Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, has just launched a new blog with a batch of interesting posts.

Having attended a number of her tough but effective sessions on academic writing in the School of Education, I am particularly familiar with her post on Swales and Feak’s exercises in skeleton writing. Her book with Barbara Kamler, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, has rightly become recognised as a key text (don’t be misled by the title; it’s just as useful for PhD students). The recently published Routledge Doctoral Companions (for students and supervisors), which she co-edited with colleague Melanie Walker, have also been indispensible in my own research.

Of course, these represent only part of Pat Thomson’s research interests and experiences, so it will be interesting to see how the blog develops. As @PatParslow suggested in a subsequent Twitter discussion, professorial blogging is all too rare. Yet in my experience of talking with other PhD students, professors who do blog can be enormously influential (probably far more than they realise) in legitimising blogs as platforms for research dissemination, particularly in under-represented disciplines.

During yesterday’s Doctoral Conference at the London Knowledge Lab, Martin Oliver, Neil Selwyn and Rebecca Eynon, editors of Learning, Media and Technology, presented a useful session on getting journal articles published. Here’s a summary of my notes.

THE PUBLISHING PROCESS

Developing Journal Articles from a Thesis

• Aim to write three journal articles from your thesis
• Develop one key theme for each – not the same texts with a different spin
• Avoid ‘salami slicing’ – replicating texts across different journals
• Also look for options in developing shorter ‘positional’ papers – Neil Selwyn mentioned the recent viewpoint article by University of Nottingham’s very own Sarah Lewthwaite as a good example from their journal

Identifying Journals

• Ask supervisors
• Look at previous authors of journals (these may now be reviewers)
• Send an abstract to editors before committing to writing a paper – they will try to get back to you
• Look for reputable publishers
• Make sure journals are peer reviewed and have an ISSN number
• Know your audience – pay particular attention to the requirements of an international audience

Submitting

• Proof read!
• Use critical friends
• Obvious, but thoroughly read journal submission guidelines / instructions

Corrections

• Make sure each recommendation is addressed
• Add a note when resubmitting to outline how you have addressed each recommendation

WRITING A GOOD JOURNAL ARTICLE

Abstract

• Present the key points from your conclusion in the abstract – don’t keep them as a surprise!

Literature Review

• A good literature review should critique, build on and support existing literature
• Ensure the literature review logically informs and justifies the research questions

Methodology

• Avoid ‘copy and paste’ methodologies from theses
• It is not necessary to describe the methodology in depth – more important to justify why you chose a methodology
• Sampling is often a weak area in journals – present sampling methods and the justifications for sampling

Ethics

• Doctoral students tend to discuss ethics too much in journal articles - reviewers assume appropriate ethical procedures have been taken
• Only refer to special cases / requirements

Presenting Data

• Journals are frequently let down by insufficient data
• Use tables, diagrams or graphs if possible but keep these limited

Discussion / Conclusion

• Always use the literature review to discuss your data – do not introduce new literature
• Draw three or four key conclusions

References

• Consider carefully who you cite – reviewers read titles, abstract and references first

“Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”

Stephen Jay Gould | The Mismeasure of Man (1981)

Coming across George Lange’s photo of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from 1991, I was struck by how well the postures, the attire and the interesting perspective capture what Apple and Microsoft represented at that time.

How different might a photo taken today look?

George Lange | Fortune Magazine (July 21, 1991) (Getty Images)

I briefly mentioned the notion of an ‘imagined audience’ in my recent post on PhD blogging for The Thesis Whisperer. In his thesis, David Brake (2009) uses a symbolic interactionist approach to examine imagined audiences in relation to personal blogging in the UK. He suggests blogging practices incorporate a range of ‘envisaged audience relationships’ where a blogger’s “construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation” (p.3). Drawing on Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, Brake explains how the marginal role of blog audiences is partly encoded in the socio-technical characteristics of the blogging platforms themselves.

Interestingly, the notion of ‘audience’ assumes a broadcast metaphor. How does this compare with the idea of a blogging community, and the participative web generally? How do we perceive audiences in the social media we use? How are these perceptions formed? And how do they differ across different platforms? Do we transfer audience identities from one platform to another?

Viewing indicators (visitor statistics etc.) are limited in what they tell us, whilst acts of participation and reciprocity (comments, retweets etc.) are often fewer in number than we’d like. Even when a network is largely identifiable – such as followers on Twitter – we have little or no idea of their actual viewing behaviours. I purposely keep the number of people I follow on Twitter to a manageable figure (I’d like to follow more) to be able to most efficiently view my twitter feed on a regular basis. I assume users who follow several thousands of people don’t do this, but rather engage in more inconsistent viewing habits, do more skimming, or employ some sort of filtering.

A number of participants in my PhD study have expressed concerns over the ambiguity of social media audiences, particularly around blogging. As I have discussed previously, doctoral practices can require negotiating a number of different contexts, which, even within my small cohort of participants, can include conflicting academic, entrepreneurial and activist activities. By choosing to use social media, they are committed to engaging in more public, distributed and persistent dialogues. The way they blog, tweet and create other digital artefacts across interrelated platforms and audiences incurs potential inconsistencies and tensions. When those audiences are ambiguous, practice and identity agendas are further compromised.

Reference

Brake, D. R. (2009). As if nobody’s reading’?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK. PhD thesis, London School of Economics. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/25535/

The Thesis Whisperer is a terrific website ‘dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis’ that seems to be well-liked and respected amongst the online postgraduate community. I was kindly invited by the site’s creator and editor, Dr Inger Mewburn, to contribute a guest post on PhD blogging to launch a series exploring professional digital identity. For my part, I tried to establish a balance between presenting a personal and subjective view of my own blogging experiences, and providing an enthusiastic and critical overview of the multipurpose of academic blogging within doctoral practices. I hope it’s useful.

An Adam Curtis TV series is always something of an event, and his new work, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (starting tomorrow on BBC2) promises to be a welcome addition to an already impressive resume.

His previous works include Pandora’s Box (1992) – on political and technocratic rationalism – The Century of the Self (2002) – Freud and mass-consumerism – and The Power of Nightmares (2004) – radical Islamism and American Neoconservatism.

Curtis’s distinctive style combines critical insight – typically delivered with calm, reassuring clarity – with a highly creative use of imagery and sound. Though hardly unique, his technique of mixing archive footage of reportage and popular culture with eclectic soundtracks pre-empted web-based mash-ups by years, and the effect is still disturbing, compelling and at times, hypnotic.

In this new work, Curtis takes on the internet, suggesting that the myths of utopianism and democratisation that evolved from ecology, systems thinking and the hippy counter culture, are serving to contribute to the illusion of social connectivity and the perpetuation of a global capitalism.

Much of Adam Curtis’s previous work is available to view at thoughtmaybe, and to download from Internet Archive. Hopefully, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace will be added sometime in the future. In the meantime, it will no doubt be available for viewing in the UK on BBC iPlayer. Adam Curtis also blogs at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/

George Roberts, Educational Development Consultant at the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD), has kindly invited me to participate in their latest one-day webinar on Communities of Practice in Higher Education this coming Wednesday. I’ll be presenting briefly on examples of emergent and institutional models of communities of practice within a doctoral education context, before taking part in a follow-up discussion with other presenters including George, Rhona Sharpe and Jenny Mackness. It will be my first time using BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing platform that looks like a tidy, stripped-down alternative to Eluminate.

This is the final post related to my participation in the New Research Trajectories event, Contemporary Art of Walking, in which I am exploring the use of geographical metaphors in educational theory and practice.

“It seems natural enough to think of knowledge and its properties and relationships in terms of landscapes, and to saturate epistemological discussion with spatial metaphors: fields and frontiers; pioneering, exploration, false trails, charts and landmarks.”

Becher & Trowler (2001, 58)

Becher and Trowler use the metaphor of academic tribes and territories to explore the relationship between the normative mode of disciplinary and professional contexts, and the operational mode of academic participation and interaction. Basically, territories provide the cognitive perspective whilst tribes provide the social perspective.

Whilst disciplines are partly socially (re)constructed through tribal activities, they are primarily territorial possessions, defined by their production of knowledge. Disciplinary boundaries can be tightly knit and heavily defended, or more distributed and open. But generally, disciplines do not map neatly with the tribal tendencies of academic communities, which operate in a state of constant flux due to the convergent and divergent patterns of mutuality and fragmentation inherent in academic migration, interdisciplinarity* and multiple membership.

Disciplines exhibit both cognitive (epistemological) characteristics – commonly classified in hard/soft and pure/applied terms – and social characteristics, defined by their forms of aggregation within the academic population, which Becher and Trowler describe as being predominantly urban or rural.

Those displaying ‘urban’ characteristics are tightly-knit and communal, engaged in intensive, highly clustered and competitive themes of enquiry. Those displaying ‘rural’ characteristics are individualised and solitary, engaged in numerous themes of enquiry that are highly distributed with far less, if any, overlap between them.

* Though we may be instinctively drawn towards interdisciplinarity, Garber (2003) suggests:

“If the new interdisciplines and study groups that now occupy and preoccupy us so excitingly were to become the centre of the academy, they would in turn become conventional, and the centre of intellectual interest and provocation would move elsewhere.”

References

Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic Tribes and Territories (2nd Ed.) Buckingham: Open University Press.

Garber, M. (2003). Groucho Marx and “Coercive Voluntarism” in Academe. The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 10).

This is the second post related to my participation in tomorrow’s New Research Trajectories event, Contemporary Art of Walking. Curated by Alison Lloyd, it aims to explore wandering and journeying, mapping or the notion of getting lost as a practice / methodology through participant contributions, discussions and performances.

Spatial and geographical metaphors are frequently employed in educational theory, particularly to describe domains of practice and knowledge. There is something instinctive about seeing how we orient our way through these domains as trajectories and pathways. Yrjö Engeström (2010) describes the landscape in which we practice “as a terrain of activity to be dwelled in and explored,” possessing both opportunities for being controlled, and possibilities for individual agency.

All ‘dwellers’ and ‘explorers’ we interact with the environment and each other to create multiple and intersecting trails. Similar to Cussins’ (1992) concept of cognitive trails, where movements of information create traces or trails, our movement through this terrain is described by patterns and directions of motion representing activity which is simultaneously cognitive (in the mind), physical (in the world), and discursive (in the social space).

Whilst linear types of movement can be seen as describing traditional practices associated with craft and mass production, emergent forms of ‘mycorrhiza’ activities exhibit movement akin to ‘pulsation’ and ‘swarming’ describing practices of social and peer production (including Web 2.0).

The terrain has pre-existing trails, as well as landmarks and boundaries made by others through historically-located social, cultural and power-related activities. When new dwellers enter the terrain, they “both adapt to the dominant trails and struggle to break away from them” (Engeström, 2010). In this conceptual context, the nature of agency is described through the increased capability to move in the terrain effectively and independently of institutional and organisational frameworks.

Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) describe space as either striated or smooth, conceptualised through a series of contextual models. Bayne (2004) suggests striated space is formal, structured, closed, and sedentary. Movement in stated space is limited to pre-existing trails between fixed and identifiable points aligned with hierarchical and institutional knowledge structures. Smooth space is informal, amorphous, and infinite. Here, movement is free, open and nomadic and aligned with rhizomatic knowledge structures.

References

Bayne, S. (2004). Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces. E-Learning. 1(2). 302-316.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Engeström, Y. (2010). The Future of Activity Theory: A Rough Draft. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. D. Gutiérrez (Eds.), Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 303-328.