PhD Blog (dot) Net

Tomorrow I’ll be contributing to an Information Services training session at the University of Nottingham for PhD students in Engineering, Medicine and Science. Its theme is ‘keeping up to date’ with resources, and I’ll be presenting how social media might be used to augment the use of database search and alert systems for sourcing formal publications. In particular, I want to emphasise the role various social media can play in accessing and managing more informal genres of academic content, and explore how these emerging practices are challenging the notion of what it means to ‘be resourced.’ I’ve put together a few preliminary slides to help establish context.

I’m particularly pleased to support this session as it is an example of integrating social media practices into core doctoral training programmes; something which I argued for in a recent post.

Here are the slides from the second of my social media summer workshops from earlier today at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Once again, a really nice group of PhD students – lots of enthusiasm and discussion.

Earlier today, I ran the first of my social media summer workshops at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. There was a good turn out from a nice mix of PhD students from across the disciplines, and some interesting discussion. Hopefully, I’ll see most of them again next week for the second workshop. Here are the slides.

It’s workshop time again at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Following previous programmes over the last few years, at Jubilee and across the University, I’m running two more lunchtime sessions. The workshops are open to all PhD students at the University of Nottingham, and are designed primarily for those with little or no experience in using social media in their academic practices. However, more experienced users are very welcome to come along to share their experiences and contribute to the discussions. As always, I hope each workshop will be informative and interactive. I’ll be demonstrating key social media and facilitating discussion around emerging practices.

Social media summer workshops – Towards a more participatory and collaborative scholarship

Workshop 1: Social Networking and Collaboration
Thursday 26 July, 12.00-2.00pm.

Using Twitter, social networks sites, wikis and online community sites for networking, information sourcing and collaborative working.

Workshop 2: Sharing and Managing Work Online
Thursday 2 August, 12.00-2.00pm.

Informal dissemination and sharing of work through blogging and content sharing sites, as well as managing content through social bookmarking and bibliographies, curation tools and RSS.

Places can be booked here.

The Research Practices 2.0 one-day event is fast approaching on Saturday 29th October. This is the culmination of the project and internship programme that developed out of the Graduate Centre workshop sessions I conducted with LeRoy Hill. It also compliments a web resource (to be located on the University of Nottingham Graduate School site), which we will be launching at the event.

In addition to me, Claire Mann and Emily Buchnea from the project team, we are delighted to have @WarrenPearce, @jennifermjones, @mark_carrigan and Kat Gupta (@mixosaurus) helping facilitate the event. Most of them contributed to the video interviews we conducted, which will constitute a significant part of the web resource.

We had a meeting yesterday to finalise a collaboratively-designed workshop session that we will be running in the morning across four groups. Later in the afternoon, me, Mark and Jen will be leading three separate sessions focused on more specific practice contexts. In addition, there will be opportunities for attendees to use a ‘drop-in’ IT clinic and to view the videos. We are looking at filming the plenary sessions for later inclusion on the web resource.

It was good to see the 100 places taken up within a week or so of publicising the event. We have a considerable number on a reserve list that we’d love to accommodate, but many more would compromise the interactivity of the sessions.

We wanted the event to be as inclusive as possible so it’s particularly satisfying to see attendees from across the disciplines. And whilst this project has been developed primarily for the University of Nottingham doctoral community, it was always our intention to make both the web resource and the event accessible to external PhD students and researchers. So it’s great we have a good representation from a number of other (primarily East Midlands) universities.

Pitching events like this is difficult. People will come with a range of experiences, competences and perspectives on social media, and different assumptions and expectations of the event. We hope to be responsive and collaborative by creating an informal and interactive environment for discussion and an opportunity to listen to and share experiences of using social media.

I’ll be blogging more on this, before and after the event, in the next few weeks.

I’m delighted to have been selected on a scholarship with the STELLAR Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning to attend a summer school next month in Ohrid, Macedonia. The Sixth Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning 2010 takes place from 7th-11th June, and aims to encourage critical thinking about the role of learning technologies around three research ‘Grand Challenges’:

• Connecting learners
• Orchestrating learning
• Contextualising learning environments

I greatly value the many opportunities my Higher Education has given me to study alongside international students; for their friendship, perspectives and cultural diversity, and this is my first chance to engage in academic work abroad since starting my PhD. I sometimes feel academic discourses in e-learning and learning technologies tend towards a North American bias, marginalising valuable European (particularly non-UK) research in a global field. So I’m hoping this event will provide an opportunity meet up with fellow PhD students from across the continent and establish sustainable links for the future.

It looks like a packed programme of seminars and workshops, with plenty of opportunities for networking, and I’m hoping to stay on for a couple of days for extra sightseeing.

More to come on this no doubt…