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....

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!