Yearly Archives: 2009

PhD student qualification rates

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Information from a recent course on being a PhD supervisor, run by John Wakeford.

Of the 1996-7 cohort of full-time PhD students (excluding those not upgraded from MPhil and those not continuing into the second year):

  • 30-36% had a doctorate after four years
  • 50-70% had a doctorate after five years
  • 72% had a doctorate after seven years

So about one in four of the students who initially register has a doctorate within one year of their funding running out.

These figures vary dramatically by university. The latest figures are that in 2007, seven years after starting their doctoral studies,

  • 92% of those at Kings College, London, who had been upgraded had a doctorate
  • 62% of those at The Open University who had been upgraded had a doctorate
  • 26% at John Moore University, Liverpool, who had been upgraded had a doctorate

Success rates also depend on other factors: the best success rates are amongst international students, research council funded, over 30 at registration, with a first-class degree from other university, studying medicine or veterinary science. The worst success rates are amongst those who are UK industry sponsored, under 25 at registration, with a 2nd class degree from same institution, studying computing, architecture or languages.

How does one teach creativity?

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Notes on a seminar given by Keith Sawyer.

Relevant literature includes:
Paul Torrance 1960s-80s – concerned with both teaching and assessing creativity. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is still widely used in the US – primarily for admission into gifted and talented programmes.
Howard Gardner 1970s – brought cognitive psychology to bear on creativity (he also worked on multiple intelligences).
Woods and Jeffrey 1996 – creative teaching
Craft, 1997 – distinguished between creative teaching versus teaching for creativity
Carl Bereiter, 2002 – knowledge age
Sawyer, 2004 – disciplined improvisation

Schools have traditionally offered an industrial-age model of teaching and learning. Instructionism (term coined by Seymour Papert): implicit understanding of what schools should look like. Assumes that knowledge is a set of static facts and procedures. Goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into students’ heads. Teachers know these facts and procedures and their job is to transmit them.

Creative

Instructionism
Knowledge Deeper conceptual knowledge Set of static facts and procedures
Goal of school Prepare students to build new knowledge Get facts and procedures into students’ heads
Role of teacher Scaffold and facilitate collaborative knowledge building Transmit facts and procedures
Curriculum Integrated and contextualized knowledge (within authentic practice) Simple ideas and procedures should be learned first
Assessment Formative and authentic Assess how many of these facts and procedures have been acquired

Emergence: higher-level properties and structures emerge from systems of lower level components in interaction. Features of emergence include unpredictability, irreducibility and novelty. Classic example is birds flocking in a V shape.

Creativity is emergent, in that it is a constant combination of many small ideas. Each idea builds incrementally on a chain of prior ideas. Creativity is accelerated in collaborative teams.

Collaborative emergence is a way of talking about how creativity emerges in small groups. It has some additional properties: moment-to-moment contingency, retrospective interpretation, and it is more likely to happen if you have equal participation.

Learning as emergent. Instructionist learning is not emergent. Creative learning requires unpredictability, irreducibility and novelty – and is more likely to happen where there is moment-to-moment contingency, retrospective interpretation and equal participation.

Case Study: The Exploratorium
Four weeks on site and carried out 47 one-hour interviews. Attended many internal meetings and studied internal documents and memos. They engage in three model practices:

  1. Fostering creative learning
  2. Designing creative learning environments
  3. Educating creative teachers.

Fostering creative learning
There is an emphasis on compelling phenomena that draw the attention. This must allow hands-on interactivity. You are provoked to inquire about it and you end up with learning that is directed by the learner.

Designing creative learning environments

  • They have an organic culture with low boundaries, flat organization and weak formal authority.
  • Rapid prototyping
  • There is an external focus – for example, on scientists, artists and innovative companies.

Educating creative teachers
Have a deep commitment to inquiry – with a formal mission to change how the world learns.

Challenges encountered
There are many pressures for such science centres to become more like school.  How do you reconcile free-choice learning with standards? How do we guide bottom-up innovation and top-down guidance? How do we ensure that distinct innovations connect to build coherent integrated learning? How to foster emergent learning that is guided by curricular structures and intended learning outcomes?

Why reviewers/editors reject articles

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Notes from a workshop on ‘Writing for peer-reviewed journals’ run by Pat Thomson.

Reasons why reviewers and editors say they reject articles:

  • Lack of focus – saying everything, focusing on nothing, cramming too much in one article
  • Not locating the contribution and the position – for a particular audience, in relation to wider debates. the specific conversation int his journal
  • Poor organisation – not guiding the reader, poor headings, not enough signposts, too many signposts
  • Failing to convince the reader – does not adequately deal with the methodology
  • Not significant – too local, done a lot, doesn’t add anything
  • Sounding like a n00b rather than an equal – assumes significance, sounds tentative, overclaims

The Bad Supervision Guide

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(Originally from Tony Winefield, University of South Australia. Came to me via an OU research degree supervisor workshop.)

Bad supervision, like any other skill can be acquired and developed with practice. Here are six simple rules to follow:

  1. Be inaccessible.
  2. Don’t return written work because you are ‘too busy’ to read it.
  3. Humiliate and belittle your students with savage, brutal and unfair criticism
  4. Alternatively, treate your PhD students as unpaid research assistants.
  5. Offer bad advice. For example: suggest an inappropriate topic, recommend research methods that have poor relibaility or validity, recommend inappropriate mthods for analysing results, allow your student submit without doing enough research, encourage your student to do far too much work, discourage your student from publishing prior to submission
  6. Choose bad examiners.

Twitter as coffee

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Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog.

This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an organisation.

Within Twitter you can:

  • Share links
  • Collaborate
  • Share blogs and news
  • Crowdsource
  • Backchannel
  • Find out what’s happening
  • Chat

Tweeting makes your job bigger and smarter and faster.

With Google you have to do the searching, but with Twitter the information comes to you, and you have the opportunity to dip into other people’s communities. If you do ask questions you may get a lot of responses, and those responses are likely to have authority.

Seven million monsters

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An exceedingly late write-up of a talk I went to on Moshi Monsters at Handheld Learning earlier this year.

At that point, Moshi had seven million registered users and was adding over a million a month. About a third of these were based in the UK, a third in the US and a third in the rest of the world. Seventy percent were female. Most were playing for free – and almost a million items were being sold (for in-game currency) in the Moshi shops.

The focus is on the social side – the monsters are pets rater than avatars.

The subscription model works well for young children, as their parents are paying. Micropayments work better for teens, who are often paying for themsleves, sometimes via their phones.

Moshi doesn’t have real-time chat like Club Penguin and Habbo. This means that messages can be approved before they appear on the site.

Another example of a successful site for this age group is Poptropica, which has over 70 million sign-ups.

Journal impact

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I’ve spent the day looking at the impact factor of various journals.

The ISI Web of Knowledge lists 1985 social science journals (according to a workshop I attended recently, only about 15% of education journals are in ISI). The ‘Annual Review of Psychology’ comes in top for 2008, with an annual impact factor of 16.217.

The impact factor is obtained by looking at all articles in the journal over the last two years (2006-7), and all citations of those articles in 2008. Divide the citations by the article and you get the impact factor. So if, on average, every article was cited once in 2008, you get an impact factor of 1. If every article was cited twice, you get an impact factor of 2. If only half your articles were cited, you get 0.5.

Of the social science journals that are listed (and many of them are not), 1685 have impact scores of less than two. On the bright side, there are 300 journals out there where your article will, on average, be cited twice a year. I’m assuming that this means it will be cited in one of the 1985 journals listed in the social science section of the ISI web of science – but I can’t find that information on the site.

Social science, though, is a broad field. Educational technology journals in which I am likely to publish tend to attract fewer than two citations per article. ‘Computers & Education’ is the honourable exception, It comes in at 244 on the list, with an impact factor of 2.19. I’d be better off becoming an expert in psychology, psychology or marketing. Education doesn’t really make it into the list until no 75, with the US Journal ‘Educational Psychologist’.

Does it matter? It does in two ways. First, the REF will be looking at impact – so we are increasingly being encouraged to go for quality, not quantity. Don’t just publish; publish in the top-rated journals. Second, I like to think that my work could/will have impact. I’m not convinced that the best way to achieve that impact is through journals (two citations a year may not be as good as five links in a blog or ten retweets on an education list). However, given that my career prospects rest, in part, on my publication record, it makes sense to prioritise the journals with the most impact.

So, I’ve sketched out some potential articles and where I might publish them. The list is significantly different from the one I had this morning when I started looking at impact factors. I may not end up writing these articles – I may not end up publishing what I write in these journals – but their impact rating is definitely affecting my thinking about what and where to publish.

Applied Linguistics (2.22)
Building knowledge in the short term
Computers and Ed (2.19)
Methodology paper
JCMC (1.9)
Building knowledge in the long term
Discourse Studies (1.16)
Avoiding disputational talk
JCAL (1.06)
Interaction on distance-learning courses
BJET (1.04)
SL paper
Improving Schools
School Visions
Learning, Media and Technology
Young users of Web 2.0
JIME
Epistolary interviews – research ethics

Writing for publication

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Researchers write all the time, writing is the means through which we work on and work out our ideas. We don’t just write up – we have not found a transparent truth which we then just put into words. Writing is a representation – we make choices and what we choose to write is a situated approximation.

In writing an article we are advancing what we know and also producing a representation of it. We are not just producing a text, we are producing ourselves as scholars — we are doing identity work.

Rhetorically, we are producing persuasive texts that persuade the reader that what we have done is a contribution to knowledge. The genre of the journal article is an argument. Research writing is dialogic. There are internal conversations which invite readers to make meaning. Don’t make it like a laundry list. Invite the reader in to make meaning. Encourage readers to make associations with other conversations (mainly through references).

When looking at a journal, consider the editorial board. Would you like to meet them and have a conversation with them? Look at recent issues. Which conversations are going on? Do you want to engage with them? Why do people need to know about what you are writing about – this gives a method of selecting a journal. What is the readership and what do they already know? This helps to create a space for your article. Significance is so what and now what? What’s new? What’s different? What does this add to the conversation? Don’t let other scholars do all the talking in your article. Refer to them, but don’t be overpowered by them.

The strongest papers usually have one point to make. They make that point powerfully, with evidence, and they locate that point within the orevious literature.

Can you do an elevator pitch on your article?

Research Excellence Framework (REF)

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I’ve just been to a presentation by our pro vice chancellor, Brigid Heywood, on the REF that will be used to assess our research over the next few years. Although the REF takes place in 2013, all applications must be in at some point in 2012 – so anything we want included needs to be written in the next year in order to allow time for publication.

Key words in the REF are excellence, impact, transformation, portfolio and engagement.

Excellence The REF replaces the Research Assessment Exercise, which was concerned with quality. Now we move beyond quality to excellence. Not only must we be excellent – we must also demonstrate that we are excellent. And we can’t be excellent in isolation – because the REF is about working in a unit, and is about the sustained performance of the group. The focus is on individual excllence within a group.

Impact will be assessed through a case-study approach and will be concerned with the extent to which our group builds on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life. Impact is not about impact within the university or on our students – it has to be wider than this.

Transformation Impact will be linked to reach (how widely the impacts have been felt) and to significance (how transformative the impacts have been).

Portfolio Each unit needs to have a portfolio of high-quality, original and rigorous research. This should demonstrate that we have shared our findings effectively with a range of audiences. It should also demonstrate that we build effectively on excellent research through a range of activity that leads to benefits to the economy and to society. We must offer a high-quality, forward-looking research environment. We must provide evidence of significant contributions to the sustainability and the viability of the research base – and we must actually be sustainable, not just planning to be sustainable.

Engagement is very important – and appears on every page of the document.

Portfolio

Engagement