This week the UWE Graduate School hosted a second discussion workshop on the topic of open access publishing deliberately timed to coincide with Global Open Access week. In October 2012 we explored the topic of Open Access by introducing what was happening in terms of the policy direction of the main UK funders of research.

Jenni Crossley & Judith Stewart (UWE Research & Knowledge Exchange Librarian) along with Alex Clarke (UWE Research Repository Manager) introduced the topic for us using the following slides.

In 2013, Jenni Crossley invited the founder and editor-in-chief of Social Sciences Directory, Dan Scott, to present his view on Open Access in scholarly publishing. His presentation can be found below:

Background

If you would like a background to open access publishing, the following segment of a Radio 3 programme, “Night Waves” featuring David Willetts & Dame Janet Finch that aired on 2nd October 2012 summarises the debate well. Here’s the link to that programme:- the segment on open access begins at about 6 min 35 seconds in from the start.

Another excellent summary of the state of affairs was written by Phil Ward on his blog, Research Fundermentals, in a post entitled “an introduction to open access”.

I think that most scholars agree that open access, in an ideal world should be the default, that the end product should be freely available to anyone that wants to access it.

Perhaps a simplistic (some may argue hyperbolic) illustration of the current state of affairs was set out by Dr Michael P Taylor writing in The Guardian newspaper, “The parable of the farmers and the Teleporting Duplicator”. It is easy to see the logic but perhaps also easy to forget that this is much more easily applied to scientific disciplines than to the rest of the academy.

The debates lie in how to make research outputs more accessible to everyone without damaging the sustainability of a peer reviewed system and not derailing researchers ability to publish. This was the task that Dame Janet Finch undertook and the outcomes and recommendations were released earlier in the year.

The UK Research Councils (and the Government in general) have accepted these recommendations and have made quite a bold policy decision about how the outputs from research that is funded by the Research Councils should be published

The extra funding that David Willetts talks about to assist the transition has just been announced although this funding will be directed toward those who publish the most outputs from Research Council funded projects.

Not everyone is happy with the “Gold OA” preference, some see it as a victory for the publishers to have their cake and eat it whilst others have different concerns, e.g. how will universities ensure that there is funding available to researchers to facilitate the publishing of articles without prejudice? The transition to open access necessitates a period whereby two models (subscription and open access) will be running alongside each other adding to the financial burden. How do we ensure that in the rush to change things we don’t undermine researchers who produce the outputs?

More recently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and their counterparts throughout the UK, are running a consultation on open access which makes interesting reading.

I am beginning to worry that there aren’t enough researchers who have grasped the seismic shift that is unfolding, moreso that experienced academics have yet to understand the ramifications for the next generation of researchers who will be operating in a different climate in terms of disseminating their findings.

What do you think?

What a lot of books!

Last week the Graduate School hosted a workshop on “organising and searching the literatures” for new doctoral students. In the past few years I have included this topic, albeit briefly, within the longer workshop “The beginner’s guide to the doctorate”. However, I was reminded not long ago that it can be hard for those of us who are experienced researchers to remember quite how daunting it can be to navigate the literatures.  Pat Thomson’s blog has a number of entries that doctoral researcher should really read about literature reviews.

The initial stages of a research degree are all about becoming familiar with your field, to understand where your proposed research project will fit, to see where the gaps are, to ultimately be able satisfy the claim for originality that you’ll make.

So where to begin? A strategy for searching out references is quite a good place, it can be easy to fall into a trap of aimlessly searching the internet for anything that might be relevant to what you’re doing so our first topic was to take stock and think about how to search effectively for things. This might sound a little bit basic but it’s important to realise that there are different strategies depending on what you are searching. We have become used to using google to find answers to questions but we need to keep in mind how databases operate to search them effectively. Jenni Crossley, the research and knowledge librarian, gave the following advice to boost our “finding out skills”.

We then moved onto how to organise stuff, it is one thing being able to find reference material, to skim read and to feel you’ve achieved something but it is quite another to be able to organise your references in a meaningful way replete with notes about why that reference is relevant, what you thought about etc.

At UWE we have an institutional subscription to a reference management system called Refworks. This is an online reference management system that integrates well with with a number of databases that the UWE Library subscribe to, it has a neat plug in for Microsoft Word called write ‘n’ cite and has loads of different bibliographic referencing styles that can be used.

Here’s the support document form UWE about using Refworks.

On the other hand there are other solutions available to manage your references that are better in other ways, for example for storing and/or annotating PDF files. Here’s a useful comparison of the most popular tools

My advice is to use a tool that suits you, to learn how to use it properly earlier rather than later, and then stick to it. Trust me when I say that it will save you time if you develop an efficient system before you get into the depths of writing.

How to get your thesis online?

This week we ran a workshop to introduce the changes to the process of submitting a doctoral thesis at UWE. From September 2013, all doctoral candidates are required to submit an electronic version of their final thesis alongside a hard bound copy. The context of this is to make it easier for anyone to access the research outputs from universities – the open access agenda which I wrote about here.

We invited the managers of the UWE Research Repository, Alex Clarke and Anna Lawson to explain a bit more about how the repository came about and how to deposit a thesis. Here are their supporting slides.

Simon Sinek: Start with why by marcoderksen 

This week I contributed to a “learning lunch” for colleagues here at UWE. The topic for this episode is authentic leadership. It’s a re-run of a leadership insight I delivered a couple of years back on a course entitled “Leadership in Action”. This is a Vitae course offered to researchers (both students and staff) to allow them the time/freedom/space to practice leadership in a variety of settings. This particular course was one sponsored by the South West & Wales regional hub of Vitae.

I’ve written about this sort of thing before in the context of communication of research, being able to explain the “why” of research is a valuable thing in my view and key to good communication.

Below is a summary of what I said about authentic leadership.

Much of the insight has been taken from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” and his TED talk based on the same topic..

I ended the segment by showing my favourite TED talk featuring Benjamin Zander who, for me at least, is the epitome of authentic leadership in action.

Image Attribution

Simon Sinek: Start with why by marcoderksen available at http://flic.kr/p/82L7jr under a creative commons 2.0 licence. Full details http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Under the spotlight

As a follow on to the workshop on writing up the thesis, I ran a session on the final examination process for the research degree at UWE.

What I try to do with these sessions is two-fold:-

1. Knowledge is power – much of the process is organised by others but if the doctoral candidate knows who is supposed to be doing what and when it makes it easier for them to keep things on track (i.e. nudge their supervisors..)
2. Reduce anxiety – there is a lot of uncertainty around the viva, most people will never have had experience of an oral examination so I try and say as much as I can about how it will be conducted

The workshop slides I used are below and the first half sets out how it is done at UWE (it may be slightly different at other HEIs) with the second half being dominated with as much advice as I could muster about preparing for and surviving (!) the viva. More recently, a scholar who writes about the doctoral journey, Professor Gina Wisker, presented some of her work to research students in the Department of Arts. Some interesting observations about What Doctoral Examiners look for.

The basic hints and tips are these:-

• know your field
• know your thesis
• be clear about your ‘significant contribution’
• be enthusiastic!

A question that often comes up is “what questions will be asked?”. Unfortunately I don’t have the power of prediction and every viva is different, however the opening exchange will always be around giving you, the candidate, the opportunity to summarise your thesis. This is something you can prepare for by talking to people about your work as an overview, what’s the big idea, what excites you about it, what are the key things that have come out of it etc.

Again there are some great hints and tips out there to draw upon, here’s a few…

• Vitae – Completing your doctorate
• PORT (postgraduate online research training) video – preparing for you viva
• PORT (postgraduate online research training) video - The Examiner’s point of view
• PORT (postgraduate online research training) video - Opening questions
• PORT (postgraduate online research training) video - The viva as an experience
• Tara Brabazon (Times Higher) – Take the heat out of trial by fire
• The Viva Survivors podcast site from Dr Nathan Ryder

Some final thoughts:-

Although the viva is a hurdle to overcome, try to think of it as a golden opportunity to have a good natter about your research. It is unlikely that you will ever have this much attention from other scholars who are interested in your work! Many fruitful collaborations begin after a viva exam, it could take your research down a new avenue.

I also think it is important to try to stay cool (I know that’s easier said than done) and to ask for clarification on questions you don’t understand by saying things like “I’m not sure if I’ve understood, are you asking…?” Don’t be tempted to launch into an answer to a question that wasn’t asked!

If you are a UWE researcher, then have a look at the research degrees webpages and read the document that is given to independent chairs (at UWE we have an independent chair to facilitate the exam process to ensure that candidates are given fair treatment) as it sets out exactly how the examination will be conducted from a practical point of view.

Last words:- Be confident, you wrote the thesis and you know more about it than anyone else. So demonstrate confidence with authority, you’ve earned it!

This week I ran a workshop at UWE on the use of social media in the context of research. This follows on from a similar workshop that I ran in February 2012 for researchers and a workshop at the Vitae Conference in September 2012 for researcher skills developers from across the country.

I invited Dr. Sarah-Louise Quinnell [@sarahthesheepu] to come and co-facilitate, someone who has a great deal of experience in the arena of using social media tools to gather research data and establishing herself as someone with recognisable expertise in the sphere of e-learning.

The background to this is that researchers are changing the way they use digital tools in the context of their research. There is lots of work going on as part of the wider JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme including work being carried out by Vitae to better understand the development needs of researchers.

I’m interested in the digital literacy of folks like me for a couple of reasons:

1) It surely makes sense to better understand how researchers using digital tools in the context of research so that we are better able to support them

2) I believe that the very same digital tools can help staff supporting researchers to engage in their own professional development (something that we all want more of!)

The slides I used to support this workshop are below.

Prezi was used to make the presentation which you can edit remotely & collaboratively.

Hopes and fears

Hopes

Basic overview of what is out there

Getting research out there

To become more aware of others with similar interest & activities to my own

Catch up with colleagues who use twitter/blogs naturally

Which button do I press?

How to quantify opinion (or research data) gathered via social media tools

Fears

Maintaining privacy

Managing a digital reputation

How do I edit the digital me?

Will this become another distraction?

Digital Identity

We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.

“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman

Twitter

We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe

Good morning, it's the digital researcher course today at UWE #druwe—
Paul Spencer (@paulspencer42) March 05, 2013

Really interesting day discussing the use of social media as a researcher #druwe—
Victoria Salmon (@Salmontori) December 12, 2013

https://twitter.com/paulspencer42/status/308892196768190464

Going to stop neglecting my Twitter account after today! #DRuwe—
Caroline Flurey (@C_Flurey) December 12, 2013

Any followers out there who can pass on nuggets of wisdom to out digital researchers here at UWE #druwe—
Paul Spencer (@paulspencer42) March 05, 2013

@paulspencer42 don't just be a listener! I've made great contacts and built networks of expertise on twitter through 'talking' #druwe—
Ghislaine Dell (@GhislaineDell) March 05, 2013

Power of networks

We discussed a little bit of network theory, illustrated by this video for a TEDx talk by Zella King

Managing information overload

We had a look at portals and aggregators to help manage information streams.

Using social media tools in research

There is increasing concern about ensuring rigour when using digital tools to gather research data. At UWE, we have some guidance available on the Research Ethics pages.

We discussed how research is social & iterative, the benefits of engaging with folks far and wide about your research outputs and how to use tools to make the finding out about knowledge a little easier. We had a play around with some social citation tools, e.g. CiteULike, Zotero & Mendeley

@paulspencer42 Really useful course but could also be good to explore using digital/social media as a research tool #druwe—
Louca-Mai Brady (@louca_mai) March 05, 2013

Blogs

We discussed why folks blog – a variety of reasons including:- organising thoughts, mind dump, getting feedback at an early stage etc.

This blog is a just one such example!

Netiquette

Summed up with “Common sense!”

Other sources of information

Here’s a list of things that I have come across recently on the topic of social media in research (clearly not exhaustive!):-

A blog about blogging in an academic research context from Imperial College - some really interesting advice and guidance here.

The Networked Researcher blog site which promotes the use of social media tools for researchers – “Digital Professionalism – what not to share”

The British Library – Help for Researchers – “Web 2.0 as a social science research tool”

The Guardian Higher Education site – discussing benefits of blogging as a researcher – “How blogging helped me find my research voice”

The Research Information Network site – “Social Media: A Guide for Researchers”

The Vitae/Open University “Social Media Handbook for researchers and supervisors”

Thanks to the researcher who attended both physically and virtually!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,400 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Having a light bulb moment?

This week at UWE we welcomed Dave Jarman, the Head of Enterprise Education at the University of Bristol to facilitate a session on creativity in research. Here’s some thoughts from Dave about how important creativity is in the business of research.

The Creative Researcher session explores the basic principles of creative and innovative thought and their importance for researchers. As researchers and as products of traditional education programmes we often prize critical and analytical thought very highly – but the ability to suspend critical thought is integral to generating creative thoughts from which truly innovative applications can arise. Too often we seek the ‘right answer’ which usually leads us exactly where everyone else has gone before – if we’re trying to find something original we have to look where others do not.

As a result creativity involves a different approach; partially an internal one – giving yourself permission to make mistakes, to explore the ridiculous, to follow your curiosity down possible dead-ends, and to stretch yourself into ‘uncomfortable’ and unfamiliar territories. But the external environment also has an impact; creativity thrives in resource-rich and diverse networks. You need stimulation, connections, and an environment conducive to exploration to generate creative ideas and experiment with them.

Further links

http://threewise.tumblr.com/post/64288653514/serendipity

http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/tag/power-to-create/

Research journals on a shelf

In December the UWE Researchers’ Forum tackled a topic at the heart of a successful academic research career, that of how to write papers that are considered to be internationally excellent or even world leading. What we try to do with these events is to help early career researchers to understand what factors are involved in a successful academic research career. We do this by inviting experienced researchers to share their knowledge, expertise and practice. Here’s the programme for the forum.

In the morning we invited two UWE academics who have a lot of experience of writing, reviewing and encouraging others to write excellent research outputs.

First up was Professor Aniko Varadi from the Department of Biological, Biomedical and Analytical Sciences at UWE, an experienced researcher and the lead for the UWE submission in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in Unit of Assessment 3.

We had a video camera running on the day so we can show what Professor Varadi had to say.

Next up we heard from Professor Katie Williams, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments who is also a very experienced researcher and a review panel member for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Professor Williams wrote a handout with tips on how to write quality papers.

The video camera was still rolling so here’s what Professor Williams had to say.

The afternoon of this Researchers’ Forum then sought to explore how researchers could use digital tools to augment their excellent outputs of research to help extend their reach. I’ve written about some of these things in a post the “Digital Researcher” and there’ll be a separate post featuring the video.

The UWE Graduate School run a course aimed at staff new to supervising postgraduate research students entitled “Supervising Doctoral Students: Pedagogy & Practice”. The aim of this course is to encourage supervisors to think about a research degree in terms of a journey, to consider the support required by the doctoral student at various points along the way.

We set some pre-course reading for the participants to bring up the ideas around the different approaches there are to supervision; these were the references supplied:

• Lee, Anne (2008). How are doctoral students supervised? Concepts of doctoral research supervision,Studies in Higher Education (33(3) 267-281.
• Deuchar, Ross (2008) Facilitator, director or critical friend? Contradiction and congruence in doctoral supervision styles, Teaching in Higher Education 13(4): 489-500.
• Morrison-Saunders, A., Moore, S.A., Hughes, M. and Newsome, D. (2010) Coming to terms with research practice: riding the emotional rollercoaster of doctoral research studies, in M. Walker & P. Thomson (eds)The Routledge doctoral supervisor’s companion, London: Routledge.

The programme for the two day course is included here:

We started by talking about what our own doctoral journeys entailed, was it a good/bad/indifferent experience and what role did our supervisor(s) play in helping to navigate that journey. Perhaps predictably, there were some pretty diverse tales from all- but with the same sort of message resonating. Our own experiences of being supervised are formative in how we then supervise others.

There was an interesting discussion regarding the framework of supervision picked out from Dr Anne Lee’s work on research supervision as being intriguing. A full explanation of it can be found here: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/484/1/fulltext.pdf

This led onto the discussions about how supervisors are chosen. Expertise & experience were two characteristics that leapt out but it was recognised that a great many other factors can and do influence the choice.

A discussion about the difference between the role of the Director of Study (DoS) and second/third/fourth supervisors was also had. These are quite clear in terms of the regulatory framework at UWE.

We ended Day 1 with a look at the progression examination arrangements we have here at UWE. The slides I used to support this are the same ones I use to inform doctoral students and are reproduced here:

It was a discursive day and it was great to have two things from the supervisors there, 1) a genuine enthusiasm for supporting doctoral students and 2) a wealth of experience that they bring to the table.

The second instalment of this course focussed on supporting doctoral students through the “middle years” (how do you maintain motivation?) and supporting students toward the finish. We began by talking about “doctoral-ness”, what is it, how do we define it and, probably more importantly, how do we encourage the development of it in others?

A good starting place was the Doctoral Descriptors, a set of criteria that research degrees are measured against by way of examination. The UWE descriptors are based on the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) publication “Doctoral Degree Characteristics” (Sept 2011). Most universities will have equivalent descriptors somewhere in their regulatory framework. The UWE Doctoral Descriptor and the separate MPhil descriptor are reproduced here:

It is important for supervisors to try to help their students understand what it is that they are aiming for, some say you should try and set out the stall from day 1. A light hearted but illustrative example from Matt Might (Assistant Professor from the University of Utah) about what a PhD is helps us to get out heads around the problem…

The Illustrated Guide to the Ph.D.

The second element of “doctoral-ness” is to consider the philosophy element of the endeavour. Perhaps research students and their supervisors spend too much time on the written output, the doctoral thesis without necessarily considering the other and perhaps more original meaning of thesis – “a proposition stated or put forward, especially one to be discussed and proved or to be maintained against objections”.

The topic of maintaining motivation was discussed. Inevitably the phenomenon known as the “Second Year Slump” (a general loss of motivation caused by a virtuous cycle of lack of progress/lack of belief in ability to make progress). Matt Might has some advice on this:

3 Qualities of Successful Ph.D Students

The group considered, discussed and debated what might constitute good hints and tips for helping research students to keep moving in the right direction. Here are those:

The last session of the day was around the final leg of the journey, how to help research students complete. Here’s is the prezi I used to illustrate the logistics:

Finally, here is a collection of some relevant materials (clearly not exhaustive) on the topic of supervision.

The outdoor classroom in the Brecon Beacons

The UWE Graduate School are currently advertising a vacancy for a Researcher Development Manager with a closing date of Monday 17th February 2014; this blog entry is to explain why it is available and to give a bit of context around the role.

The current role holder (that’s me!) is covering the maternity leave of a colleague – the Graduate School Manager – so am having to step out of researcher development. I believe it is a fantastic opportunity for a researcher who wants to break into the sphere of researcher development or it could be just the change of perspective required for a current researcher developer as a secondment opportunity.

So, a bit more about the job and why it’s a great opportunity. At UWE, we recently (in January 2012) consolidated support for doctoral studies into a single institution-wide graduate school. This  provides all the necessary support for doctoral researchers from admission through to completion.

Skills development sits within the graduate school structure and provides a programme of events for all doctoral researchers across all disciplines. We have a population of just under 500 doctoral researchers spread across four faculties (Health and Applied Sciences, Business and Law, Environment and Technology, and Arts, Creative industries and Education). This presents both a challenge and an opportunity to understand more about the differences between disciplines. I’m a microbiologist by training but I have come to appreciate the range of approaches of colleagues across the institution.

As well as catering for doctoral researchers, the role extends to providing skills development events for research staff at UWE, there are approximately 200 staff on research only contracts and many more academic staff who cold be described as “early career researchers”. This is achieved by extending the offering of the skills development programme but also by running the UWE Researchers’ Forum. This is an important route of engagement with research staff not just in terms of their development but also of how UWE as an institution supports researchers through the policies and procedures it adopts.

As well as providing a programme of events for researchers this job also involves contributing to policy development with respect to researcher development e.g. the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers and the associated HR Excellence in Research award that recognises progress in implementing the concordat.

The other feature about this job is the collaborative nature of researcher development in the South West region. UWE has a long tradition of working with others to deliver skills development events for example:-

• The residential skills development course held at Buckland Hall in the Brecon Beacons, last year with Plymouth University
• The South West Crucible programme with Universities of Bath and Bristol
• The reSEARCH careers regional event – this year being held at UWE in the Exhibition & Conference Centre
• A Leadership in Action residential – regional

A growing area of this role is finding new ways to engage with researchers who cannot attend the university in a physical sense. We have been using a videoconferencing system called Visimeet to enhance our skills development delivery especially in a module entitled Research in Contemporary Context. There are opportunities here to think more creatively about how the future might be shaped by the use of these tools.

This blog has helped extend the reach of what we do (and wordpress.com is a really easy blogging platform to use even if you aren’t technically savvy) so a willingness to embrace some social media tools is a pretty good thing to have as a researcher developer.

Hopefully you can see that this job has a lot of scope to get involved in a variety of events, projects and policy discussions which would give the role holder a lot of experience in researcher development. If that wasn’t enough, the job is in Bristol – which is a great place to live and work.

Are you interested?

Apply here

Still have questions?

Today I ran a session for researchers entitled “First Steps to Small Group Teaching”. This is a workshop that hopes to serve as an introduction to the role of teaching assistant/demonstrator/seminar leader/stand-in lecturer. My first disclaimer is that I am not an expert in educational research and/or the politics of learning & teaching. What I do have though is 12 years experience of teaching in various guises, demonstrating, lecturing, training and facilitating – the latter have been my life for the last 10 years.

I set out to introduce some basic principles that I think are important to know. Mostly the participants in the session were either research students or early career research (only) staff who had some experience of teaching undergraduate and/or taught postgraduate students in one way or another. Some were keen to learn more about how to be a ‘better’ teacher with a view to securing an academic position.

I started out the session by gathering the experience of the folks attending and talking about the challenges that teaching presents. We also talked about what the opportunities might be from teaching, some clearly had an idea that it might be seen favourably if applying to be a member of academic staff with a mix of teaching and research – I did forewarn that the balance of teaching is heavy when more junior as more experienced academics seem to only want to offload their teaching to focus more on their research interests.

As it happens there was a relevant live chat about this topic on the Guardian Higher website . I believe there is an inherent problem in universities – academics are not generally rewarded with promotion for their success or otherwise in teaching – it is their research outputs that determine many things:- the papers, the grants won, the research students supervised etc etc that really count. Yet, there are those who continually perpetuate the idea that the more research intensive an institution, the better the quality of the teaching… something doesn’t quite add up there!

We also took a bit of a diversion into discussing Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) and how awareness of ones own preferences might give us some food for thought about the relationship between student and teacher/lecturer and/or (perhaps more importantly) the relationship to ones own supervisors. UWE students and staff can access an MBTI test called “Profiling for Success” through the UWE Careers InfoHub.

There have been a few interesting articles about Introverts which (I personally have found) are somewhat controversial in their suggestion. This about Introverts in the academy is a case in point!

The main concern, I think, of many a researcher remains how to teach without looking the fool.

Here are the main themes of the day in the slides I used:

I suppose the main points are these:

• We all prefer to learn in different ways
• There are lots of “theories” or models out there that try to describe that
• Most of them are paper thin in terms of evidence
• Students (especially undergraduates) tend to adopt strategies to learning
• These strategies tend to override preferred styles (driven by motivation)
• There is nothing inherently wrong with these strategies – perhaps we (as teachers) dislike “surface” learners the most though!

I’m a scientist by training so I don’t recognise the phrase “theory” as applied to the scenarios above, I found this site that explains my reticence and challenges the assumptions made in these models.

Learning Styles Don’t Matter

We talked a while about the use of visual aids, powerpoint as a tool that can be used and misused came up more than once and prompted me to show this video clip:

We also looked at a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, partly because of the perspectives he brings about education and partly it was a chance to see an engaging presentation style that uses humour, anecdote, poetry, insight yet no powerpoint….

His earlier TED talk from 2006 is just as engaging and personally relevant to me as a parent but as he says, aren’t we all interested in education?

I then moved on to talk more about the difference between teaching and being a trainer, facilitator and coach. The main difference for me is the latter require less telling but more asking and listening to the group. We spent a lot of time talking about “crowd control”, i.e. how do you manage a group of people in a learning environment. It brought back memories I had of the NUS run program “Training the Trainer” that was part of the National Student Learning Programme (NSLP) on which I both learned how to be a trainer and subsequently contributed to as a tutor. Within that program was a session entitled “Dealing with nightmare trainees” – somes tips to deal with disruptive/disengaged folks that we all come across from time to time.

We ended up by having just one more look at a TED talk, this time by Benjamin Zander. This is one of my favourite talks because it represents why enthusiasm and passion for what you do is so important to being able to enthrall others or to get them to think, do or feel something different as a result of your input as a teacher/trainer/facilitator. That, I think, is what we should be aiming for…

This week the UWE Graduate School put on a welcome event for new doctoral students. The turnout was really good and it was great to see so many enthusiastic and excited doctoral students (or “PhDers” as they have affectionately become known!) eager to understand what lay before them.

In a tried and tested format we put on a number of short sessions interspersed with free food to settle the new arrivals into the world of doctoral study.

We began with a brief introduction to the UWE Library and the support that researchers can expect from Jenni Crossley. One of the key things that Jenni handed to the new starters was a really useful information literacy checklist, embedded below:

Following lunch I asked the Director of the Graduate School to give a brief overview and welcome to the new starters, here’s what he had to say:

We then moved on to what is probably the most useful section, I’d invited some current PhDers to talk about their experiences and to offer their advice to new starters; I only provided the title “What I know now that I wish I’d known when I started”. 

Axel Palmer

Niamh Branelly

George Papaharalabos

What I know now that I’d wish I’d known when I started

We moved on from there to present a picture of the overall support available to doctoral students across the institution beginning with a short presentation from Dr Tilly Line, a researcher and careers adviser (@UWECareers) about what Student Services can offer.

Next up was Sarah Hickie (@studentreps) , the representation & community support co-ordinator at UWE Students’ Union who gave an overview of the services and support offered by the Students’ Union.

Then it was the turn of Dr Paul Spencer (@paulspencer42) to give an overview of the UWE Graduate School skills development programme

I finished up sharing the thoughts of Matt Might using his excellent Illustrated Guide to the PhD

Let us know your thoughts, comments, questions about what we are doing at UWE with the graduate school. Why not follow @uwegradschool on twitter to keep up to date with all the things we are doing?

Further links that might be useful!

The UWE Graduate School website

UWE Researcher Skills Events Diary

Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD) Comic Strips

This week I delivered a session on behalf of the Vitae London Hub aimed at staff supporting researchers (colloqially researcher developers) on the topic of using social media. I have talked about this topic before, at the national Vitae conference and at a South West and Wales regional good practice event.

Both of those events have been face to face workshops but this session was delivered as a webinar which means I have had to think quite hard about how to keep the content and discussion moving in this format. This was the first time I had used a webinar application in this way so was new for me. There was a minor glitch at the beginning but I think we managed to circumvent the problem and deliver the material pretty much as intended!

Here is the link to the information about the webinar:-

Webinar: Social Media What is in it for me?

The slides I used to support this session are included below.

I started out by providing a bit of context around social media use and wanted to emphasise that although there are a myriad of different tools out there, the process is still about people sharing things with others. I also posited that we have little choice about engaging with social media which I summed up with a quote from Erik Qualman…

“We don’t have a choice whether we do social media, only how well we do it”

In setting the context around social media use in academia, I talked a little about the Vitae project on Digital Literacy that was undertaken as part of the larger Jisc Developing Digital Literacies Programme. This survey was undertaken to establish a baseline of understanding about how researchers and that staff who support them are using social media tools in their social and professional lives.

We then moved onto what concerns or fears people have when it comes to engaging with social media tools – here’s a selection of comments.

• It comes down to a personal cost-benefit analysis (of my time and overall reach)…and the little I have delved into social media, hasn’t really produced enough interaction to make the time it takes to spread the message online worthwhile
• Using team twitter accounts – how do you make sure it is the right message when several people are using it?
• Finding time to do it during the day
• Finding the target audience
• I think it’s best to keep personal (e.g. Twitter) separate from professional. what do others think?

Whenever I ask this question, the answers can usually be put into three categories

1. Information overload – the fear that engaging in social media would be too much information to keep track of
2. Digital Identity – concern over what to share about oneself, privacy issues and the blurring of private versus professional
3. Data/intellectual property concerns – what happens if I share something that someone else exploits/stealing of ideas

Managing information overload

We had a look at portals and aggregators to help manage information streams. For example I use Tweetdeck to manage 3 twitter accounts -This makes it easier to separate out different elements of twitter, to send scheduled tweets, to monitor hashtags etc. For me, it also provides a much easier way to track news items or professional activities of interest in one place which is a time saving rather than investment.

In response to the question raised about several contributors to a single twitter account, Anna Price from the Vitae London Hub offered up this advice from Tseen Khoo

Digital Identity

We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.

Blogging

I wanted to focus a little bit of time on the use of blogs by researcher developers. We, collectively, are in the business of training and development and, in my experience at least, there are few of us who don’t re-purpose, borrow, adapt materials from other sources. There is no point reinventing the wheel as the saying goes. Networks like Vitae give us the opportunity to share practice although most of this is face to face.

I covered a couple of themes with this; partly about dealing with the finding the time question; when I write a blog post I write primarily for me – it is a way of reflecting on the workshops that I deliver, thinking about how they went, thinking about how they can be adapted in the future. This has a secondary function – it provides context and resources for the participants. So I do this instead of writing handouts as supplementary material.

A further outcome is that it is not just participants of my workshops who can read and access the materials – other researcher developers can and do. This helps continue the sharing of practice beyond the infrequent face to face networking meetings.

And speaking of networking, part of the reason why I engage with twitter is that (by and large) the people I follow are chosen because they share things that are interesting and useful. There is a theory about all this works but we didn’t have time to get into it in an hour long session but here is a short video from Dr. Zella King that summarises that.

Netiquette

I talked a little about this and I try to live by a simple rule when posting on twitter; “If I wouldn’t say it to your face, I won’t post it online”. This is especially good to remember if you’ve had a drink (or three) and engaging on twitter.

Further Resources

Digital Professionalism – what not to share

Social Media – A Guide for Researchers

Vitae/Open University Handbook of Social Media

Vitae Digital Literacies survey report (2012)

The Thesis Whisperer blog

Patter – Prof. Pat Thomson’s blog

What a lot of books!

This week the Graduate School hosted a workshop on “organising and searching the literatures” for new doctoral students. In the past few years I have included this topic, albeit briefly, within the longer workshop “The beginner’s guide to the doctorate”. However, I was reminded not long ago that it can be hard for those of us who are experienced researchers to remember quite how daunting it can be to navigate the literatures.  Pat Thomson’s blog has a number of entries that doctoral researcher should really read about literature reviews.

The initial stages of a research degree are all about becoming familiar with your field, to understand where your proposed research project will fit, to see where the gaps are, to ultimately be able satisfy the claim for originality that you’ll make.

So where to begin? A strategy for searching out references is quite a good place, it can be easy to fall into a trap of aimlessly searching the internet for anything that might be relevant to what you’re doing so our first topic was to take stock and think about how to search effectively for things. This might sound a little bit basic but it’s important to realise that there are different strategies depending on what you are searching. We have become used to using google to find answers to questions but we need to keep in mind how databases operate to search them effectively. Jenni Crossley, the research and knowledge librarian, gave the following advice to boost our “finding out skills”.

We then moved onto how to organise stuff, it is one thing being able to find reference material, to skim read and to feel you’ve achieved something but it is quite another to be able to organise your references in a meaningful way replete with notes about why that reference is relevant, what you thought about etc.

At UWE we have an institutional subscription to a reference management system called Refworks. This is an online reference management system that integrates well with with a number of databases that the UWE Library subscribe to, it has a neat plug in for Microsoft Word called write ‘n’ cite and has loads of different bibliographic referencing styles that can be used.

Here’s the support document form UWE about using Refworks.

On the other hand there are other solutions available to manage your references that are better in other ways, for example for storing and/or annotating PDF files. Here’s a useful comparison of the most popular tools

My advice is to use a tool that suits you, to learn how to use it properly earlier rather than later, and then stick to it. Trust me when I say that it will save you time if you develop an efficient system before you get into the depths of writing.

So this is the way forward!

This week I ran a workshop for newly registered research degree students entitled “The Beginner’s Guide to the Doctorate”. What I set out to do was to lay bare the road ahead when it comes to a research degree, to get the participants to consider aspects of the journey that, perhaps, they had not yet thought about.

I always enjoy this kind of workshop because I am always enthralled by the enthusiasm and diversity of the new researchers who are embarking on their journey of discovery in research; the topics sound fascinating.

I started by introducing the concept of the journey from a skills development point of view, although I offer many workshops to researchers, very few of them are about upskilling researchers, more about changing the perspective of the researchers themselves toward their own development. It’s about helping them to understand what they have as a consequence of following a research degree path.

It also gave me the chance to talk about the Researcher Development Framework (RDF) which is a relatively new way of being able to describe the incredibly rich skills set that researchers have (I have written a separate blog post about the RDF as there is a lot to talk about).

Vitae have recently released an online tool to help researchers navigate the RDF, to encourage them to plan their development. The full details about that tool can be found here: http://rdfplanner.vitae.ac.uk/

I asked the participants to talk about motivations to undertake a PhD, I think it’s important to understand what drives you so that you can remind yourself when the road becomes a bit more difficult to negotiate – that’s the infuriating thing about a research degree, it rarely if ever goes smoothly. The words of Einstein ring true here, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”.

The day was loosely structured around the sharing of hints and tips for new researchers and I used the following powerpoint slides to give the day a format although we explored lots of different areas of the RDF.

Here’s a few more resources that I think are useful:-

UWE Graduate School webpages – Everything you need to know about the support available to doctoral students from UWE.

The Thesis Whisperer blog – A fantastic resource for all doctoral students from Dr. Inger Mewburn (Director of research training, Australian National University). A comprehensive coverage topics relevant to doctoral students covered in this blog site.

Patter; Pat Thomson blog – A blog from Professor Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, focussing mainly on the topic of academic writing. This blog is a goldmine for advice on finding your academic voice.

The Graduate School development events diary – The online events diary for all events relating to researchers – a chronological list of events with booking forms. Any of the events I talked about today, you’ll be able to find them here.

Vitae – The Researcher Development Organisation

www.vitae.ac.uk A first port of call for a wide range of useful materials relating to postgraduate research study especially on assessing how you are developing your skills throughout the process.

Researcher Development Framework The collation of the skills, knowledge, behaviours and attributes that make up a successful researcher.

The RDF Planner An online application to better enable researchers to self-audit their competencies against the RDF and help direct them to resources for professional development. e-mail skillsdevelopment@uwe.ac.uk if you are interested in taking advantage of a trial subscription to this.

www.phdcomics.com Light relief following grad students through their journey in the form of a comic strip.

www.phinished.org – A discussion and support group for people who cannot seem to finish their dissertations or theses.

Under lock and key: keeping your data safe

This week UWE put on a workshop on the topic of data management, something that is becoming much more important in contemporary research environments. Indeed JISC have been funding a number of projects on producing best practice in this area.

I was lucky enough to be able to invite the UWE research and knowledge exchange librarians,  Jenni Crossley to facilitate this session. We started out the session with a small quiz asking where the researchers were with their current practice of data management. The slides they used in the workshop are embedded below.

There was also a short humourous take on data management…

The remainder of the session was used to explore the excellent resources that the the Library services have

Further resources

UWE guidance for researchers on data management

Guide on Research Data Management from JISC

Informed Researcher booklet (need to register with Vitae)

On Monday the 17th November, I ran a workshop at UWE on the use of social media in the context of research. This was aimed at PGRs who are engaging in the Research Training and Support Day (RTSD) at the Glenside campus. I’ve run this sort of thing before; a similar workshop that we ran in December 2013 for researchers and a workshop in October for researcher skills developers from across the country.

The presentation was prepared using Prezi, and is linked behind the cover slide below.

After a brief introduction, I gathered views about what fears folks have about using social media. Broadly they fall into three categories:- Digital Identity, Information overload and Intellectual Property/data management concerns, all of which are explored below.

Digital Identity

We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.

“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman

I offered the main reason for using social media tools is to broaden and enhance your network which is beneficial for researchers looking to establish themselves. I also argued that this is a change in the contemporary research environment compared to just a few years ago – there is more competition and so it is in the individual’s interest to augment their profiles.

Power of networks

We discussed a little bit of network theory, illustrated by this video for a TEDx talk by Zella King

Managing information overload

We had a look at portals and aggregators to help manage information streams. I talked very briefly about a couple of examples:- Tweetdeck is useful for managing multiple streams of information.

Using social media tools in research

We discussed how research is social & iterative, the benefits of engaging with folks far and wide about your research outputs and how to use tools to make the finding out about knowledge a little easier. We had a play around with some social citation tools, e.g. CiteULike, Zotero & Mendeley

Blogs

We discussed why folks blog – a variety of reasons including:- organising thoughts, mind dump, getting feedback at an early stage etc.

This blog is a just one such example!

Netiquette

Summed up with “Common sense!”

Other sources of information

Here’s a list of things that I have come across recently on the topic of social media in research (clearly not exhaustive!)

A blog about blogging in an academic research context from Imperial College - some really interesting advice and guidance here.

The Networked Researcher blog site which promotes the use of social media tools for researchers – “Digital Professionalism – what not to share”

The British Library – Help for Researchers – “Web 2.0 as a social science research tool”

The Guardian Higher Education site – discussing benefits of blogging as a researcher – “How blogging helped me find my research voice”

The Research Information Network site – “Social Media: A Guide for Researchers”

Under the spotlight

This week I ran a workshop for our research students entitled “The Progression exam”. This is a formal milestone in the research degree journey that pretty much every doctoral candidate at any university will have to overcome. Some call it a “transfer” exam, others a “progression viva” but whatever the nomenclature they all have an aim similar to the following: -

a formal test of progress in the early stages to ensure a suitable basis for continuation on the programme has been established

I have run this workshop numerous times in the past and there have been one or two changes in how progression at UWE is now monitored.

Whenever I run a workshop on this topic or the related “Writing up” or “The Final Viva” workshops I always try to do two things:-

1) Provide knowledge about the process

2) Reduce anxiety by reassuring doctoral candidates

Recently at UWE we established a Graduate School at UWE with a new (and hopefully improved) web presence that puts all the information about research degrees in one place. We have created sections that relate to the major milestones including the progression exam.

Disclaimer: One should read my post in conjunction with the latest rules governing PG Research study.

Those rules are set out in section K of the UWE Academic Regulations here.

The slides that I used in the workshop are below:

Recent changes

From October 2013, all new research degree candidates will be subject to a slightly amended progression exam process where the option of re-submission (a time limited referral step) is now available to the examiners. Full details about this are on the  Graduate School website. Other recent changes are summarised below.

1. When a progression report has been submitted, a viva will automatically follow
2. Two independent examiners are appointed for a progression exam, one of whom will be designated the Principal Reviewer
3. The Principal Reviewer may be used in subsequent progress review stages including the final viva voce examination if this is appropriate

Any queries about how the progression exam is arranged, the paperwork etc can be found by contacting the team in the Graduate School Office

Tapping away

This week I ran a workshop for research students on the topic or writing up the thesis. I remember my own journey well and how exhausting it all seemed. I, probably like many other research students, did not relish the prospect of turning my research into a well crafted piece of writing so I procrastinated.. a lot! Much of my written work was completed in a matter of weeks right at the end only because I was given an immovable deadline, just what the doctor ordered for a classic last minute type of person.

I set out to try and help research students understand that it doesn’t (and probably never will) feel comfortable to approach such a seemingly daunting task as producing a thesis and I set about imparting as much wisdom, hints, and tips on writing as I could. This has led to this particular workshop being quite content heavy as it has been added to over the years (so any thoughts on streamlining the content will be appreciated!) incorporating bits and pieces from the Vitae Resources repository as well as nuggets collected from far and wide.

Two things I think are important about writing a thesis:-

1. Writing should be thought of as being integral to the research, not as a add on activity
2. The purpose of the written thesis is to convince the examiners that you meet the criteria for the award of doctorate – so clarity is important!

Here’s the slides.

Further resources

Throughout the session I made reference to a number of blog posts which I think are worth highlighting here:

The Thesis Whisperer – Edited by Dr Inger Mewburn; this is an excellent resource for folks navigating their way through a doctorate).

• The Zombie Thesis
• Why does feedback hurt sometimes
• How to Write Faster
• The Valley of Shit

Patter – Professor Pat Thomson‘s blog – This has to be one of the best places to read up on the many challenges of academic writing.

• Literature Reviews – Beware the list
• Methodology isn’t methods… Or what goes in a methods chapter?
• The Thesis Introduction
• Choosing a thesis examiner