system and finding my way around it again.

it runs a lot smoother than i remember actually and so far it's been easy to pick up again. Issues that i've had to think about, but not for too long are creating words that are relevent - for instance, in creating a message board statement that is attractive/youth friendly etc for people to feel ok responding to it. Likewise having a profile in the 'supportees' section of kooth raises a similar issue. I also have the user names terry.s(or c) ... which could be a bit of a put off - it doesn't seem the most friendly username. I guess this is all abou the non-textual stuff that goes on.

i also created a user the other day just to see what it was like completing the questionnaire but it turned out that the questionnaire wasn't there yet - hopefully this will happen soonish otherwise my phd will start ticking along without it - which would be a shame. In a simlar way i said that i would do a f2f pilot too - this seems to have gone by the wayside at the mo, despite finding an org who would want to take part - i should follow this up but priorities are a bit different at the mo..... maybe in a week or so i will return to this

other stuff - i've been organising abstracts for next years conference season - which for me only includes the bacp one in york i guess. It's a little far to be heading away from a baby going to the other usuals - eg SPR in Madison. A lazy year hopefully but we'll see.... obviously that doesn't include the business caused by baby types

that's it for now

once more into the breach

2006-10-12T16:14:00.000Z

So i've been lazy and not posted anything for about a month now. This was kind of in the guise that people may come and visit and read the previous post, but really it was because i hadn't been bothered ;P

*talking heads* on the stereo - easy to forget how great they are

however, during my blogging idolness things have been moving along with my own research. in the last week my questionnaires have gone up on the kooth website and people can now contact me directly to feedback about how they are experiencing the service. hopefully this will get me back into the work - over the last few months i've been a little preoccupied by other life events (moving house and baby stuff).

Anyhow the hunger pangs return and it's time to create a pizza for tea - then an evening with the green wing.

Release of CPR

2006-09-14T13:03:00.000Z

Hi all

now generally i don't expect anyone to head into this distant corner of the Internet, however as i've noted this address in an article for a special edition of a counselling jounral there may be one or two people popping along this way.

I actually received the final copy of the special edition the other day - well actually for some reason i received three of them, all posted in separate envelopes and all cramming up my pigeonhole at work. Obviously i didn't mind this when i worked out what they were, but with the intitial thought that they were all going to be Masters thesis to mark, i have to admit that my heart sank for a second :(. Fortunately it wasn't the case, unfortunately the marking is still gonna come at some point in time.

The journal itself looks all nice and shiny and hopefully will prove useful to some people. I wonder who will read it? which bits will be of use? which bits are of limited use? etc etc. I also wonder if anyone will contact me about it - i guess i would expect someone to email but maybe i'm wrong. On this note i will have to keep you (whoever the reader is - most probably just william and gudrun) posted.

My PhD is starting to move quite a lot at the mo. I'm actually expecting to enter into the phase of the work. I've been working with Kooth.com to work out what would be the best way to evaluate the service and it looks as thoguh we have come to some decisions and all being well things will be fully operational come October. This is kinda weird because if you were doing a standard piece of research you wouldn't need to add in quite so much time for top end forward planning about technological things - however in this case there has been a lot of this and almost inevitably it's not going to work first time. BUT even though i anticipate this to be a bit of a sticky period (to some extent) it'll be great to actually get some 'data' for my phd work.

Essentially the PhD seems pretty dull at the mo in contrast to other bits of life. I can't remember what i have wrote about in other blogs (I'm not the most avid blogger), but me and my partner are presently goign to have a baby. This is pretty damn exciting for us both, and without hoping to sound like one of those people who talks as though there is no-one else in the world has ever been through this process, it's also pretty daunting. I'm not going to go on about this here for the time being as i could whitter on for hours about it but it goes someway to explaining my slackness in PhD work at the mo. I'm not even goign to mention the attempts to move house where the seller decided to pull out at the last moment!!! :(

That'll do for now - i'm gonna update my website a little now - it's kinda like a tidying the house before inviting people around i guess

take care all and do feel free to leave a message and say hello if you're passing :)

#7

2006-08-03T12:31:00.000Z

Ahah - i better add something to this - for some reason i've just left it be for ages. I have written quite abit on the blogging as a research tool space but even that seems to have dried up after I brought it all together in a presentation at edingburgh!! However, an addition to this that i will add at some point is how do you end a blog? Mmm - interesting - guess i'll end the other blogg soonish with a post about just that.

Anyhow - a lot has been happening. I eventually got through my end of the first year panel. There seems to be alot of fall out about this - mostly about the uni trying to work out how it should work without actually putting the students through hell. But now that's gone and, although i've been asked to feedback (and i feel i have a lot to feedback) on the whole i can't be arsed - that's done and dusted. BUT maybe i'll get around to it once i finished all the other stuff that i'm involved with at the moment.

So, since last checking in I found out that Becky (my partner) is pregnant. In fact this and the plan to move house probably goes a long way to understanding why i've not been blogging for a while. this is all great news but keeps me busy and distracts me from phd stuff that i should be doing. In a really sad, wanting to share all the good news with anyone willing to listen kinda way I wish i'd worked out how to put pics up on this thing and then i could attach the scan pictures - very strange things i must say, but at least they give me something concrete to hold onto and help me understand why becky was being sick everyday a few months back. Anyhow - as i say that's great news.

Other stuff - the special edition of CPR should be coming out soon. Finally i managed to tie the loose ends together with the co-editor Kate.

PhD - well this has moved on quite a lot - i found that my proposal changed (or at least got refined) because of the panel. I ended up presenting a really dull piece of work which complied to academic convention i guess. This makes me wonder about how i will eventually write up the final thing - after all i'm imagining that all being well there will be more interesting distractions in my life over the next few years. With regard to this, I've been hoping to automate a lot of my data collection stuff and the org (kooth.com) who i am researching have been really supportive and helpful in doing so. I won't go into this at the mo but i'll do another post sooner than last time.

Gonna go now and write upsome stuff for the BACP's AUCC journal - fun fun fun

#6

2006-04-24T13:01:00.000Z

Well another gap in the blog. This time i've been working hard and heading off to Moscow for a conference. Needless to say far too much vodka has been consumed and then i went to Moscow.

As for the research side of things - well i've ben attending regular steering group meeting sfor the kooth project. I think last time i was surprised to hear that it is essentially up and running. There now seems a bit more urgency to get on with my project - after all the funding for the whole project runs out in 2 years time.

Moscow - i'd like to put up a piccy but haven't got the camera nearby to USb it into the ol' pc - therefore you'll just have to do a google search for the kremlin etc and look at pics there. Unsurprisignly it looked just like the piccys - in fact the sun even shined. As the trip was a university trip to visit the Moscow school we attended and presented at a conference over there. This was quite a strange experience - particualy presenting with an interpreter. However it was also pretty fun. Vegetarian food consisted of mainly potatos and mushrooms with a slight wiff of meat fat but i'm sure that that helped soak up the alcohol consumed. There should be another blog somewhere devoted to this trip but i haven't got to putting it up yet.

CPR - well, the editing of the journal is slowly happening. Today is the last date for people to send in redrafted versions of their articles - i hope that they arrive :). Mine are now done. Although reading the peer review comments was pretty harsh (I'm sure that part of being a researcher is developing a thick skin) I got on and made some changes.

PhD - this is the week of my Panel presentation (basically an end of year report). Reassuringly I could have conducting a very unethical piece of work for the last year without any insurance, but hey ho. Fortunately i'm pretty confident abou the process and my own work - however, we'll see.....maybe i will check in later on in the week to tell you i've been asked to stop my work :)

fun fun fun - take care

#5

2006-03-01T11:10:00.000Z

ok - so things are starting to make a little sense in my little head.

I would now describe myself in phase 1 of my phd. Maybe this isn't the significant part, maybe it's the fact that i now understand what phase 1 is a little better. Presently i am getting my head around what the organisation (Kooth) is. To start with i automatically assumed that it was just an online counselling service. However now I am acknowledging that it is not only more than just this in practice, it is also a project with a massive politcal agenda.

So differences from my initial perceptions:

- firslty the website has many other elements. For example, it has a lot of referral stuff, it has the message boards, it has private messaging (I guess asynchronous therapy) , it has a magazine and all of this is moderated by counsellors and (this is the crunch part) other professionals. Therefore kooth is also there for drugs workers etc etc to have an online presence.

- secondly the politcal agenda. Presently there is a massive lacking in the parity of counselling services for young people. This spreads throughout the country but i think kooth is going to highlight this within cheshire. I guess Steve (probably the centre of the project for the time being) has a role, notably something like developmental worker for interagency blah blah blah kinda sums up this agenda. He hopes to bring together statuatory and voluntary sector organisations and link them in a more fluid way. This is where it becomes a massive task, there are 3 PCTs in the area and getting them to talk to the vol sector won't be easy - and likewise the questions around the quality of provision flow the other way too. Mmmm - bringing the medical and social models of counselling together seems like a thankless task. However, i guess my sense is that this needs to happen for youth services to work fluidly - mmm - however, i guess this needs a lot of thought - mmm - i will stop here with this one

- thirdly - i also shouldn't forget the face to face provision that is also being funded from the same pot oif gold.

Anyhow time to go

#4

2006-02-13T11:28:00.000Z

another day and another ramble on.

I've been trying to get my head around the research project but so far haven't really got very far. I kinda know what i want to be doing and in many ways am already doing that but some more structure may be necessary. Mmmm that sounds a little radical, maybe i'll have to get to the old drawing board and actually draw something - rather than being all 'post modern' about it.

However, although it seems as if the research side of things has been a little ad hoc, other things are moving quite well. In particular i seem to have been doing a lot for the special edition of CPR. The first articles that i have received are being peer reviewed and i have an idea of how the whole is now going to look. i have also been getting on with the 2 submissions that i want to make. So this is good. Other publications that may show their ugly little heads are a chapter in william's book about 'counselling on the edge' (although i don't think that this is happening quite yet) and a book introducing practioners to research. Oh yeah it also looks as though my review of Mick Cooper's in school work is going to go in the next edition of CPR - hopefully it will make him chuckle.

Coming back to the research - although i feel they all complement each other I specifically refer to the work i am doing with kooth as my PhD research - I have begun to try and evaluate the training that the practitoners have undertaken. To do so i have asked individuals to comment in the message forums. So far no-one has. I have had one message through kooth's internal mailing system though, which is a start. My plan is to complete a questionnaire and inform all of those who attended about it.

Some issues that have arose about the traing - it was slightly confused in places. Mainly because those attending didn't know, or more acurately assumed that they would be offering counselling online. However, in reality each of the orgs will only get a very limited amount of time and it will mean that it will probably only end up with 1 person taking up the hours. i feel that this could have been sorted out earlier - but the rush to get it online and to start spending the money was at the fore.

This leads nicely to the politcal debate that has been going on in my head. I may have mentionned this in a previous posting but it is still ticking around. basically what are we doing set up such services. Oh no that's more of the ontological debate. this comes into the epistemological debate i think. Basically at the root of the whole Connexions project is the hope to get more people into jobs - does this fit well with counselling? and i guess the next thing would be does counselling fit with getting funding? particularly if there is a reluctance to evaluate and 'prove' efficacy!!!. Mmm it's all very interesting (at least for me).

#3

2006-02-08T15:56:00.000Z

thought i better check in again to this

i've just been writing part of a book review that I'm supposed to have finished ages ago. I haven't quite worked out what that's all about. I'm guessing there's a combination of nervousness from submitting things to be published and laziness. I guess that this is interesting to some degree as if you're going to complete some research then you have to be able to tell people about it - with this in mind things in the pipeline include:

- editorial for the cpr special edition
- article on failed research with william for the special edition
- article about my own MSc research for the special edition
- article about using bloggin as a research tool - have a few ideas for where it may go but depends how this eveolves i guess
- summary of online counselling literature - possibly for the BJGC

anyhow these are ideas - baring fruits will be another stage.

Yesterday I did a session for the doc couns students at the uni. It went relatively well although i think it could have flowed better. It initiated a lot of interesting debate and reitteated to me how involved with the whole political side of counselling I am. I could muse a lot more about htat but i'm gonna get back on with writing this review.

#2

2006-01-23T13:56:00.000Z

Well it’s taken me quite a while to post another entry. I’m not 100% sure why it’s so difficult to keep these things (in that I mean research journaling as a whole) up to date.

A lots been happening – I’ve been involved in the Cheshire Kooth’s training and been to another steering group meeting. At some point in time I should write a summary of all of the things I have attended before I forget!!!! A number of issues are beginning to emerge. However at the moment making sense of them into something useful may be difficult so I’ll just list things that have come to mind below:

Social Control: this is an oldy but became very apparent at the last steering group meeting. Talk went from talking about the local here and now to considering what the project is really about. Needless to say Connexions as a government funded organisation have a more political agenda – notably getting people into work. This raises some interesting questions around how counselling (or at least humanistic non-directive counselling) fits in this framework. Although there is a sense that counsellors who have worked with young people will generally be familiar with this issue others may be more challenged by this – maybe

Referring On: This is actually quite linked to the above point. The service intends to act as a portal to other services when they are required. In doing so there are some interesting philosophical assumptions about who is the expert. For instance how can you work from a non-directive stance but direct people to a drugs worker. This reminds me of some of the geldard and geldard stuff (being pro-active as a counsellor). I also feel that this is something that happens anyhow – but appears more controversial when it’s written down.

Training: Within the training group there are very different starting levels of experience. This lacking in parity proves curious in developing a training course (where do you pitch it) and raises the question of what position they are in at the end of the course.

Blogging: this seems an interesting process but raises a number of issues. Eg if I want to write something nasty about someone then it could all go wrong (I also notice I just censored myself then from swearing because others may read this). What title do you call your blog?!!! How well do you publicise it? It’s definitely different from pen and paper – I almost want to say less creative, but that may be my lack of competency – I can add piccys in here but I can’t scribble. I find doodling very useful – however I’m sure there is technology that allows that too. I think I may try and stat a sub-blog to focus on blogging as a research tool.

That’ll do for now – I will check in more regularly from now on.

a preamble

2006-01-12T14:19:00.000Z

Hi there

this is the first posting that i'm making on blogger - as i intend this to be a major part of a PhD that I am conducting, it should be the first of many (however is has taken me several months to even get to this stage). I won't go into the research i'm intending to conduct yet as i'm just testing this out.

In fact lets try and post this

T