Category Archives: Identities

A PhD is more than a thesis

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Inspired by a Tweet I read recently about the distinction between a thesis and a PhD, I have been thinking about the difference between the two.

The university really focuses on the thesis, which must :

  • be of good presentation and style
  • be a significant contribution to knowledge and/or to understanding
  • demonstrate capacity to pursue further research without supervision
  • contain a significant amount of material worthy of publication or public presentation.

What else? Well, our university specifies you must be a registered student, you must live in the UK, you must pass your probationary period, you must spend a minimum amount of time as a registered student, you must make satisfactory progress, you must have a viva, you must make any specified corrections and you must present your thesis according to the guidelines.

All very thesis focused.

Vitae has a Researcher Development Framework that covers knowledge and intellectual abilities;  personal effectiveness;  research governance and organisation; engagement, influence and impact. The university encourages students to engage with this but, apart from reporting satisfactory progress at probationary review, it isn’t enforced or assessed.

Typically, students are assessment focused. They learn what they will be assessed on. It’s not surprising, then, that many doctoral students focus their entire attention on the thesis. That is the centre of their activity – everything else that takes place at the university is a distraction and has lower priority. In extreme cases, they only visit the university for supervision sessions, talk to nobody but their supervisors about their research, and focus totally on putting their thesis together and passing their viva.

But what then? A PhD is one line in a CV – perhaps five or six if you bulk it out with a description of your research. Permanent academic jobs in the UK and in many other countries may not be as rare as hens’ teeth, but they come pretty close. Even fixed-term contracts are difficult to get.

For employers, the PhD is not just one line in a CV, it’s also one line in a long job specification.

Academic employers want to know that you can publish papers, put together grant proposals, attract funding, increase impact via social media, create course materials, teach, mentor, work as part of a team, initiate projects, provide connections to a wider academic community and work on several projects at the same time.

The people getting the academic jobs are the people who can produce evidence that they can do all those things, and that they have already done those things. The people who treated their PhD as a period of academic apprenticeship, when the thesis is just one activity among many. The people struggling to get a toehold in the academic sector are the ones who have simply written a thesis.

Catwalk technologies

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Notes on ‘You heard it here first’ seminar at the OU from Anne Adams.

When considering research about innovation, is it catwalk or ready-to-wear? Is it ready to use off the shelf, an innovation that people can take up and use, or is it a catwalk approach, testing and showcasing what is possible without suggesting that this will be taken up as it is? A catwalk approach may bring together elements from many different approaches and disciplines. Participants need to know which you are aiming for, so they don’t expect something they can take away and use if the project is about experimentation and high-tech solutions.

A ‘boundary creature inhabits more than one world’. They may move between practice domains and can be seen as a deviant from the norm, a form of monster (Donna Haraway, 1991).

Wenger’s view is that distance learning locates learning closer to the learner because it goes to people in their space rather than expecting learners to shift into the academic space.

Technology can act as a boundary object, crossing knowledge domains and structures. It can support communication and collaboration by acting as a shared interface. However, it can form a barrier if it is too associated with jargon or with specific practices.

Researchers bring:

spatial acuity – sensitivity to spatial issues in the environment such as weather and use in space and spatial triggers

temporal acuity – perception and reality of time in relation to the environment including time taken to learn systems, flow of time in the lab

socio-political astuteness – perceptions and interactions of a variety of stakeholders, around inhibitions, safety, expectations and ideologies

Learnabout Fair

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Advantages of a blogged research journal

Hyperlinks Link your research blogs to useful information sources

Personalisation Use emoticons and images to personalise entries

Categories and Search Find your notes quickly and efficiently

Blogroll, RSS feeds, trackbacks and permalinks Link to other researchers.

Ideas for a blogged research journal

Community Posts Collaborate and link with other academics.

Reflective Posts Discuss ideas, progress, methods, theory and academic writing.

Environmental Posts Share experience of the research environment.

Memos Things to do and remember; links and references.

Emotive Posts share how you feel about your research.

Blogging-related Posts Discuss blogging…

Types of learning

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I keep losing this, and I keep needing it. Forms of learning in a psychologists’ community of practice:

    1. They learn about psychologists’ resources and how to access these 

    2. They learn the skills which are required of a psychologist 

    3. They learn how to behave as a psychologist 

    4. They learn how to think like a psychologist. 

    5. They learn the values of a psychologist. 

    6. They learn about the problems faced by psychologists
    7. 7. They learn the language of the psychologist.

Cats and computers

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I’m so used to Gill heading off to collect gadgets from around the university that I wasn’t surprised when she said she was going to pick up some tablets. Not until she said she was collecting them for her cats!

I didn’t know she was researching animals’ informal learning with mobile devices.

Oh – the other sort of tablets. LOL.

CAL Monday noon

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OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. 

Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)


Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice… 

He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂  ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.

There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.

The paper focuses on three areas:

1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online  community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.

Feeling very angry

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I just logged in to FirstClass to see what was going on and in the vague hope that I would have received a message from my unhelpful gatekeeper. No such luck. However, logging on reminded me that while the gatekeeper claimed to have had no time in the past three months to OK a couple of letters I had written, they had found time to exclude me from a whole series of relevant FirstClass conferences.

It’s bad enough to have a gatekeeper who is wasting hours of my time, disrupting my research and stressing me out. That’s their prerogative. They’re not paid to help me. But being deliberately obstructive? hat sort of educator does that? My opinion of this gatekeeper has fallen very, very low.

Emotional analysis

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Just been reading Guy Claxton, and that reminded me of the importance of emotion in education. Could I do an emotional analysis of the conference? Is it emotion that moves the students on, or does emotion get in the way of doing anything?

I think, when a student gets upset about the deadlines, that stimulates the rest of the group to move things on. However, it’s not a very emotional group – or they don’t express much emotion anyway, so perhaps this wouldn’t be useful.

According to my word-by-word breakdown (knew it would come in handy sometime)  positive emotions include happiness, sympathy, confidence, enjoyment and negative motions include anxiety, paranoia, frustration, fear, distress, exhaustion, dread, confusion, vulnerability and stress. Seems to be a clear bias towards the negative emotions here, especially as the happiness tends to be because they all wished each other happy Christmas!

Intuitive

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My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.

Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.

I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.

I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.

And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.