Bowling Alone

Today has also been a great day as I managed to speak to my second Supervisor Dr. Rachel McLean so I thought this deserved its own post. It's always great speaking to Rachel because she is the Principle Lecturer of my school (BCT) so her time is pretty precious. She had a look through my R1 form and gave me loads of great feedback and we discussed the changes that needed to be tweeked. The subject of her thesis is very similar to mine and covers lots of the same themes, so she gave me a copy of hers to look through for inspiration. This has probably come just at the right time as I have been avoiding other people's work as I didn't want it to hold too much influence over me before I could form my own ideas, but now I am fairly comfortable with my topics and the direction I want to take I think it will be really good to take a look at her work for inspiration and a standard to work towards.
She was also really positive about my work and seemed genuinely excited by the topic, which is always good and put me in a really positive place. As well as her thesis she also lent me a few really useful books.

the first is The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold:

This is great because we had a speaker from the University of Salford in our research session a few weeks ago called Helen Keegan, usually these sessions a little dull and slightly irrelevant to my work, but Helen was informative and entertaining and it was during this session where I first heard about this book.
The second book is called Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of the American Community by  Robert Putnam. I know I shouldn't judge a book by it's cover but how awesome is that artwork

I had never heard of this book before but I am currently reading the book The Longer Long Tail by Chris Anderson and on the train home he used the phrase 'Bowling alone' in reference to this book.