PhD Blog (dot) Net

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.

This blog, my wiki (both public) and my research journal (private) represent the primary tools I use to record my academic progress and Doctoral experience. Each can be seen as serving specific and interrelated processes of documentation, reflection and dissemination. Such things are rarely reflected on, so there’s nothing like a damp bank holiday weekend to do so…

I’ve discussed various aspects of my blogging previously here. Suffice to say, i see this blog as the focal point of my web activity. Even though I’m frequently more active in using Twitter, Delicious, Mendeley and other tools, this is at the heart of my engagement with the wider academic community and the first place I direct anyone interested in my work.

I use Google Sites for my wiki. It’s a wiki tool in all but name, and one I find to be more effective and reliable than others I’ve tried (such as Wetpaint). I feel I’m yet to develop the full potential of the wiki. It remains a largely static repository whilst it could integrate much more dynamic cross referencing and annotation to facilitate thesis development. Perhaps this will be realised once I reach the writing-up stage of my PhD. I have no problems sharing my work in progress – I think it’s a personal choice. As my PhD is fundamentally rooted in participatory practices and openness in academic work, I guess it helps to practice what I preach. I don’t think many people actually read the wiki, but occasionally it’s useful to reference parts of it on my blog, which is a more appropriate platform for gaining feedback.

My research journal is an old-fashioned diary-style Excel file which I use to collate random thoughts and ideas, quotations and references, and notes on seminars I have attended etc. – much of it actually on the periphery of my PhD. Some content may become formalised into blog posts, wiki entries and thesis drafts. Maybe I should use a private wiki-type site for this, to enable access from any computer and facilitate better search and cross referencing.

These tools are interconnected in various ways to other tools and services which I use both on and off-line, particularly my Twitter and Delicious sites. I’ve also started using Evernote again, primarily to keep tabs on comments I make on other people’s blogs and in social network sites and fora. (I’m considering this or some similar web-based ‘sticky notes’ system for my participants in my main study). Some call this combination of tools a Personal Learning Environment/Network (PLE/N) – ambiguous and contested terms I’m happy to let others use. Key for me is identifying how and why we adopt and configure these tools, and how they transform and disrupt our academic practices. It’s always worth reflecting on your own use of technologies when investigating others.

A week on from attending the excellent Digital Researcher event run by Vitae and the British Library, it’s been interesting to see how some attendees have followed up with their online activity; developing networks and continuing discussions, partly driven by Tristram Hooley and Alan Cann, two of the presenters at the event. The #dr10 hashtag key has been evident on Twitter, FriendFeed and a number of blogs.

Open online course models, such as George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08 and CCK09) may partly rely on traditional ‘bounded’ online platforms (such as their Moodle site), but actively encourage participants to use their own existing social media (blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites etc.) for personal reflection, social engagement and content management, as well as creating new groups and platforms for further discussion and knowledge sharing. The use of a unifying hashtag seems at present, the most effective way of aggregating this type of distributed activity.

But how effective is this in sustaining interest and participation? By adopting and encouraging an open, distributed model like this, it is necessary to accept that the resulting activities can be exciting, unpredictable, imperfect, messy or just plain non-eventful.

Attendees at events like Digital Researcher can vary considerably in their awareness, knowledge and competences of the technologies being introduced, and in their motivations to use them (like it or not, some PhD students DO attend training courses just to tick off another skill-set for their annual reviews). The excitement and good intentions which some may take home with them can be soon forgotten in the subsequent days and weeks, as busy schedules and deadlines take over. In addition, people trying social media for the first time often ‘don’t get the point’ of them because their affordances only become evident once a level of maturity is attained.

In the recent sessions I ran with LeRoy Hill at the University of Nottingham, we adopted similar methods of presentation and discussion to those which featured at the Digital Researcher event (albeit on a far less ambitious scale). Though we’ve not conducted any formal evaluation as yet, anecdotal evidence would suggest that the take up of these tools in the subsequent weeks that have followed has been patchy at best. Reflecting on our sessions, we identified that whilst such initiatives can raise awareness, the need to scaffold them with ongoing support such as drop-in open workshops and online discussion groups becomes apparent.

Tristram Hooley rightly points out that students were best supported at Digital Researcher by actively working with each other, sharing personal perspectives and good practice. Arguably, follow-up activities can be scaffolded in similar ways. However, whilst the initial focus can be on the event itself, and within the core group of attendees who are keen to continue participating, that motivation will soon dissipate, as the event and the group become increasingly irrelevant to individual research practices, disciplines and communities. How do we make the transition?

During the second of our social media sessions at the Jubilee Graduate Centre, I mentioned that I had recently responded to a tweet from one of my followees on Twitter. He posted a link to an article he was desperate to read but unable to access as his University wasn’t subscribed to that particular journal. I quickly found out I had access to the article through my University of Nottingham account, and uploaded it to GoogleDocs for him to pick up. For all I know, others may have responded in the same way.

Interestingly, the response to this in the session was mixed. Most I’m sure, appreciated the time and effort I saved this guy; the inter-library loan service is an invaluable yet often frustratingly time-consuming provision which many of us rely on. I used the opportunity to emphasise the expectation of reciprocity in social media interactions; that I would hope others would do the same thing for me. Perhaps the uneasiness evident in some of the responses was a natural reaction to the way this small, virtually insignificant act represents one of the ways social media challenges traditional channels of academic access to knowledge. And the recognition that we all influence, and depend on, the complex socio-economic structures that bind Higher Education and academic publishing.

I picked up on another interesting comment by Dave White during the webinar discussed in my previous post. He suggests academic reputation, status or kudos is not automatically transferable to social media environments, but has to be ‘re-earned’ through new modes of participatory engagement. If this is the case, why is it some academics (e.g., Etienne Wenger) have accrued hundreds of followers in twitter despite little or no output. This is almost akin to sitting at the feet of a prophet waiting for him to speak – not much re-earning necessary here.

Academic hierarchies (either perceived or real) are culturally and historically stratified and persistent. I suggest social media has the ability to ‘skew’ rather than nullify this stratification. True, the cultural heritage and technological infrastructure of social media lends itself to a more open and accessible academic discourse than that provided by traditional platforms, and enables greater movement and interaction between academic strata, but only up to a point.

Yesterday, Eva – my colleague in room C11 – successfully passed her viva (with minor corrections) and will soon be leaving us to go back to China. We will all miss her and wish her every success. In the next few weeks, new PhD students will be taking the place of departing friends.

Although I regularly work at home, when I’m in University, I value the social and working environment of C11, particularly in the mix (in terms of stages of PhD, experience and fields of study) that is provided by my colleagues. One of the key roles of formal education is to promote diversity, and thereby expose students to different perspectives. Yet as our online learning activities become increasingly informal, self-directed and distributed, is there a tendency to choose like-minded people in our digital networks and online communities of practice/interest? How can we replicate the diversity which formal educational structures often impose?