 Thanks very much, Marin. It's a pleasure to be here and to see so many people joining us now. As Marin just moves over to our slides, I think, do I need to reshare my slides, Marin, or will it come up automatically? No, you'll have to reshare them, sorry. Perfect, okay. Just to introduce myself, while I do that, my name is Louise Drum and I'm an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, and I'll pass over to my colleagues. Hi, I'm James Brunton. I'm an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University. And I'm Sarah Honeychurch and I'm a good practice advisor at the University of Glasgow, and I have my helpful research assistant on my desk with me at the moment, Lacey the Cat. So apologies for that. So please would just ask you while we're moving through our slides, if you could introduce yourself, maybe tell us who you are, your name and where you are, actually. That would be nice to just get a feel for who's in the room with us today. And cats, of course, are welcome. Mine will probably disturb me a little bit. So what are we doing here today? Well, we're going to talk a little bit about the journal Research and Learning Technology and why you might want to consider submitting for it. Where to start? Where's the start point? What are the things you want to think at the beginning, not at the point at which you're submitting or pushing the submit button. Common pitfalls and what reviewers, what we as reviewers and editors are looking for. And the way we'll ask you to participate, we'll ask you to talk in the chat. We're going to use some breakout rooms. We have Marin standby to help us with that if we have enough people to do that. Otherwise, we'll just kind of keep it within the room. And we'll just check and see how many people we've gone on. And we've also got a Google document that we're going to be asking you to do some work on. So that'll be a Google slide stock. And so just have a device ready that you can type in or use a mouse just to have that on standby. So I think I'm going to pass over now to Sarah to tell you a little bit about the journal. Okay, so yes, so we're called Research in Learning Technology. And we publish articles in very, very broad areas to do with learning technology. So tech enhanced learning, online learning, distance learning, mobile learning, flexible learning, wearable technology, simulation learning environments, learning spaces, pedagogy, open educational practice and social media. We're an open access journal. CC by four is how everything is published. And we also encourage people to do their own self archiving. So it's very, very open, very, very accessible. It's been published in 1993. It's been going since then. And at the moment, we don't actually have additions. We have a rolling publication. So when things are ready to publish, we just publish them. So that's about getting things done as quickly as we can for people really. So far this year we've published 19 articles. Last year we were just so incredibly busy. That absolutely bump a year with so many things being submitted. And we actually had to close the journal for submissions because we just didn't have funds to publish everything. So we have just opened up for submissions again, which is fantastic as editors were really, really pleased to be back and to see the submissions coming in. So far this year, we have actually published 19 articles. So although we've been closed for submissions, we've still been very, very busy, which is fantastic. Now, some stats, I have to say, I don't really understand what these mean. We have 2017 SJR of 0.784. I've no idea what that means. So the peer reviewed journal. So everything that comes in is reviewed by at least two peer reviewers quite often more than that. We use authenticate to screen for similarity. Not really about plagiarism, but we do just check that everything is original. So from a reviewer point of view, we're integrated with Publons. So this is a way that as a reviewer you can build up your profile and get a bit of kudos for what you do. And I think that's about all I want to say about that. What I want to do next, I think it's just go on to the next slide. What we're going to do now is we're going to get you to do an activity. And this is all about article titles. And here we have some titles that are similar to things that have either been accepted for publication in research and learning technology or ones that haven't been accepted. So what we'd like you to do is we're going to put you into breakout rooms. We'll then give you a link to a Google slide and we'd like you to drag and drop and just out of these six say which of any you would accept and which of any you would reject. We'll give you about five minutes to do that and then we'll come back as a room and start to talk about what makes a good title and why we accept it or reject it any of them. So that's great. I'm going to share a link in the chat here. And Marin, do you think it will be possible for us to bump people into breakout rooms? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Should we do maybe two or do you want three? I'd say maybe groups of four maybe. So how many people have we got at the moment? We've got 12 persistent participants. So three rooms. Three rooms sounds good. So brilliant coming up. Perfect. I'm just putting it in the chat now, your instructions. So accept or reject, go to the slide with your group number. You'll probably have a group number when you're bumped into your room. So you've got a slide dock there. Go to the slide number that's got your group on it and accept and reject. Feel the power. Right. I'm just going to move everybody now. So hopefully that will then Hey, Marin, so we could probably close it probably at 20 past. Okay, that's okay. I can see them work. It's great working on Google slides because I can see them all moving things around. I stayed in the main room in case anybody and arrived late. Great. Yeah. And the session is still being recorded. Do you want me to stop the recording? No, we've only got another minute or so. Okay. The later breakout room will be a bit longer. So probably we can pause then. Okay. Okay. So whenever you're ready, I think Marin. Right. I'll end breakout rooms now. Thank you. There's a mention of a theory. I don't know if it's real or not. There's talk about students. Hello. So we'll just we'll just carry on now. So, Sarah, would you like to maybe just wrap up? We've got the next slide just to wrap up on that particular activity. Did anybody want to just put it in the chat? What was what was interesting about that? How did you decide? Or if anybody wants to share how their group went and I'll just pass back to Sarah. So I have to say I was sitting listening to group two and it was absolutely fascinating listening to the conversation because everybody is absolutely so right. You can't just work out just purely from a title if you're going to accept something or reject it. But I mean my my group to do you want to say how you found that exercise? I can jump in if you like. It was useful because it sparked a it sparked a conversation about what it was like B for example a chemistry laboratory platform enhanced with virtual reality for students adaptive learning. We weren't certain if we were looking at a an ad or a description of how something work and whether or not it was more a news article rather than actually a piece of published research, for example. So it just started asking all kinds of questions about you know what theory what were they what was the research all about and how is it going to be beneficial. I think was was what we found what we you know what the discussion sort of circled around if that makes sense. Yeah, no that makes a lot of sense. Does anybody from group one want to talk about how they chose anything we found that we wanted it to be a bit more specific in some cases. So it wasn't clear or the use of some of the language was confusing to be able to tell what it was about. So sometimes it's it's using language that is perhaps not going to be completely familiar with the audience of the of the journal. So I think that's fair enough. Yeah, it makes me realize just how much I do decide I don't decide on titles titles are very important group three do you have anything that you'd like to add to that. I don't mind jumping in. I think it was quite a difficult activity. It's kind of like we almost kind of needed more of a synopsis of what the study might be about or where it could possibly lead to. I think there was in the titles there was some really interesting ideas there, but they were they were ideas that we couldn't take any further. But there were things that we kind of wanted to accept because they sounded like they could be important or relevant but it would be really nice. I've just had some more information about where they were going to be leading. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And being in the background of group three I can tell you though they they were onto some key ideas that are going to come up later. All right. And as Louise has just said, just now in the chat, if you flip down to slide six, then you will see our ideas. So I will numbers two, three and five are actual titles from the actual research and learning technology journal. And they're all from the last couple of years because I don't want to go too far back. Numbers one, four and six are sort of similar to things that I have actually rejected. Either mainly desk reject. They're not actual titles, they're sort of similar to ones that were rejected and not just on the basis that they were a title. But really, having looked at all of the papers, none of them really talked about learning technology. They were just very, very vague, you know, we did some teaching and I will mention a bit of technology is just to get into research and learning technology, but they weren't focused. Whereas the ones that were accepted were very, very focused on the areas that we publish in. So yes, I think I'm just really aware of the time Louise, I think on James, I'm not sure who goes next, but I think let's move on. So I'll just go through some of the next slides just to kind of, some of this, as James will say, will be covered in the things that's already emerged in some of the conversations that you've had. So one of the things we have talked about is where do you start when you're thinking about getting published. Of course, where we would suggest you start is with the literature with the scholarship that exists and to make sure that you have a depth and a breadth of knowledge of what is already written. Not of course just in this journal, but in other journals as well and in the sphere, I suppose one of the things that's quite common when we see papers coming in that aren't necessarily embedded in an understanding of what's gone before. And I like this quote from Thompson's blog who writes a lot about writing, particularly at a doctoral level but it's equally appropriate for this is that research and publishing is entering a scholarly conversation. So it's that dialogue that's embedded within, where the place that you find your paper should be within that dialogue. We've got the slides to share with you on this as well. So don't worry about taking down those URLs. So we asked our fellow editors what are the things that they said that they would like to share with you and one of them was locating the argument within the discipline. What is that discipline that is a bigger conversation that we can't have today, but everybody comes from different areas and different disciplines. And I suppose it's just making sure that you have an understanding that you that there is a situation within the discipline that your argument your paper your research is sitting. And also that there is a theoretical foundation there. It's, you know, this is where the really where the difference between research and evaluation is like where does theory sit how is this underpinned by things like philosophy by by things like the ontology behind the epistemology is behind what you're writing about. Now, it's not that we need to see an awful lot of that within a paper but there needs to be some glimpse of an idea that there is a theoretical foundation here it's not just something that you did with a couple of students and you've just written it up as a paper. And we want to know that you did that. It's also wise to know that it's not already been written been written broadly so it's not to reinvent the wheel so it's getting making sure that you're you're finding a niche that is fulfilling a gap. And but also literature reviews and can provide the right with broader understanding so reading again going back to reading widely that you have a broad understanding. And but also that it sits what you want to write sits within a particular literature gap. And I'm not going to go through all of these but just if you are kind of wanting to find a few writers maybe to kind of get an idea of what it is to be critical within this discipline within this field of publishing. And those are some links that you might want to follow up on. Don't forget about ethics. Don't come to us at the very end if you are working with human subjects which for the most part we probably are. You do need to think about the ethical implications and many germs will ask on a submission for evidence that research has been approved by an institution and some. So thinking about it from the beginning you can't play for ethics retrospectively. Final tip find collaborators find people in other disciplines within your institutions. It may not it may be people in different departments. It may be learning technologists. It may be academics. It may be you know librarians. It could be that you'll find it. It certainly makes the burden a little bit easier and it also finds it's a good way of getting a little bit of accountability as well. But finding collaborators maybe without. Maybe within all to see you'll find somebody that you might want to do some work with the collaboration is a fantastic way of moving a project forward. I'm going to pass back to James who's going to do a quick fire activity. This is going to be a super super quick quick fire activity because we want to make sure we have time for for more activities as we go along in the chat. Give me your best ideas for what you could do if you wanted to submit the worst paper that would not even get past the editors of the journal. So if when papers come to us in the journal, the editorial team look at them first. And if there is something fundamentally wrong with them, we do not send them out to reviewers. We don't ask them to spend their time looking at something that like isn't worth looking at or doesn't seem to be worth looking at. Or there's fundamental flaws. We desk reject them. So give me your top tips in the in the chat. Let's just get a few going on what you could do to use children without ethical approval. Fantastic. No references. Let's get that projected platform out. And you could. Yeah, that probably would do it. No references would definitely do it. Yeah, spelling, spellings and grammar. Come on. Well, that's not even about technology, possibly that one. So there could be a few issues with a paper that says let's just get back to lectures. It's just easier. What else what like what kind of fundamental stuff could you could you get wrong? Yes, abstract abstract does not cover what's in the paper yet. We've given tips in activity one now, you know, no technology. Yeah, no technology mentioned anymore. Just imagine the countdown music is coming along. It's counting down repeating something already done. Yeah, not adding anything new. Okay, let's let's go on to the next slide. That's great. That's great. There was definitely some there was definitely some good desk rejection fodder there. And so everything that I'm saying here is not it's not just coming from me. It's not just coming from me, Louise and Sarah. This is kind of crowdsourced ideas from our whole editorial team and beyond on what are the pitfalls? What are the things that we see in papers that we end up desk rejecting that don't make it through to to review? And I'd say some similar things I would see in papers that I am asked to review for other journals. So the first one is sort of mistaking evaluation for research and there's a slide on the next slide, but I'm not going to talk through it. It's there if you want to look at it later. But basically, research is about being empirical. Evaluation is about, you know, making a quality judgment or an evaluation judgment about quality, merit or worth. And those are different things you plan for them differently. The processes of doing them are different. And sometimes what we see in papers is someone submitting something that obviously they did something. They evaluated it. Then they saw these these what we got out of our evaluations a little bit interesting. Let's try and publish it. But now you're kind of trying to work backwards to the process by which you would best approach a published paper. And it's very difficult to take an evaluation and turn it into a published paper. And you have to plan, you know, to make it a research paper, you have to plan for it to fit into that mold. And so it's not impossible. But, you know, again, if you're doing something, if you're doing a practice and you think you're going to do an evaluation, but plan it as a research paper from the off, you know, get your ethics fits with humans. Do your background reading beforehand design this study around whatever it is an innovation pilot or a new practice or whatever it is. Don't just do something evaluated and then go, oh, we should have plans to publish this from the get go. Yeah, I think someone said it's like that that process is like trying to put the ingredients into the pot at the end of the cooking process. That's not going to work. You're not going to make a nice meal by doing that. And, you know, not moving beyond a single use tool in a single scenario is kind of connected to what I was just talking about. Sometimes we will see papers that are, you know, it's a very it's a small practice. It's good. It's great. Someone did it and they evaluated it. That's great for them for their practice. But how is that going to add to the literature if it's just a single tool use in a single scenario? Often that that's coupled with this idea that someone did something they evaluated it. Oh, well, maybe I should try and publish my findings in that, in that that I got came out of that process, but it's not going to make a fantastic paper. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these points actually come back to a central point, which is if you're thinking about publishing something or you're working on something, you have to continue to ask yourself, what is the contribution of this paper to the existing literature? How does this paper move what we know forward? You always have to ask yourself that because if it gets out to review, that is what the reviewers are going to be looking for. What is the contribution of this paper to the literature? And where does it say what it is? You know, don't be technologically deterministic. You know, if we see papers that are too focused on the practical at the expense of the theoretical, if they're very kind of, oh, we did that, we did something and we think it works papers, but it's not informed by theory, then there's a good chance that that's not going to get that's not going to get past the editorial team. And the last three bullet points, you know, really come back to a set another key thing that's already been said. Read, read and read again before you kind of do the research. You know, again, if someone ends up with some findings and is like, oh, I think I should get this published and then they start reading the literature to see what the literature says about that area. That can be that can come across in a paper, you know, and so a pitfall is ignoring the history or the depth of the topic, you know, if you end up making points in a paper that are contradicted by the last 1020 years of research, that you know you're not going to do well with that. Ignoring the recent developments and parallel research so recent developments again if you're quoting everything that's 10 years old, you know, in a paper but you're not talking about the stuff that's been published more recently. That's going to be a problem. Parallel research can be very tricky. I have experienced this multiple times in my own career. You know, I remember when I was doing doctoral research I was studying identity and then I found as a whole parallel world of research on the self. I was looking at the work-family-border theory. I was looking at that literature and then I found there's a whole equal amount of work-family-boundary theory. But you have to explore the literature so that you know what's out there so you don't get sort of surprised by the fact that there's this whole other body of work that's sort of talking about the same thing from a different perspective. And again, lack of criticality is the same kind of area. And a lot of these kind of cross, when you come across a paper that falls down on one of these, often they will fall down on a number of them. One example that kind of combines a few, I had a paper lately that got desk rejected where, you know, in the introduction the authors were making this kind of claim that now that we have the internet and now that we can do online learning, there's no more problems with accessing higher education. There are many problems with accessing higher education that was a very, you know, a non-critical point to try to make in a paper. And it wasn't backed up by references either. So that's the slide that I'm not going to talk through, but you can look at that later. So, you know, think bigger than your context. You know, explore an aspect of digital technology from a particular conceptual or theoretical angle. You know, again, it's how are you moving the literature forward? Like what is the hook? What is the key thing in this paper? Another thing that was said by, or I think, well, I think something we got in this crowd sourcing process, although I think it came from someone's blog, you know, that by publishing something, you're entering a discipline conversation. So you must be able to locate your argument, your findings within the discipline within that area of the literature. We can go to the next slide, I think. So what would we say? Familiarize yourself with the journal. Read articles from the journal. What kind of things get published in this journal? What do they look like? You know, and I mean, the next one isn't even, it's not really a don't get discrejected point. This is a real pro tip. Look at articles that have scored well in terms of number of downloads, number of citations, you know, look at what made those articles attractive to other members of the community. You know, going along with familiarize yourself with the journal. Follow the journal guidelines, particularly about word length. If our word length is 6,000 words, if you put in a 7,000, 8,000 word article, it's getting discrejected. If you put in a 4,000 word article, what's missing that you had 2,000 words you could use that you didn't use? That's also a danger. You know, I mean, you can take these tips as being broader than about research and learning technology. Some publishers of academic journals, Sage, Elsevier, publish helpful tips for aspiring authors, but definitely whatever journal you're looking at, look at their author guidelines. All the information is there. If you put something in that's not following the journal guidelines, then it's like you're not trying. You know, you're not really telling us that this is fit for the journal. And if you're not sure, ask the editors. Next slide, please. So again, you have to ask yourself, what is the hook for the reader? Now, this is kind of a fundamental thing. Like, what is your contribution to the literature? You have to be able to identify that. You have to know what that is. You have to be telling the reader what that is. But also, let's say, oh wait, I think that never mind. That's a point on the next slide, I think. Know how you're hooking the reader in. You have to be showing the reader what stance you're taking, what framework you're using, or what previous writing you're building on. So you have to know exactly what the main contribution of your paper is. Next slide, please. So this one is the language. You have to be submitting something that's a polished article. Don't polish something that's half done, half baked, that you haven't really had time to proofread or smooth out or really read over. It has to be polished. You know, there's no shortcut for that. If something comes in that looks a mess, it's going to get desk rejected. The second bullet point here is, you know, know the difference between thinking is writing is thinking versus writing is communicating. My doctoral supervisor always used to say, this is about reader expectation management. You have to write something with the idea of how you're guiding the reader, not just getting something down on the page, down on the page. So make sure you're adhering to sort of the academic English standards. You're not making unsubstantiated claims. If you see big, wild claims or just statements of facts with no references, that is a highway to getting desk rejected. So make sure you put in cycles for editing, proofreading, all that. Get other people to do your proofreading. You can read something a hundred times. If you're tired of, you know, and you've been writing something a lot, you won't see the mistakes anymore. You get something else to do a good proofread. They will spot the mistakes. And the last thing is know your audience. Don't write something that's like very techno determinist when you know that's not going to fly in research and learning technology. Know the structure of the research paper. You know, you will get desk rejected if you put something in. If we say, here are the sections we require and you leave some of them out. If there is no discussion in your paper or if there is no methodology section, it's not going to make it through to reviewers. The introduction needs to do the heavy lifting in terms of setting the scene. The introduction needs, you know, you should be doing a lot in the introduction. You should be explaining what the contribution of the paper is to the literature. You should be explaining to people, why should they read this paper? You know, life is short. You know, why should people spend the time to read through this whole paper? Tell them in the introduction. The introduction has to be strong. If there's a weak introduction, you know, that's not going to be well received. Also, make sure you're using keywords. Keywords should, you know, highlight things about the themes in the articles that aren't already in the title of the piece. Okay, so we're going to do another breakout room activity now. And so I'll just ask Marin to set that up. What you're going to be asked to do is you've got to agree on a title of an imaginary paper. You're going to be in the same groups. And we're going to jump in. The three of us are going to jump into the rooms with you and give you a link to a padlet board that is your padlet board. And what we're looking for is just the structure. What would you imagine the sections of you would find in a paper? As again, thinking as an editor, as a reviewer, what sort of structure would you expect? We're just looking for the section, the headers, if you like, of the paper. And we're going to share those padlet boards with you. So, Marin, whenever you're ready, you can start bumping people into the rooms. And if you have any problems, technical stuff or anything like that, or you can't access the padlets, just let us know. Great, yeah. Breakout rooms already. Can I just check how long we'll be in those breakout rooms? I'd say we could probably go for about 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Okay, great. Sorry that everybody will then be bumped back into the main room. So, I'll start these now. 10 minutes up and we've got five minutes to go. Great, thank you so much, Marin. Welcome back to the main room, everybody. I was watching the padlets there. A little bit of technical difficulty with some of the padlets getting things into separate columns. But it looks to me, and I'm just looking across three of them now. It probably took me too long to share my screen. I might do it at the end. But we've got some assembled papers there, which is quite impressive. So, I'm just going to go through what each room came up with, and we can compare and contrast. So, in room one, we have title, abstract, keywords, introduction, literature review, research methodology. I don't think they're going to get these in the right order, but that's a padlet thing rather than anything else. Findings, data, and discussion of data, and I'll come back to that, and possibly discussion, conclusion, and references about the authors and appendix. So, very comprehensive. Well done for room one. Room two, we have title, and they chose a title from the previous one's exercise. Introduction, abstract, keywords, literature review, methods, results, and discussion, conclusion, and references. So, almost the full there. And room three had abstract, oh, sorry, introduction, abstract background, literature review, research methodology, analysis, discussion, and evaluation, conclusion, and references. So, we've got a very similar structures there for those papers, and I suppose one of the things is that, you know, depending on the journal that you're looking at, but, you know, we have name sections that we would be looking for. And I think just I'll hand back to my colleagues as well to discuss this a little bit too. I think this was certainly an area of where, you know, where things kind of can fall down when a paper comes to us, if there isn't a clearly defined area where there is a discussion, because sometimes people go straight from findings into a conclusion, and there isn't that kind of reference point that if you have those sections, you want to see there's a continuity between them. So, say for example, if you spend all that time on a literature review, and then you talk about your own research study, and then you just conclude around that without linking back into the literature, for example, that can be a place where a paper could really fall down. But yeah, so some of the terminology here might be a little bit different. Sometimes discussions are rolled into findings, and it very much depends on the kind of data that people are working with as well sometimes. And that will be informed by disciplines that people are coming from. Any quick thoughts there, and any of those? James or Sarah? Yeah, no, I agree with you. It's not so much about we have just one structure that's necessary. It's just that there is a structure. And the thing that I can see about each of these three papers is there is a very clear structure. And I can see that's been thought out, and that's the difference, I think, between very often between a desk project. Is that you can see that there's thought gone into it. You can see it's actually research. You can see where the areas go into each other. Yeah, if the if the idea is within the scope of the journal and the proper structure is there. And there is some there's then a red thread where you don't go from one section to another. The next section you go, wait, am I reading the same paper? What happens? Yeah, you know, that is they are the things that make a paper gets sent out for review, you know, versus being discharged. Yeah, brilliant. Any thoughts? Anybody before we've only got a minute to go. But was anybody want to have a have a thought about how difficult was that? How did you find that particular exercise? I know some people are heading off. I've just put the slides in the chat there. And I just want to say thank you to everybody for coming along as well. Yeah, thanks for participating, everyone. See you for the rest of the conference when you're looking forward to it. Thanks very much to James, Louise and Sarah. It's been a fascinating workshop. And we hope very much that you've been inspired to submit to research and learning technology. If we can all give a warm round of applause for our presenter trio. It's been a fantastic workshop. Thank you very much.