Back in the saddle...

I teach Digital Marketing and am acutely aware that my own web presence has suffered in the last two years but here's why:

The long and short of it is that this blog used to be  a place where I would discuss my research, it acted as a place where I could rehearse arguments and points of view. As those who have read this blog previously will realise I've been undertaking a PhD. In the last two years that has dominated my time. Well my time when I've not been teaching. Six weeks ago today I submitted my PhD and at some point in the coming months I will have my viva.

While one might assume that completing (or as best possible until it is examined) would overwhelm one with relief and joy, this is not quite how it is or was.  Over the final months of bringing it together I was very disciplined (for me):  little to no social life, a lot of gym visits, early nights and long-ish  days (I am a parent so the working day is naturally curtailed when parenting starts) writing/proofing/checking. I was in an odd state: focused, anxious and adrenalin (and caffeine) fuelled and all the time trying hard not to get ill. As it happens within half an hour of submitting I had a sore throat, followed by a week-long, heavy cold and recurring shoulder/neck problem back with a vengeance, leading to a month of sleepless nights and physio bills, in retrospect it took its toll. I will write a  more in-depth post about how the PhD process was for me at some point soon, I am still a little nervous to talk publicly about it until I've got through the examination process.

I am now left looking at what next? I have a lot of ideas and things I want to do in terms of research, although I will miss my PhD (there I've said it!) or maybe I will miss the people who became the focus of the research, their stories and struggle. This is another posting for the future. I'll also give a synopsis of my thesis at some point too. I have written or attempted to write three papers in the last 6 weeks too. This was over ambitious and as they are derived from the PhD I've had to be careful to not plagiarise myself (much harder than you would imagine). Two of these papers are intended for this year's ISBE conference. I've attended ISBE every year since 2004 (a year after my academic career began) but last year, other than giving a keynote presentation at the Cultural Entrepreneurship conference in Pori, Finland, I was on a self-imposed conference moratorium. So I am really looking forward to ISBE and reconnecting with the research community. This year it will be in Cardiff.

So my next steps, other than get through the viva (everything crossed): to re-engage with the research community, develop my research ideas and seek collaborators to help make them happen, continue writing about and disseminating my recent research and reconsider and develop my online presence. This is where this posting started. Those who know me know I have a pretty lengthy history working within online/digital/Internet environment, as if to haunt me some old photos recently emerged, which I might share including press cuttings from the 90s....'Women take on Cyberspace' (Birmingham Post, April 1997) *cringe*.... but my focus on my recent research focus has meant I have dropped the proverbial online presence ball. This timeout has also offered me an opportunity to reflect. To value my privacy. To consider how much I want to share and why? I have become a 'lurker', an observer, utterly bemused, sometimes amused and delighted by the banality of what people choose to share (incidentally I would suggest this is a useful exercise for anyone working in this field: to take yourself out and observe others for a bit). But I feel it is time to test the water again. So my next steps also include attempting to re-build my online presence, tidy-up and revive this blog and practise a little more of what I preach in my Digital Comms and Digital Marketing modules....

Cultural Entrepreneurship Conference 2012

(A little shameless publicity to follow)
In recent months I have been buried in the 'writing up' of my PhD. Apart from my teaching commitments I've been keeping a very low profile within the research world. This means for me, this year, I haven't submitted any papers for conferences! For example this is the first time in my 9 years in Academia that I won't be attending the ISBE conference (which I am a bit disappointed about, especially given they have a dedicated creative industries track).

However I have been invited, and have accepted, to give a keynote presentation at The Cultural Entrepreneurship Conference in December, of this year in Pori, Finland. I figured by then I ought to have the bulk, if not all, my writing complete.... My presentation title will be: Creative Disciplines Education; a Model for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Paradox of Teaching ‘Creatives’ Entrepreneurship.

What is great is that finally the two main areas that I have been working in (with in my research) have converged. For those of you who don't know me: alongside my PhD work on 'Creative Entrepreneurship, Gender and Careers' I've also been working pretty hard in the field of 'Enterprise Education' (ironically this is the area I've published in too). Perhaps this was inevitable, afterall so much of my approach is dependent on my own role within the research, I guess I couldn't help but influence myself.  Anyway I aim to look at where these two fields converge in December.

Before I go I have an observation/PhD tip:
If I get stuck, if I go back to my data I always seem to find the answer. I am still very fond of my data I feel like it's gold or something of very high value and when I get lost or am off on some mad detour (which often feels the case) my data can really help to focus my mind and reassure me that I'm actually on the right track.

PhD update

Well for anyone who read this blog when it was updated on a more than once a year basis, you'll recall I am a part-time PhD student as well as a full-time senior lecturer. My study is looking at entrepreneurship within the careers of creative industries graduates. To say this has been a long process is an understatement but finally I think I am beginning to see the 'light at the end of the tunnel'.

It has been a tricky balancing act. Like many in my profession I am also 'research active' so at the same time as doing my PhD and carrying out my teaching commitments I've also been working on other research projects and publishing papers within a linked field - Enterprise Education.

A list of papers recently published, related to that can be found at my Birmingham City Business School staff publication page (BTW I know that photo is awful).

I'll maybe write a more detailed post on these papers sometime in the future.

So the PhD. Well. I'm basically ‘writing up’. I think. What I mean is the literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis are complete (all but tidying up/final sweep of the lit etc.) and I am writing up my ‘findings and discussion’ chapters. This is a nuts job and I have to kind of get into a particular head space and really concentrate. I think, due to having supervised and now having been supervised so long, that I am beginning to be able to self-supervise if that’s possible. So I can see where my work is flawed or there are gaps but it all makes my head hurt (in a good way).

I am working with a relatively small and specific sample group who I interviewed, at some length, the interviews were long and intense and are around 20,000 -25,000 words long. It’s a lot to analyse and make sense of. But I’m enjoying the process. Even if it has resulted in increased insomnia. I feel really strange if I manage to get a couple of consecutive days to work on it. Like I have to re-join the world afterwards, but I also resent being taken away from it because I find it so hard to get back into that zone, that level of concentration.

I would say though that once I got into doing my interviews (which were full of issues at the time - again that’s another story), which I really enjoyed, the whole PhD experience has been far more rewarding than those early days where I felt I (it wasn't just a feeling I literally did) spent years doing my literature review and getting very little in return.

I just hope now that I can keep up the momentum for this final push!

I’ll keep you posted…

Blogging again

S0 another year went by and I didn't blog. Oops.

Recently I've been talking to my Digital Marketing students about blogging and encouraging them to set up blogs, develop their online presence and it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to be setting a slightly better example. I also figured that from a research perspective (i.e. I am research active) I ought to be sharing more. A colleague once said to me 'if you don't tell anyone about your research then it doesn’t' exist' or something like that I guess it comes from the same school of thought as 'publish or perish'.

So I will blog a bit more - or try to at least.....and in my next post I will give a bit of an update on where I am with my PhD. That doesn't sound that exciting I realise but may be of interest to those of you also on the PhD path...

Where did 2010 go? and now I am 5

Well it's that time of year again where I teach Digital Marketing. I spend a few weeks talking to students about their own online presence. Some start blogs, some develop their twitter identity...last week I asked them to join Linkedin and make contact with me. I don't think any did that.



This year I had to reflect that perhaps I hadn't given my own online presence much love. In fact this blog has somewhat gone to seed. I last posted in late 2009!



This afternoon I am taking a break from marking, last term I had an intense amount of teaching that meant my research suffered and blogging was the last thing on my mind, it also means I've a huge stack of marking still to get through. Still with some light at the end of the marking tunnel I thought I'd spend part of the afternoon figuring out how to go forward with my research and that's where this blog comes in.



I am about to embark on an intense period of time related to my research and PhD specifically and I intend to reflect on the process as I go along. Here I'll be highlighting various aspects for example when I manage to publish something, give a conference paper or read or write something of interest.

That was always the original purpose of this blog which incidentally celebrated it's 5th year last October!! here's a link to that first months blogposts back in 2005 - crikey what a lot has changed in that time!

Did you graduate from Wolverhampton Fine Art 1994?

Ok so some folks will have noticed some recent Twitter and Facebook activity from me asking the question in the title of this post.  If you did graduate from Fine Art 1994 from Wolverhampton. Then please let yourself be known and I'll forward the link to a simple career history survey - it should only take 10 minutes. Here is some of what I've said to the participants:

This survey is for graduates of Wolverhampton University's 1994 Fine Art Alumni. The survey is part of Charlotte Carey's PhD research. The research seeks to understand links between gender and entrepreneurship within the creative industries. Any information you contribute will be stored securely and your name will never be attributed to any of the data offered. This survey is aimed to capture the career paths of a cohort of creative industries graduates. I am hoping that the 1994 Fine art Wolverhampton alumni will participate in this study.

As part of the process of reaching this sample group I am making use of social media with the hope of generating a snowballing effect. Whereby one participant will forward information about the survey to their contacts within the grouping. This is proving harder than expected, partly due to the nature, amount of time that has passed and individuals names changing (through marriage etc.). An approach I am taking is to leverage my own social media networks in order to try to reach this group. All help is gratefully received. If you are or know of anyone within this grouping then please contact me directly via twitter @charlottecarey or simply respond to this posting in the comments.

IEEP; Twitter and Teaching Enterprise

Yesterday (yeah okay I know I haven't blogged for ages, anyway...) I was presenting to this year's IEEP (International Enterprise Educators Programme) cohort with colleagues from two other universities; Dr Kelly SMith (Huddersfiled, @kellyjs) and Tom Williamson (Coventry @floppyarms). Not really sure how we were billed but I went along to talk about how I have used Twitter in my teaching.

Above is a screen shot of a slide. The table highlights how I think twitter is useful for the different courses I teach on.


I was trying to talk about why I use Twitter? Mainly it's because I teach interactive or digital marketing. So obviously Twitter, along with many other things, is covered. I use it for a number of practical things too. Students can interact with my networks (an area that with colleagues I have discussed elsewhere), develop their own, get an insight into appropriate ways of using Twitter on behalf of their future clients and for developing their own businesses and personal online presence. Twitter is not explored in isolation it is one of many tools (just currently particularly useful). As well as this students are encouraged to use it to annotate the session under a common #hashtag, making for group note taking and an ensuing conversation which, potentially, extends beyond the class room.


At the IEEP event a number of concerns were voiced. One of the issues that arose was anxiety about referring students to documents which held no academic rigour. Along with this was anxiety about the level of academic evaluation as to the value of services like twitter.

My initial response to these two points. Firstly the speed with which technology changes and the ways in which folks use the Internet and apply the various tools available is constantly evolving. In contrast an academic paper can literally take years to go through the review process and be published. This making research relating to use of twitter (at least peer reviewed academic research) rather thin on the ground. Twitter only started in 2006 after all.

A second aspect is a tension which I perceive within enterprise/entrepreneurship education and which has been borne out in various evaluations of enterprise provision I've been involved in. This being the balance between academic/theoretical pursuit and the need to provide students with insight into new and emerging business models as well as timely and appropriate marketing approaches (and that's scratching the surface). I am talking about theory vs practice.

The ensuing talk offered much healthy scepticism and tough questioning.

However anyone would think that we were pushy sales folk trying to flog our wares, rather than a couple of academics discussing how we are embracing new technologies, trying to conceptualise their implications and seeking opportunities from them for ourselves and our students.

Hmm as a final note I must thank the IEEPers as one way or another the debate has ended a long drought period within this blog (been tweeting too much....:-) Thank you and perhaps see you on twitter @charlottecarey

Fear and loathing in doctoral studies...

Dear blogger forgive me it has been sometime since I last posted. 

Dear reader 

This blog has lost its way. Or rather this blogger has lost her way. Sometime ago I thought this was a twitter related thing but barely tweet anything worth reading there at the moment either...

Tomorrow I am due to present my PhD research so far.... this goes on and on. I have been delayed somewhat of late. Partly due to what I realise is pure fear! Fear of not completing (I know go figure, pull your finger out and bloody well get on with it), fear of my intended sample group not playing ball. Okay what else? oh yes fear of the whole scale of the thing.

This will not be news for anyone else who has embarked on this particular journey. It is a slog and as I've mentioned here before with all the other family and work things going on there is little time, at least not the right sort of concentrated time I could do with to fully engage with the process. Anyway these may all be excuses. Think I need to figure out a solution here. 

Okay I have a much more positive post to write about some other new, interesting and thoroughly distracting pieces of research I've been working on. 

Incidentally I might give this blog another chance. If I get a chance I'll update on tomorrow's event.

Kreative Oslo

This week I am in Oslo. I am attending the launch meeting of Creative Metropoles, a new project where I am working with a couple of colleagues from across the university and researchers from 12 other EU cities. I'll talk about this in more depth as it develops but my colleague Jon Hickman has made a start by developing some of the conversation we've been having here about creative industries definitions. 

Glamorgan Enterprise Education event

Just a brief round up of the day back in December where, amongst others,  my colleague Harry Matlay and I spoke at Glamorgan University on Enterprise Education. Includes a gym motivating pic!

Enterprise education and web 2.0

Okay so there's no new years list. No resolutions (of the blogging variety).  Last year was pretty intense but in a good way. I am now more a lecturer than a researcher - although I have a couple of research projects about to get underway and so the balancing act will continue for the forseeable and PhD rumbles on (desperate to get some of my work time devoted to this - that's a little something to work towards). 

So my research interests are evolving but still focussed on the following broad topics:

• Gender and entrepreneurship in the creative industries
  
• Enterprise education 
  

The former of these is my PhD topic and pretty much under wraps for the time being - it is a long slog with moments or real joy when I can literally feel my brain absorbing new ideas and stuff, but otherwise hard.

The latter, which has emerged from my funded research, has developed into various strands: 

1.  Contextualised enterprise education (i.e. enterprise taught within the context of a discipline e.g. sport or art and design)
   
2. What can generic business school enterprise education learn from how existing curriculum is taught within art and design?
   
3. Enterprise pedagogies and web 2.0  - this is an interesting area and one which seems to have a growing interest. Mainly it's about how education can respond to students increasingly immersed in the online world? how does that make them different sorts of learners? and what fantastic opportunities exist with in social media etc to engage with our students?
   

Based on the latter I am presenting next Friday (23rd Jan 09) at Birmingham City University for an event run by the Higher Education Academy for English.

HEA/BMAF Enterprise Education Event brief Feedback

I am going through an insomniac phase at the moment so at 7.45 a.m on a Saturday morning I've already been up for 2 hours already!

Thought I'd give a little feedback from the HEA/BMAF event I was presenting at on Thursday. I'll frame this around my tweets from the day (I use twitter - micro blogging). Here are the three tweets, the latter 2 are in response to my twitter pal and enterprise education colleague Dr Kelly Smith (from Huddersfield University).

1. A very interesting day. With some tough love re:responsibilities of business schools in relation economic crisis

2. @KellyJS on this basis, what responsibility do we take/have?Could new enterprise/entrepreneurship pedagogy's be more appropriate? about 19 hours ago from web in reply to KellyJS

3. @KellyJS long story short:Business schools continue to teach Fordist models, these clearly don't work in 2008. i.e. credit crisis (David Rae,2008)

The day was set in the dramatic, wintery valley scenery of Pontypridd at the University of Glamorgan. First up was Prof David Rae who gave a timely insight into where we sit as business schools in terms of our delivery of business management pedagogy's.  According to David our continued Fordist approach is out-moded and unsustainable. The current economic crisis clearly shows this.  This gave a lot of food-for-thought for myself and the other delegates.

As my colleague Prof Harry Matlay and I were immediatly following David we had to think on our feet somewhat to respond to this message. I think, however, that our own presentation complemented his in so much as we were focussing very much on the who, when, why, how and when entrepreneurship/enterprise should be taught? We also considered what Business Schools could learn from how other disciplines deliver their generic pedagogy. Here I used creative disciplines as an example (see this earlier paper which explores this idea). Briefly,  we suggest that generic training within, for example, art and design potentially leads to more enterprising behaviour, for example: experiential, project based curricula, peer review (crits), lecturers who are practitioners and exhibiting work.

Speaking with  Dr Andy Penaluna (the organiser) yesterday I was expressing my sense of seeing the world and future a little bit differently as a result of this day. From my perspective this was one of those occasions where you come away recognising that your thinking has altered, in other ways a thoroughly stimulating day. 

The presentations and a podcast from the day, I believe, will be made available soon and I'll point to them once they're online.

Off to Glamorgan

Today I am off to an event organised by Andy and Kath Penaluna on behalf of the HEA/BMAF (Higher Education acadamy for Business, Management, Accountancy and Finance) and ISBE (Institure of Small Business and Entrepreneurship). My colleague Harry Matlay and I are speakers at an event and looking at Enterprise education (there is a brief outline of the day here).

We will be discussing the key questions 'The Current state of Entrepreneurship education: the Key questions'. I will, with the permission of my co-presnter give some more detail related to this when we're done and what we think those questions are. But as always any thoughts welcome?

Hello BCU

Today I am due to present to some colleagues about why I blog. So thought I'd I've myself literally 5 minutes to put down as many reasons as possible:
feedback
rehearse
write down ideas
brainstorm
brain dump
practise articulating
collaborate
raise profile
manage profile
have profile
have online presence
be myself
be me
write
write some more
have ideas
exorcise ideas that won't develop
have ideas that might develop
come back to things
a repository of ideas and thoughts
figure stuff out
things to go back to when ideas dry up
reflect
think
think about multiple perspectives
avoid mentioning names
ethics
research ethics
plan
note to self
link
link to people
link to events
link to research
link me to literature
connect me to people
association with events and people and places
tell my story..........

I think I could go on and on. Blimey the endless benefits. Others might mention the 'conversation' being part of, and contributing to, the conversation around my research area.

Okay my blog has also just proved useful to thinking about what I might say this afternoon! Happy day.

a mini catch-up

Since I last posted I've been very very busy. This is me in my first full year as a lecturer and still a researcher - trying to find the balance, afraid my blog has gone a bit on the back burner. I've had a couple of conferences in the last couple of months. Most recently ISBE -this is the 5th time I've attended this conference and I enjoy it more and more each year. Perhaps because I get more and more immersed in the networks there and they increasingly provide a rich source of knowledge, friendship and opportunity.

Note to self
A couple of issues that arose which I will blog about at some point:

1. the entrepreneurial university -
- is it lead by an entrepreneur?
- is it made up by entrepreneurial individuals?
- are academics entrepreneurial but just haven't recognised it yet?

2. Are those that are creative industry individuals running a business entrepreneurs?
I was reminded of a definition of 'entrepreneur' which clearly suggests that they are - I need to dig this out - But any thoughts in the meantime are welcome