My original proposal for my PhD was about virtual international communities in primary schools. Why? Well, apart from the excellent, and convincing, reasons I gave at my initial interview, it was what I thought I was most likely to be accepted for. With a 25-year-old degree in English, and a 20-year-old masters in history I wasn’t the most obvious candidate to be funded to research educational technology. So I built on my PGCE (hey, only 10 years old) and my school governing experience to put together a proposal. And the international element? Well, travelling abroad has to be one of the perks of PhD research

So, what happened? I am still interested in the virtual international school communities – and involved in one via the Schome project. But in my PhD work? Well, first of all the international bit went. Lots of international travel is fine when you’re footloose, but when you have three small children who need to be at school, and Brownies, and Cubs, and swimming etc it begins to appear as more of a chore. And then I shifted focus from primary schools to higher education, because studying higher education fits in more with my department.

But I stuck with virtual communities for a long time. Until Etienne Wenger said that what I had in my data wasn’t a community, but a group.

And now here I am studying asynchronous dialogue, with the emphasis on the asynchronicity. And I’m very pleased with how it’s going (OK, a lot of it is still a confusing muddle, but I’m relatively sure that I’ve found the end of the string and will be able to unravel the tangle of data and theories). I’m even, tentatively, beginning to critique the touchy-feely concept of learning communities.

But I can’t help noticing that my work is now very well aligned with that of my supervisor, whereas my pilot project was aligned with the very different work of my MRes supervisor. Am I sensibly open to expert guidance, or am I just malleable?