Tama’s eLearning Blog

In exploring the role of participatory media forms in higher eduction, media scholar Henry Jenkins recently penned an article entitled “From YouTube to YouNiversity” for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a great read, but this passage particularly caught my attention:

Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master’s degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program’s home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.

Henry teaches at MIT, leading the Comparative Media Studies Programme, which is globally respected and watched as a high-powered hub of ideas and pratices regarding emerging (or emergent) digital media and the interactions facilitated by those media. His words about the importance of blogging for graduate students resonnate widely, suggesting that blogging and social software are here to stay in higher education and are especially important for postgraduate research students.

As the the article may disappear behind the Chronicle’s paid firewall at some point, Henry has re-posted the article in his own blog here. Go and have a read …

One of the more interesting projects I’ve been involved with this year has been the development of a blogging server and file storage and fora platform for UWA’s graduate research students. The platform, playfully dubbed MyResearchSpace, is live and includes fora, blog and gallery tools, as well as 500Mb storage space for every research student (no more excuses for not backing up those chapters!). To promote MyResearchSpace, we’ve just announced a little competition as well:

Announcement of a prize for the most interesting blog on MyResearchSpace.

The Graduate Research School is pleased to announce that a prize will be awarded for the most interesting blog appearing on myResearchSpace. The blog that records the most reads and comments between now and the next Graduate Research Induction (March 2007) will receive a new model compact digital camera.

myResearchSpace is an online community set up by the Graduate Research School for UWA research candidates. It provides storage space (500MB) for your research files, a blog for a personal or research journal, forums for interest groups, news and more. If you are a research student at UWA, visit http://myresearchspace.grs.uwa.edu.au and join today.

I’m afraid the competition is only open to UWA graduate research students using MyResearchSpace as their blogging tool, but if that’s you, get blogging!

Update: A few people have emailed me and pointed out that it looked to them as if I’d currently win the Most Interesting Blog competition. Let me reiterate: the Most Interesting Blog Competition is only open of current gradaute research students at UWA in the period November 2006 – March 2007. That means that my MyRS blog — Tama Leaver’s GRS Blog — is not part of the competition. Nor are the following MyRS blogs which are run by GRS academics: Robyn Owen’s Blog; The Ezone (also maintained by Robyn); Discourse on thesis supervision (by Michael Azariadis); Krys.Haq’s Blog (by Krystina Haq); or the generic MyResearchSpace Blog. Nor, I should add, have we finalised which model of digital camera will be the prize. If you’ve got a suggestion, Robyn would love to hear from you here.

[Cross-posted from Ponderance.]

Today’s Higher Education section of The Australian contained some timely thoughts and speculations on the role of blogs in Australian academia. Bernard Lane’s “Blog on and start debate” looks at undergraduate blogs but also looks at academics blogging and mentions that Sydney University has set up a staff blogging platform via which Sydney academics are encouraged to blog in order to engage more widely with those outside of their university (both at other unis and the general public).

Also of interest was Andrew Leigh’s piece “Don’t Miss out on the world library” in which he argues that all academics should be posting their work online in order to ensure their writing spreads as far and wide as possible. Indeed, for those pondering an academic life, this statistic should be all you need to get your own blog and online presence up and running:

A spate of studies has shown that making articles available online boosts citations by 50 to 250 percent. If you want to have your articles cited in other countries and other disciplines, your best bet is to post them on your website.

(There is a slightly longer version of the article on Andrew’s own blog which is worth reading.)

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning in this context that I’m part of the group helping set up a blogging platform called MyResearchSpace which is run by the Graduate Research School here at the University of Western Australia and will provide a blog, gallery space and 500Mb storage space for any postgraduate student at UWA who wants it. More on that in a future post …

As part of my role at the Centre for Advancement of Teaching and Learning, I’m part of the editorial committee for Issues in Teaching and Learning. Here’s my first piece; feedback would be appreciated…

The PhD … more than a research process?

Despite differing structures, processes and means of assessment, the PhD remains a universally recognised and respected qualification. While experience, publications and the ability to attract grants are core selection criteria, those two little, D and r, remain the unquestioned prerequisite for the vast majority of new academic positions. However, the differences between national approaches often produce graduates with markedly different skills. In the United States, for example, periods of teaching, and thus teacher-development, are often part of the processes of candidature.

The University of Western Australia’s model of doctoral candidature emphasises research and some might argue often to the exclusion of all else. This situation is comparable with most Australian universities. While this model has been thoroughly tested by time in terms of producing graduates with outstanding research abilities, the same cannot be said for other core skills required of new academics today. Although most academic positions entail a substantial teaching role, when exactly do doctoral candidates build and develop the pedagogical skills required for their future careers? Similarly, while many undertaking doctoral candidature are no longer looking to academia as a career path, is there a single professional occupation today which is looking for graduates who have only research skills, no matter how impressive they might be?

While recent mandates from the Federal government have focused on Excellence in Research, they have also directly linked funding to Excellence in Teaching. Economic incentives should never be the only reason for re-evaluating our procedures, but they certainly highlight the shifting role of the doctorate and may be a useful catalyst for provoking a level of self-evaluation and reflection about what postgraduate research degrees do, and should, entail. One of the core questions is simply: is the doctoral process simply about building brilliant researchers or outstanding, well-rounded academics? If the answer is the latter, then we need to acknowledge that the vast majority of academics have substantial teaching roles. Ensuring our graduates are first-rate educators as well as outstanding researchers will ensure the overall utility and credibility of our higher degrees.

Initiatives such as the Postgraduate Teaching Internship Scheme at UWA recognise that doctoral candidature can be a period which allows postgraduate students to foster a wide range of pedagogical and communication skills. While the postgraduates who are fortunate enough to participate in such schemes are in excellent standing to enter academia and professional positions more broadly, the question of embedding professional and pedagogical skills as part of higher degree programmes for all postgraduate research students remains one worthy of future consideration.