I’m a bit late with this follow up to our Research Practices 2.0 event a couple of weeks ago, but it’s been good to allow a chance to reflect on the several things that struck me the most on the day:

Can we stop talking like academics?

Most academic practices reflect the most basic human activities, but we try our best to make them sound otherwise. Even the most generic academic terms are loaded by disciplinary bias and individual assumptions. PhD students (and I include myself here) are amongst the worst culprits as it consolidates the necessary enculturation process inherent in becoming legitimised as an academic.

Using broad terms are useful starting points though not always workable. For example, in the morning session I helped facilitate, one table interpreted data collection as general academic information sourcing rather than in the narrower methodological sense. So, terms like collecting stuff, exploring ideas, explaining things etc. are useful to cut through the bullshit.

Tools vs. Practices

Social media is itself a problematic term. Social media constitute a range of different tools and platforms. Whilst some provide defined parameters of use that may be attributable to recognisable activities, many do not. As the Visitors and Residents framework suggests, understanding the effectiveness of social media can be dependent on whether they are perceived as purposeful tools for specific academic activities, or as flexible, social and cultural spaces for participation, enquiry and critique.

Despite practice-based approaches such as those we promoted at the event, there are those who inevitably lean towards the instinctive tool-focussed ideologies inherent in learning new technology, and therefore partly quantify the success of workshops or events on box-ticking exercises such as the collaborative listing of social media we employed in the first session. Some attendees appreciated the opportunity to explore some of the social media we discussed in the morning session in the drop-in IT workshop after lunch.

Balancing Assumptions

To me, the success of an event like this is partly dependent on the dynamic between how it both placates expectations and challenges assumptions. In this case, this was not only applicable to assumptions on social media, but also on what it means to ‘do a PhD’. And, as Jen’s excellent account of her workshop experience suggests, this is equally true for facilitators. The difficulty is; that dynamic and the implications of the event are different for each individual who participates.

Thinking practically, this requires developing an initial dialogue necessary to gain an understanding of these collective assumptions, and adopting a flexible approach that can adapt to changing needs. Basically, there are as many ways to do events like this, as there are events. If we go away not wanting to rip it up and start all over again, we are probably doing something fundamentally wrong.

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 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/

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.

The postgraduate and early career researchers who have attended the social media sessions I’ve been running with LeRoy Hill over the last year bring with them rich and wide-ranging learning experiences and perspectives.

Some might have been under the impression that we are on some sort of crusade with web 2.0, but we are not. It’s always been about raising awareness of its potential. We recognise that the values of these tools are highly situated in each researcher’s individual practice and disciplinary research culture, and many attendees are rightly apprehensive over the appropriateness and usefulness of social media in their studies and work. We welcome current users who share their social media practices with other attendees, often supporting our enthusiasm with fresh and unique perspectives. But we are equally happy for them to share bad experiences, misconceptions and concerns. This is why we try to encourage an interactive environment and opportunities for discussion.

I can’t speak for LeRoy (though I think he’d agree), but I’m happy for attendees to go away choosing not to adopt any or all of the social media we discuss, as long as the sessions have given them the opportunity to reflect on their own use, or potential use, of these tools, and encouraged them to think critically about their applicability to their own practices and the wider contexts of web 2.0.

This approach also informs and underpins the modes of enquiry and analytical model I am developing for my current PhD work with doctoral students. But what do we mean by critical and reflective practices? Both draw on rich historical and contested models and definitions, which I will not attempt to review here. Rather, I’d like to suggest how these (in my view, often interrelated) practices should be embedded in the processes postgraduate researchers adopt in using social media.

Reflective Practices

• Identifying appropriate web 2.0 resources and services, and evaluating the affordances of specific tools and platforms for academic practice
• Developing self- and collaborative organisational and time-management skills in relation to social media use, including the use of technology-supported strategies
• Identifying appropriate technical know-how and training needs, and using training opportunities (formal and informal), online resources and other sources of support
• Recognising the transferability of web 2.0 skills and digital literacies in lifelong learning, professional development and employability contexts
• Engaging in opportunities for sharing practice and technological skills with peers
• Developing potential for individual, participatory and collaborative action planning and learning design

Critical Practices

• Negotiating new socio-technical academic community and network development and boundary-crossing activities within disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts
• Recognising shifts in academic protocols; new modes and means of production, peer review and knowledge resources
• Adapting to new practices in academic integrity and responsibility; referencing and attribution of digital sources and artefacts
• Identifying inconsistent pedagogies and socio-cultural and political ideologies that underpin social media practice
• Challenging rhetorical representation of social media historically founded in the business metaphor of web 2.0
• Negotiating increasingly blurred boundaries defining institutional, proprietary, freeware and open-source tools and platforms
• Understanding emerging multimedia and multimodal literacies
• Managing online identities and reputation

In critiquing exaggerated claims of ‘self-organizing’ behaviour in social media, Alan Levine (AKA @cogdog) draws on Emergence theory to argue that patterns of corresponding participation – such as Twitter users tweeting on an event – “arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” and do not necessarily indicate collaborative or coordinated acts.

Resulting ‘constellations’ of participation are frequently interpreted through network analysis and increasingly complex visual data representations. But how do we go about examining any claims that these are more than merely the result of cumulative activities? This requires exploring the interplay between individual and social agencies, motivations and influences, and understanding how these are acted out within cultural contexts and protocols. To use Levine’s example, actors may acquire a ‘sense’ of collaboration (for example, in producing a collective digital archive) but is this realised through a shared cause or an environment for debate? Is the participation – and the nature of the contributions – the result of individual self-will or coerced? What hierarchies, power relations and modes of influence might be at play here? And how does the technology influence these things?

Earlier today, Leroy Hill and I ran the latest in our social media sessions; our first at the Arts Graduate Centre.

The sessions are designed to integrate a range of interrelated key concepts (e.g. networking, digital identities), underlying processes (e.g. folksonomy, aggregation), and tools / media (twitter, blogs etc.), with the hope that personal and disciplinary perspectives, and wider socio-cultural and political contexts will emerge.

Today’s attendees – a mix of doctoral and masters degree students, primarily from the arts and humanities – didn’t let us down, demonstrating thoughtful, reflective and critical approaches to adopting and using social media in their practices.

Within our structured programme of presentations, we try to adopt a flexible approach to encourage an informal and interactive environment, and today, it’s refreshing to note that by the time the two sections we had factored-in for group discussion came around, the attendees had already brought up many of the key issues we were planning to introduce. Key concerns raised during the session included the usual suspects:

• Difficulties in developing critical mass in networks / communities
• Questioning the academic ‘value’ of web 2.0 compared with established practices
• Negotiating multiple online identities and reputations
• Perceived risk factors in sharing work in progress
• Time constraints

We hope all the attendees found the session as useful and rewarding as we did, and we look forward to seeing them again on November 24th.

Next month I’ll be back at the Jubilee Graduate Centre (JGC) with LeRoy Hill to run a new round of social media sessions for the new academic term. The original series of three lunchtime sessions earlier in the year attracted a great group of enthusiastic, multi-disciplinary PhD students and early career researchers, and led on to a further single all-day session at the Engineering Graduate Centre, and a presentation and paper (forthcoming) at the Future Learningscapes e-learning conference with JGC manager Tracy Sisson. (We also have a couple of sessions lined up at the Arts Graduate Centre, but that’s for another post).

This time round, we’re presenting two longer sessions at the JGC. We have limited preparation time, so we won’t be diverting too far from the original format; combining presentation, discussion, and the opportunity for quick demos – and we are updating our online resource which support the sessions to encourage further exploration of the social media we are discussing. Our key aims remain to raise awareness of the potential of using social media in academic and research work, and provide an opportunity for dissuasion and sharing of best practices. But I hope the new sessions will also indicate both my and LeRoy’s evolving thought processes and perspectives from our individual doctoral research projects and our own personal and reflective use of social media.

Guides to writing a dissertation / thesis, particularly within the social sciences, often stress the act of ‘locating’ or ‘positioning’ oneself within the field of research being studied. In interpreting and conceptualising selected arguments we are expected to take sides; to critically evaluate different perspectives, look for synergies, contradictions and gaps in the constructed debate. Whilst this spatial metaphor is largely confined to the context of literature review, it is seen as a crucial component of doctoral study, indicating the student’s development as a critical and reflective researcher, and representing the process of finding her own voice as an independent scholar.

Depending on your research field, some of the authors you reference may be long departed. Many however, are your contemporaries; living, breathing academics, fellow researchers, supervisors, professors, each with personal perspectives and motivations, influenced by ongoing professional incentives, constraints and experiences. The ‘I agree with x but disagree with y’ type of rationality we routinely adopt in reviewing formal texts belies the personal traits and circumstances and social glue that underpin academic discourse, and the nuances, cliques and politics of faculty and the wider academic field.

How much I wonder, does engagement in Web 2.0 environments indicate these often hidden influences? Does the informality and transparency evident in blogging, Twitter and personal learning networks etc. give us a richer, more authentic perspective? What these practices reveal may not be transferable to the formal, structural requirements of the literature review, but they may help us signpost key arguments and their proponents, and give us an ‘edge’ in understanding the social complexities that influence contemporary academic debate.

A number of recent activities has made me engage with the issue of academic disciplines in relation to my work and studies.

At last month’s JTEL Summer School in Macedonia, I participated in a group task based on one of the three grand challenges, Strengthening Learning Contexts. In presenting disciplinarity as a learning context, I drew largely on Tony Becher’s book (revised with Paul Trowler in 2001), Academic Tribes and Territories, which adopts a geographical metaphor to describe how historically defined academic disciplines and specialisms are perpetuated by the cultural values, norms and traditions which reside within them.

I recently came across a paper by Kuang-Hsu (Iris) Chiang (2003), in which she proposes that disciplinary diversity in doctoral education is engendered by the research training cultures, which she argues, are highly influential, not only in establishing the PhD students’ research environment, but also in their research processes and learning experiences. Taking the research training in Chemistry and Education respectively as examples, Chiang makes a clear distinction between a ‘teamwork’ structure and an ‘individualist’ structure. The social media sessions I’ve been running with LeRoy Hill at Graduate Centres in the University of Nottingham have been delivered to cross-disciplinary audiences (PhD and Early Career Researchers) from a number of Schools and Faculties. There are clear indications that disciplinary cultures may affect (though not exclusively) their attitudes to adopting and using social media in their studies.

I’ve commented before on the ‘privileged positions’ those who work in or study learning technologies have in using social media. The advantage I feel, is not so much in our familiarity and confidence with using the technologies (though that is clearly a factor), but more so in the richness of networks and communities we can rely on in which to participate. If students from other disciplines and specialisms do not have access to critical numbers of fellow academics within their fields who are using these tools – a concern raised by a number of attendees at our sessions – should we expect them to engage with social media at all?

Neil Selwyn’s excellent keynote address to the Ed-Media Conference in Toronto last week no doubt ruffled a few feathers, but his remarks serve to remind us of the clear disconnect between the potential of social media for learning and the reality of current adoption rates. If we are to engage with students and educators outside the ‘ed-tech bubble’, we can demonstrate the tools and establish best practices, but these need to be contextualised within the academic disciplines and research cultures of those we are trying hard to convince.

References

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

Chiang, K.-H. (2003). Learning Experiences of Doctoral Students in UK Universities. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 23 (1/2). 4-32.