H809-3. I ain't no fly by night

That's just the title of the song I'm listening to by Seasick Steve as I down a bottle of Chilean red, having cooked a soul-warming chicken tikka masala. I was thinking earlier that a bottle of wine makes studying go down a treat, but as my eyes fog over I'm starting to revise that observation.

First thing when I got to work this morning I set about ruthlessly chopping and changing TMA 01. I rewrote most of the section on methodology and feel it's much more honest now, true to what I want to do rather than what I think might 'sound good' to others.

It's nice to have created a space in which to study/explore for the sake of it, rather than panting through the week to keep up with tasks and readings. I have been playing around a bit more with Zotero and RefWorks. I don't have enough evidence at this point to form my final opinion, but I like the intuitive nature of Zotero, which blends nicely with my intuitive - and beloved - Mac. I have also been experimenting more with Furl - it's certainly an improvement on storing bookmarks on different laptops, and in different browsers, which is what I was doing before.

In working through Week 6 materials in an 'iterative fashion', hahaa, I have come across Grainne Conole's blog entry on whether blogging will become an academic activity which will count as evidence of the blogger's research engagement. This intrigues me a great deal...I am working on genre analysis in my Translation Studies course and wonder if academic blogging will emerge as a new genre...(okay, this is an example of where I revisit a post and add something I found later: Blogging impacts on formal academic output.) I also learned what technorati authority is - honestly, at first I thought this was the latest goofy widget, or even a bad linguistic joke, but academics who blog are displaying their statistics on their sites. This is a rating which shows the number of blogs linking to a web site in the last six months. Are we going to start worrying about our technorati authority now? It's like the newest incarnation of the high school popularity contest - how cool am I? How many people like me? I find it fascinating (perhaps disproportionately so at this point given the red liquid at my elbow...)

In my class today I found myself lecturing my Freshmen about considering all the 'stakeholders in research', so clearly this course is worming its way into my teaching life as well. They clearly had no idea what I was talking about, but I keep chipping away...