PhD Blog (dot) Net

A number of PhD students participating in my research have discussed how they became aware that there is a finite number of peers operating within their academic field or specialism, and even less (if any) researching within their specific research foci. This might seem fairly obvious, but this realisation appears to be a revelatory moment for some – representing a small but significant point in the doctoral learning trajectory, as they negotiate the transition from anonymous student to independent researcher becoming increasingly participative and visible within the academic community. Perceptions of peer groups can be realised through a range of activities and environments, but how reliable might these be?

The literature review partly represents the mapping of established researchers and recognised ‘experts’ in a particular research field, but few PhD students will be considered for inclusion here. Web-based academic networks can provide cues to help identify peers – both nationally and internationally – as well as developing sustainable links and trusting relationships, whilst the conference circuit and summer schools provide valuable opportunities for face-to-face interaction. But what of those PhD students who may be marginalised by any or all of these activities; who may not be able to access such opportunities, or who may be yet to publish, or have the skills or inclination to develop significant online profiles?

Furthermore, how does academic recognition through traditional means of research dissemination and informal networking compare with those increasingly enacted within digital environments? How do we reconcile narratives of professional networking and identity production with micro-celebrity cultures in social media?

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/388401/Born-Yesterday-Movie-Clip-Practically-Blind.html

George Cukor | Born Yesterday (1950)

My thesis is examining how PhD students’ academic practices are facilitated by the adoption and use of social media. In attempting to develop a conceptual model of doctoral practices, it has been useful to look at similar examples in the literature.

From the outset, I have adopted a holistic perspective of what constitutes doctoral study, looking beyond those activities that only support thesis-development. I’ve therefore been particularly impressed with some of Jim Cumming’s writing. His integrative model (2010) incorporates four mutually inclusive doctoral practices that describe curricular, pedagogical, research and work-based activities. These are, he suggests, in a constant state of flux, and embedded within a diverse range of relations, networks and cultures that orient around several key doctoral ‘arrangements,’ which he defines as participants, the academy, and the community.

Integrative model of doctoral enterprise (Cumming, 2010; 31)

Cumming (2010) also highlights a number of previous conceptual models. Though slightly dated, Holdaway’s (1996) framework of activities and foci is the most comprehensive.

A conceptual framework of activities and foci of graduate education (Holdaway, 1996; 52)

His distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ foci relates closely with a coding model proposed by McAlpine et al. (2009), in which activities are designated ‘doctoral-specific’ or ‘academic-general.’ These are mapped across 3 levels (formal, semi-formal and informal) to form a matrix of six activity clusters. This categorisation of formality seem somewhat arbitrary to me. And what do we mean by formal anyway? Is it an indicator of importance, or is it something that is scheduled, rather than spontaneous? Does formality distinguish whether an activity is optional or mandatory, or whether it has some assessment criteria? I’ve discussed the problem of ‘formality’ in doctoral education in a previous post. Even if some agreed definition is established, I think the formality of individual activities should be thought of as being highly contested (by the PhD student, supervisor(s), Faculty etc.), and as such, constitute potential sources of tension.

The conceptual model I am developing from my empirical work is no more than a useful heuristic with which to guide my analysis, which – as I’m using an activity theory-based approach – is essentially to inform the various components of the activity systems I am developing.

As such, general academic activities are of limited use. But dig deeper, and they each encompass a wide range of academic and social processes. Take conferences, for example, and you’re looking at information sourcing (call for papers), writing (proposals, abstracts, papers), disseminating (presenting), making contacts (networking), giving and receiving critical feedback, gaining recognition in the research field etc. Each of these processes (along with many others) permeates the various interrelated activities that each of my participants are engaged in. Throw social media (the focus of my research) into the mix, and you can start to build a picture of where and how they are influential, disruptive and transformative.

Multiple occurrences of these activities coalesce into a highly complex analytical framework (for each participant), but this ensures that a qualitative analysis of each of their social media experiences is highly situated and contextualised within the various practices and stages of their doctoral studies.

References

Cumming, J. (2010). Doctoral enterprise: A holistic conception of evolving practices and arrangements. Studies in Higher Education, 35(1), 25-39.

Holdaway, E. A. (1996). Current issues in graduate education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 18(1), 59–74.

McAlpine, L., Jazvac-Martek, M., & Hopwood, N. (2009). Doctoral student experience: Activities and difficulties influencing identity development. International Journal for Researcher Development, 1(1). 97-109.

Thanks to everyone who organised and contributed to yesterday’s Open Nottingham Seminar. Whilst Open Education Resources (OER) are on the periphery of my own research focus, the event provided a useful overview of current initiatives and some of the key issues and challenges. The University of Nottingham’s activities in OER were briefly showcased alongside several case studies of adoption at Faculty level. Wyn Morgan, Director of Teaching and Learning, gave an honest appraisal of the University’s “social corporate” agenda for open education, as one that values promotional and cost efficiency benefits as highly as any related to pedagogy or widening participation.

Earlier in the day, the University had finally made the inevitable announcement that it is to charge the maximum £9,000 undergraduate fees in 2012. In response to Dave White’s ‘tumbleweed’ question, Morgan suggested that attending a University like Nottingham provides a richer learning experience, enabling access to resources and expertise.

In a previous post, I wrote how Weller and Dalziel (2007) identify the key functions of universities as providing:

• Structured learning frameworks (i.e. curricula)
• Access to resources and educators
• Social learning environments
• Formal accreditation

This corresponds closely with David Wiley’s categorisation of the universities’ role as an aggregation of:

• Content
• Support Services
• Social Life
• Degrees

Wiley argues that the development of OER supported by an increasingly social web represents a potential ‘dissagregation’ of these categories, and suggests universities need to present clear arguments for the value of their continued monopoly.

The issue of institutional accreditation of OER was central to the following presentation, an inspiring talk by Wayne Mackintosh, founder of WikiEducator, who described how OER can provide learning opportunities for students underserved by formal education, and the role of the OER University (OERu) in developing pathways to quality assurance for accreditation and assessment services.

Reference

Weller, M. J. & Dalziel, J. (2007). On-line Teaching: Suggestions for Instructors. In L. Cameron & J. Dalziel (Eds.), 2nd International LAMS Conference: Practical Benefits of Learning Design, 26 November. Sydney: LAMS Foundation (76-82).

Whilst browsing Twitter late last night, it suddenly occurred to me that the interface had reverted to it’s old design. A retweet indicated there was a temporary fault, and sure enough this morning everything was back to normal. It’s like when your shiny black digital widescreen TV breaks down, and you dig out the old yellowing, boxy analogue telly from the attic (“I knew it would come in handy.”) Timeframes in the retrograding of  technology are rapid in social media. My experience of this brief flirtation was a mix of slight disorientation, a twinge of nostalgia, and that self-satisfying smugness that comes with the illusion of technological progress.

Image: Moma Propoganda | MaxiMídia

In his entertaining article from 2007 (revived via a tweet from my colleague @leroyh), Jonathan Wolff describes the tension a novelist creates between story and plot to keep the reader engaged in the unfolding narrative. He suggests however, that the inherent protocols of academic writing – and requirement to signpost theoretical, methodological and analytical processes – dictate such tensions are removed entirely.

Extending Wolff’s detective novel metaphor to the TV screen; it could be said that academics take the Columbo approach to revealing the ‘killer facts.’ The 70’s cop show from NBC (revived in 1989 by ABC) was unusual in discarding the ‘whodunnit’ format in favour of revealing the murderer at the very start, only for him or her to be hounded relentlessly by Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), whose dishevelled looks and wandering style of enquiry belied a incisive analytical mind, a meticulous approach, and a ruthless pursuit of the truth.

Rebecca Gamble | Host, Guest, Stranger | 15 December 2010

We have just submitted the Evaluation Report of New Research Trajectories – the Beyond Text student initiative I helped coordinate – to the AHRC. Unfortunately, I had to miss our evaluation meeting at Nottingham Contemporary, which a number of key participants also attended. My co-coordinators, Heather, Rachel and Becie, therefore deserve most of the credit for putting this report together, which provides an excellent summary and critical assessment of the initiative. However, it is also an appropriate moment for me to personally reflect on my own experiences as a coordinator and participant.

The nature of engagement in a collaborative project like this is determined to a certain extent by how much one exposes oneself to new experiences; be it new ways of thinking, engagement in activities, or opportunities to learn new skills. It is perhaps inevitable that time constraints dictate that the need to ‘get the job done’ frequently outweighs opportunities for expanding one’s practices and perspectives. Hence, we end up performing certain tasks with which we are most familiar or competent.

I was quite heavily involved in setting up the main website (in WordPress) and the various other online spaces and social media platforms we explored throughout the project. That said, it was immensely satisfying to see the other coordinators actively engage in these activities, and to hear examples of how it was subsequently influential in their own skills development. In addition, I did encounter some new challenges in developing online sites; some of which were situated around specific problem-solving (such as embedding the participants’ Tumblr blog into our main website), or generic concerns around encouraging creative forms of participation and documentation (which was not always successfully realised).

With limited previous experience in organising events, I found the scope and ambition of New Research Trajectories – with its multiple events and locations – slightly daunting. I learnt a great deal from my co-coordinators, who are far more experienced in this area than me. On many occasions, they would think of the most seemingly trivial things that collectively contributed greatly to the success and smooth running of the events. They demonstrated similar expertise in managing promotional activities and the limited budget.

I’m not sure we can categorise most of the skills exchanges that occurred in New Research Trajectories as ‘formal training.’ Had we had more time, we may have been able to formalize a more structured and purposeful ‘training’ agenda, which may have resulted in extending ourselves out of our own ‘comfort zones’ a little more. That said, possibly some of the most valuable experiences were gained through osmosis; i.e. being around people performing specific tasks rather than necessarily being active in performing those tasks oneself, or at least participating in a peripheral way.

Generally, we collaborated well to negotiate the various challenges of the initiative, despite the individual demands of our own doctoral programmes, and I would have no hesitation in working with any of my co-coordinators again. But New Research Trajectories would have been nothing without the postgraduate students who came on board with the creative input and momentum necessary to shape the initiative through their ongoing support and active participation.

Whilst New Research Trajectories has effectively ended as a funded initiative, we are looking into ways we can continue to encourage and support the self-sustainability of the informal network of postgraduate students we have established. In particular, whilst the website and social media platforms we created sufficiently served to help promote the initiative and facilitate a limited amount of online discussion, we are conscious that – compared to the city environment – there was a relative lack of participatory engagement with the online as a creative or productive space. This may be a focus in any further discussions.

In summary, New Research Trajectories provided me with an excellent opportunity to participate in a project that engaged with peers from a number of disciplines and institutions, and a range of methodologies and ways of working, and in doing so, highlighted the potential rewards and difficulties associated with interdisciplinary and explorative forms of research practice and collaboration; areas I would be happy to explore further in my post-doc activities.

Photo: Rachel Walls

If you’re not familiar with the ongoing Animate series of videos from the RSA, they are well worth a look. Whilst these short animations, based on excerpts from RSA lectures, may be fairly rudimentary, the visual annotation provides an innovative way of disseminating key concepts and ideas. I particularly recommend watching Sir Ken Robinson’s on changing paradigms if you have even the slightest interest in education.

In the latest Animate, Steven Pinker references Hollywood movies and everyday scenarios to explain the role of innuendo as a language-based negotiation of culturally defined social relations. He describes the dual purpose of language, that is; (i) to convey content, and (ii) to negotiate one of three specific ‘relationship types’, which anthropologist Alan Fiske defines as dominance, communality and reciprocity. He explains how the perceived appropriateness of a social interaction can be acceptable or anomalous to each relationship type, and is characterised by whether or not there is a mutual understanding. He goes on to argue that the visibility of this shared knowledge has profound consequences for political uprisings (which has particular resonance with current events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the role of social media.)

Hew and Hara (2007) present reciprocity as one of six motivators to sharing knowledge in online environments. Reciprocity can be direct – between a provider and a receiver – or generalised, indirectly by a third party (Ekeh, 1974). Whilst personal gain refers to increasing one’s own welfare (such as recognition, reputation and self-esteem), altruism increases the welfare of another person. Hoffman (1981) views group commitment or ‘collectivism’ as a variant of reciprocal altruism, in which the individual member increases the welfare of the community by identifying with and valuing a collective vision or purpose.

Pinker’s ideas introduce a fresh perspective to these types of discourses into the understanding of online knowledge exchange and community development, and raise a number of interesting questions. How are our participation, mutuality and reciprocity characterised by the (increasingly multimodal) forms of language apparent in our social interactions on the web? And are these defined by inherent technological cultures (‘nettiquette’ etc.) or by dominant social factors, power relations and hierarchies external to the web environment?

References

Ekeh, P. P. (1974). Social exchange theory: The two traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hew, K. F., & Hara, N. (2007). Knowledge Sharing In Online Environments: A Qualitative Case Study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(14), 2310-2324.

Hoffman, M. L. (1981). Is altruism part of human nature? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(1), 121-137.

This weekend I’ve enjoyed reading about Young Vienna, a group of Fin-de-Siecle writers who frequented Café Griensteidl and other coffeehouses in the Austro-Hungarian capital at the turn of the 20th century. The group included Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler, whose stream-of-consciousness writing prefigured Proust, Joyce and Woolf. According to Watson (2000), its coming together represented a pivotal moment in intellectual thought, at a time when the rigid sense of order defined by Newtonian physics was being challenged by the discovery of particles and quanta, and which coincided with increasingly Modernist influences in art and music, epitomised by Schoenberg’s experimentation with dissonance and atonality.

Another in the group, Hugo von Hofmannsthal suggested these epoch-defining events were defined by a shift towards multiplicity and indeterminacy. In describing his concept of ‘das Gleitende’ (the moving, the slipping, or the sliding), he declared:

“Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”
(Quoted in Schorske, 1981: 19)

References

Schorske, C. (1981). Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books

Watson, P. (2000). A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind. London: Orion

Image: Reinhold Voelkel | Café Griensteidl (1896)

My predominantly non-digital experience of yesterday’s Vitae Digital Researcher (my dodgy laptop plus erratic British Library wi-fi) was actually most enjoyable. And this is in no way a criticism of the event, which, similar to last year’s, managed to pull off the trick of engaging a large, multidisciplinary audience of doctoral students and trainers (well done to all concerned.)

In between the plenary sessions, the workshops and the keynote address from Aleks Krotoski, the programme provided several opportunities for discussion. I found myself in a lovely group of fellow academics who shared a healthy mix of enthusiasm and criticality in understanding their own social media practices. The organisers were particularly keen to encourage Twitter networking and amplification and collaborative meaning making through Google Docs. But for me, it was a useful reminder that sometimes the best conversations happen when we put down our mobile devices and close our laptops.