PhD Blog (dot) Net

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, will be your contemporaries; living, breathing academics, fellow early researchers, postdocs, supervisors, professors, each with personal perspectives and motivations, influenced by ongoing professional experiences, incentives and constraints. 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.

Following on from our successful lunchtime sessions at the Jubilee Graduate Centre earlier this year, me and LeRoy are repeating our Graduate training in social media at the Engineering Graduate Centre (EGC) on Thursday 17 June. This time we are conducting a single, full-day session (10 till 4), which will incorporate all the presentational elements from the Jubilee sessions whilst allowing, we hope, greater opportunities for interaction and discussion from the attendees (as suggested in our Jubilee feedback). As this will be the first time we have delivered a session on the main campus, it is being co-funded by all four main campus Graduate Centres. Whilst the session is open to all Postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers across the University, the venue may attract a strong representative from the Engineering faculty, and EGC manager Rebecca Dowsett has suggested incorporating more ‘hands-on’ approaches might be appreciated. Whilst we will be demonstrating a number of key social media during the sessions, time limitations restrict any formal workshop component, but we hope there will be opportunities to ‘break-out’ from the session room and use the Centre PCs for additional demos during breaks and lunch.

In her lengthy response to a previous post of mine, Virginia Yonkers offers further insight into how we perceive social networks and communities. I was particularly struck with her take on how social engagement evolves through maturity into adulthood and more defined societal and professional environments:

“Looking at educational development, teens and young adults tend to have more superficial relationships as they are still creating their identity. Regardless of what tools are available, or even what culture you are looking at, teens will belong to multiple communities. As we age, however, and our identity is established, either by profession, culture, religion, local community, or a larger global community, we tend to limit those organizations and communities we join or are actively engaged in. This happens with or without technology.”

This seems to me to offer a much more astute perspective with which we might try to understand engagement with the social web than many accounts that focus on generational differences determined by technological competencies or psychological wiring. Though I would argue that our identity is never fully ‘established’ as such (as that would almost suggest we stop learning), recognising the learning trajectory as a process of identity formation that is situated and socially and culturally negotiated resonates with many of the conceptual ideas I am exploring.

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.

Steve Wheeler’s list of his top 10 Web tools generated a typically popular response on his blog today, with others sharing what they are using and why. I raise the point that whilst these tools are highly effective for a range of purposes, we should not necessarily treat them as discrete technologies. In adopting a holistic view to studying the social web, I’m particularly interested in the type of emergent processes that students are developing in using these tools collectively.

I go on to comment:

“For example, writing a blog post such as this one is not an isolated activity. What are the motivations for writing it and how might they involve other social media? Attending a webinar perhaps, or reading an online journal article? Or is it in response to another blog post? And was that sourced from Twitter, or from a regularly subscribed blog via a RSS feedreader? What external resources might the post link to, or does it embed content from other sites? What happens after the blog is posted? Is it promoted on Twitter or Facebook? Does anyone leave a comment, or bookmark it? Well, you get the general idea…”

Tools come and go. Whist certain tools become culturally embedded and synonymous with specific activities, or we appropriate certain sites with specific communities, it’s the combined processes of – as Steve rightly says – connection, sharing and amplification that makes social media so powerful. Identifying these processes enables us to develop good practices, but how transferable are these as new tools emerge?

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2010/03/10-web-20-tools-i-cant-do-without.html

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?

We had another great turn out for our third and final social media session at Jubilee Graduate Centre last week. We are now looking into taking this to the main campus, though we might consider merging the three sessions into a single all-day event. This may allow time for lengthier and more interactive discussion activities.