PhD Blog (dot) Net

I’m delighted to be involved in a new initiative with Jubilee Graduate Centre manager Tracy Sissons. We have secured funding for an internships programme, which will focus on the use of social media at doctoral level and explore opportunities for developing sustainable methods of sharing practice.

The programme builds on the workshop sessions I have been conducting in the University of Nottingham with LeRoy Hill. Crucially for me, the aims of the programme have been shaped significantly by the feedback – both formal and informal – that we received from the students and researchers who attended the sessions, and also draws on our own critical reflection of conducting the sessions, and our subsequent presentation and paper for the Future Learningscapes e-Learning Conference. To quote directly from the internships Role Description:

The experience of conducting these sessions indicated emerging and innovative practices in doctoral and post-doctoral scholarship. Yet examples of adoption and use of social media tend to be bottom-up and under-publicised in the wider academic community. Feedback from attendees indicated that opportunities for sharing good practice, in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, are highly valued.

Essentially, we are looking at developing an online resource and a one-day event with which to showcase social media use and explore creative opportunities for critical and reflective debate. Both will be aimed at PhD students from all disciplines and will be accessible to audiences within and outside of the University of Nottingham.

We are looking to recruit two PhD students for the programme. Having done an internship myself – as a first and second year PhD student with the Visual Leaning Lab – I can appreciate how rewarding they can be, whilst recognising the difficulties in negotiating the extra workload on top of a busy doctoral schedule. Hopefully, by recruiting two interns, they will be able to develop a partnership that is collaborative and supportive.

Full details of the internships are here.

This post is an early contribution to an exploratory exercise in collaborative writing following recent discussions with fellow Twitter users @jennifermjones, @martin_eve and @FlyGirlTwo. In discussing the activities associated with the recently established Twitter hashtag #phdchat and its emergent postgraduate student following, we hope to use our own online spaces to create an open dialogue for critical reflection that others (not least ‘phdchat-ters’ themselves) can contribute to and develop.

#phdchat is a themed, hour-long session held every Wednesday at 7.30pm UK time, with associated asynchronous chat through the rest of the week, and – at present – limited activity on other platforms (a wiki and a Facebook Group). For a more detailed overview, and an account of its brief history, see Martin’s excellent introductory post.

Many of the increasing number of studies into Twitter have adopted modes of enquiry based on largely quantitative and data mining methods, which provide very useful indicators of participation activity, frequency and interactions, often utilising easily accessible visual forms of dissemination. Microblogs like Twitter present researchers with explicit environments that lend themselves – perhaps too easily – to a network-based research paradigm that can reduce user relationships and interaction to nodes and clusters without adequately addressing the complexities that underpin such activities.

By critiquing such methodologies we can also problematize the over-emphasis on digital artefacts as a singular indicator of social media use. Whilst I realise active participation is fundamental to the web 2.0 rhetoric, we should recognise that the production and re-appropriation of digital artefacts do not necessarily represent the full picture of social media engagement and interaction. For example, I contributed to a recent weekly chat in between cooking tagliatelle and watching football on TV.

Several studies have attempted to develop more qualitative models for analysing tweets, including boyd, Golder et al.’s (2010) look into retweeting practices, whilst others (for example, Priem & Costello, 2010) adopt a mixed methods approach, supporting quantitative data with participant interviews. I’m sure there are other examples in the growing body of literature.

I encountered the difficulties in categorising Twitter use myself when, as part of my PhD pilot study, I attempted to develop a taxonomy of tweets based on individual participants’ use of Twitter in relation to their doctoral practices. Mutually inclusive categories were defined by:

• Type – e.g. open, reply, retweet. direct message etc.
• Orientation – e.g. crowdsourcing, notification, backchannel etc.
• Feature – e.g. (includes) RT, link, hashtag etc.

In addition, I examined relationships within participants’ Twitter networks (followers and followees) by:

• Location – to identify collocated and distributed research networks within and external to faculties and institutions
• Academic Discipline – to identify modes of ‘locating’ in the research field, enculturation and boundary crossing across disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts
• Academic Hierarchy – to identify peer support and participation and recognition in the research field

I’m not suggesting that even modified versions of these imperfect models would be appropriate for examining #phdchat, but it is useful to consider how such approaches might contribute to an understanding of emergent practices.

Discernible themes in #phdchat are naturally influenced by the pre-determined topics of each of the weekly chats, though it is not uncommon for participants to go ‘off-piste’ in their discussions. Whilst recurring themes related to ‘doing a PhD’ are clearly evident – such as specific academic practices (literature review, writing up etc.), theories and methodologies, and use of technologies – we also need to recognise that many of the tweets indicate phatic, empathic and socio-affective forms of conversation. It may well be these elements of peer support that represent the real value of this growing community.

This is only a start, but it’s getting interesting…

References

boyd, D., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of HICSS-43. http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf

Priem, J. & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proceedings of ASIST 2010. http://bit.ly/eJnlb5

Good News. I’ve had my abstract accepted for the Learning, Media and Technology Doctoral Conference at the London Knowledge Lab on the 4th of July. I’ll be submitting a paper (4000-6000 words) for the online conference proceedings at the end of May. Reviewed papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Learning, Media and Technology journal. In the meantime, here’s the abstract:

The proposed paper describes current doctoral research into how a small sample of social sciences, humanities and interdisciplinary PhD students are adopting and using social and participative media (web 2.0) in their academic practices. The study uses a qualitative, mixed-method design of observation of online activities, participant-reported accounts and successive in-depth interviews. An Activity Theory-based analytical framework of interrelated activity systems is used to describe shifting patterns of practice across multifarious academic contexts and through key phases in the doctoral experience.

The study adopts holistic perspectives of (i) doctoral practices, that legitimises academic activities beyond those related purely to thesis-development and established models of participation and enculturation, and (ii) of social media, responding to the multiplicity, interrelatedness and transiency of web 2.0 tools and platforms. In doing so, it recognises the self-efficacy and heterogeneity of PhD study in the negotiation of multiple socio-technical research communities and networks, and the complex role social media can play in identity-formation and induction into doctoral scholarship and academic professional development.

In addressing the significant gap between the potential of web 2.0 and the reality of low adoption rates and lack of widespread use, the paper proposes that dominant discourses and idealised concepts within the educational technology and media communities do not necessarily reflect the majority of doctoral students’ engagement with social media. Rather, key incentives, disincentives and barriers created by tensions with embedded research cultures within and without the faculty, and inconsistencies in training opportunities and shared practice, heavily influence and disrupt patterns of adoption and use.

The paper will also describe how the dissemination of the activity systems analysis is facilitating the ongoing participant interviews, enabling a negotiated understanding of participants’ use of web 2.0, and encouraging a shared, critical and reflective dialogue for the development of effective social media practices.

We sense that the distinctions between formal and informal learning are becoming increasingly blurred, yet we still resort to using such terms. Within doctoral education – the focus of my thesis – the dichotomy is particularly ambiguous and unreliable.

Even if we think of formal and informal learning as a continuum, where do we place something like presenting at a conference, or publishing a paper? These are rarely formal requirements of a PhD, yet there is an expectation that a doctoral student actively pursues such opportunities. What about attending seminars, or taking on a teaching role? Where might we place these? And how do different disciplines, faculties and doctoral programmes determine the importance of these practices?

Universities assume the custodianship of doctoral learning through the formal induction and integration of PhD students within a supportive research environment; one that provides supervision, research training and facilities, and other support services, and fosters a mentor- and peer-based community of practice. Wenger (1998) describes practice as a dialectic relationship between participation and reification. A learner’s trajectory can therefore be understood in the interrelated dimensions of greater participation and engagement within an academic community and increased familiarity with the signs and discourses that reify that participation.

According to Davies and Mangan (2006), models such as communities of practice provide a social regulation of learning. Whilst the individual student develops a unique set of reference points to her learning process, these must attain legitimacy within the context of the community she is acting. Since communities derive their coherence from particular ways of practicing, they regulate how the student’s progress can be recognised as learning. This is usually manifest as curricula and the attainment of qualifications. In doctoral education, where there is far less of a structured programme, and a greater emphasis on student efficacy and negotiated study, this notion of legitimacy as a defining characteristic of the learning trajectory becomes particularly pertinent.

My own research and teaching indicate that the lack of recognition associated with the use of social media (and the ‘value’ of their related artefacts, such as blog posts) compared to established scholarly pursuits – getting a paper published or presenting at a conference – can be a major disincentive for postgraduate researchers. Yet in my own field of study, it is expected that I become familiar with, and actively engage in the social web, because of its elevated status as a legitimate academic practice within my research communities and networks.

References

Davies, P., & Mangan, J. (2006). Trajectories of students’ learning: threshold concepts and subject learning careers. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Research in Higher Education, University of Brighton.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crayola Color Chronology 1903-2010
http://www.weathersealed.com/tags/crayons

Virginia Yonkers’ latest blog post introduces a concept that is new to me, where membership of a community is legitimised predominantly by language. Reflecting on ongoing analysis of her research into distributed groups, she suggests expertise might be defined by profession, department or organisational power structures, and goes on to describe the tensions that arise when there is conflict between these different discourse communities, and how they might be resolved.

“Yeah, I’m the deadhead. Here you go.”
“You’re a little late, but the jump seat is open.”
“You know. it’s been a while since I’ve done this. Which one’s the jump seat again?”
“Have a nice flight.”

“Are you my deadhead?”

“Frank, Captain Oliver, John Larkin, the copilot.”
“Hello.”
“Fred Tulley, flight engineer.”
“Frank Taylor, Pan Am. Thanks for giving me a lift, boys.”
“Go ahead and take a seat, Frank. We’re about to push. What kind of equipment you on, DC-8?”
“Uh, 707.”
“You turning around on the redeye?”
“Uh, I’m jumping puddles for the next few months. Trying to earn my keep running leapfrogs for the weak and weary.”
“No shame in that. We all did it.”

Screenplay by Jeff Nathanson | Catch Me If You Can (2002)

In a recent response to an article by Stephen Downes, I briefly touched on the use of language within the context of practice and access to learning and professional environments.

This account of how real-life sixties fraudster and conman Frank Abagnale Jr. hitches a cockpit ride whilst posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, may be fictitious, but it perfectly demonstrates how familiarisation with the jargon (along with a uniform and bags of confidence) was sufficient to convince professionals of his authenticity, despite not having the remotest idea of how to fly a plane.

I’ve recently got to the stage that will be recognisable to many researchers who are using 3rd generation Activity Theory in their research; that is, drawing activity system triangles at every available opportunity – notepads, backs of envelopes, beer mats, in my sleep etc.

However organic and spontaneous this approach might be, the need for consistency, and to communicate activity systems to participants, supervisors and wider audiences, invariably necessitates developing digital methods of construction. Furthermore, the fine-grained approach I am taking with my research requires constructing numerous interrelated activity systems to represent shifting patterns of practice across contexts and timeframes.

Whilst I looked into a range of drawing programmes for this task, I’ve actually ended up adopting the use of a concept mapping programme. A desktop-based freeware from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), CmapTools was originally devised by concept mapping pioneers including Alberto J. Cañas and Joseph D. Novak around cognitive studies based primarily on Ausebal’s Assimilation Theory.

I’d be interested in hearing what other researchers use to draft their activity systems. In the meantime, here are some key tips on using CmapTools for this purpose:

Drafting the Activity System

By default, CmapTools automatically creates a link between two nodes to facilitate standard concept mapping notation. Override this by holding down the Shift key whilst dragging the link.

Applying Styles

Styles are applied to text, nodes and links (font, colour, shape, thicknesses etc.) A really useful feature is the ability to copy and paste styles (accessed through right clicking) to one or more components, enabling consistent design within and across different activity systems.

Nesting Nodes

Once a basic activity system is constructed, it’s useful to be able to group all components, through the nested node feature (Tools > Nested Nodes > Create). Once created, nested nodes can be collapsed into a single node, which is useful for copying and storing lots of Activity Systems in a single file. Nested nodes can be ‘un-nested’ at any time (Tools > Nested Nodes > Detach Children).

Developing the Activity System

I use nodes with and without links as labels to annotate the activity systems (the prompts shown here are based on Mwanza’s (2001) Eight-Step-Model). According to Yamagata-Lynch (2010), tensions and contradictions can occur at nodes and in the intersections between nodes. I find it useful to use colour codes to identify specific occurrences, though other styles could be applied.

Outputs

Whilst CmapTools does not have transferability of a vector programme such as Adobe Illustrator, content can be printed directly from a file, or saved as image files and PDFs (click on the image above.)

References

Mwanza, D. (2001). Challenges of designing for collaborative learning in an organisation. International Conference on Computers and Learning 2001 (CAL 2001), 2-4 April 2001, University of Warwick.

Yamagata-Lynch, L. C. (2010). Activity Systems Analysis Methods: Understanding Complex Learning Environments. New York: Springer.

In my early days as an Art and Design student, I remember carrying my work around in one of those old black portfolio cases about the size of a small kitchen table. I went for my undergraduate interview at Blackpool and the Fylde College on a Monday morning in early summer. I remember getting to Blackpool North railway station early, so I hung around for a while and got a coffee. I was entertained by three guys from Glasgow who, having spent the weekend enjoying the earthly delights of the seaside resort, were heading home. It soon became apparent that they had been up all night drinking and were finishing off their last few cans of lager. After a few jokes at my expense, they were soon huddled round my portfolio with genuine interest. So there I was, critically disseminating my entire body of work to three Glaswegian drunks in a railway cafe. Suffice to say, my interview at the College an hour or so later was a doddle by comparison, and I was offered the degree place.

Even in the relatively few subsequent years of studying in Art and Design, my portfolio underwent significant changes, in both editorial and design contexts, and significantly, the very medium in which it was presented; the physical case was soon replaced by a CD, and then a HTML website, then a Flash movie etc.

ePortfolio development is not a focus of my current studies as an educational researcher, though immediately after my MA in Falmouth, I was involved in a small research project with Ana Carvalho and Oliver Scott promoting digital portfolio workshops for Art and Design students. This highlighted the importance of portfolios as documentation of process, and we therefore explored portfolio development in context with other artefacts of reflective practice such as (digital) sketchbooks and Personal Development Plans (PDP).

Whilst I recognise the unique and specialised role the portfolio plays within Art and Design, issues such as portability, ownership, customisation, accessibility and scalability are applicable to the wider academic field. My own experience has taught me that portfolios are never static, but require regular management and sometimes fundamental changes.

Chris Thomson discusses the current uncertainties surrounding Delicious to highlight the transiency of web 2.0 tools within the context of developing a distributed ePortfolio. As I noted in a recent post, successful adoption of social media – for whatever purposes – requires developing key critical and reflective practices. In the case of ePortfolios, this may necessitate the negotiation of messy interrelations between institutional, commercial and open source tools, and the development of multiple platforms and multiple versions for different roles and audiences.

Jenny Coombs, Faculty Team Leader in Science and Engineering, who attended one of our recent social media sessions, informs me of a three month trial of RefWorks, the bibliographic management software, to take place in the New Year. Any researchers at the University interested in volunteering can contact Jenny at jenny.coombs@nottingham.ac.uk