Faultlines

Another interview request

Requested an interview with Adrian Cardinali at SUPRA.

Feminist pedagogy resources

Here. From Gill Kirkup's blog,

Interesting website to follow up

From Lilia's honest and moving post on publishing a thesis. It is a series of 'conversations' held at Stanford called 'How I write'. Has audio, video, transcripts and commentary. It includes a group of grad students, too.

Another interview and a reflection

An interesting interview with A/Prof Tony Masters in Chemistry. He is the first pure scientist I have interviewed, and I really valued his reflective and reflexive opinions. Really good stuff.

Thinking about interviewing Prof Michael Jacobsen after his defence of the US PhD.

And still have to line up interviews with Derek and Jill Trewhalla. Nearly ready to make a list of questions for them.

Have also critiqued the PhD WP draft report, which was a pedagogical black hole and very poor on evidence.

I'm not sure that there's that much more I can usefully learn about the way the PhD is understood at Sydney at the moment. One thing that's clear is the tension between the rationalists (ie those who are interested in improving the mangement of the process, because they believe (generally without any evidence) that that will somehow (magically?) improve the experience for the students, and those who are more reflective and want to improve the student experience by trying to find out more about what that experience actually is and what is presently lacking in it.

Working Party to review PhD at Sydney

My first thoughts on reading the draft report of this committee was that it seemed overly managerial. Nowhere are pedagogical concerns addressed or even alluded to. Lots of discussion on improving the student experience, but scant reference to what students have said they want. Many of the recommendations have huge workload implications for staff or resourcing implications for faculty, and are therefore pie-in-the-sky.

I am lucky that I was recently asked to join the Doctoral Studies Committee in the Faculty of Education, which gives me a channel to feed these concerns back. It will be interesting to see the final report.

Research as change agent

I recently had a discussion with someone in health area about the number of people who want to change that way something works (especially in health and education), so they undertake a research project to 'prove' that the change needs to happen. "Research has shown us that...". I've noticed this myself in the EDSW faculty.

But just doing research can, in itself and regardless of its outcomes, change systems and make them better for people. A few times in my interviews the interviewee has learned, from something I've said, how things are done in another faculty, and that has given them an idea about how they could do things in their faculty. Near the ends of interviews these kinds of things happen quite often. So although I'm doing the research primarily to find something out, to build a picture, to tell a story, I do hope that my work will result in change, or at least in more understanding of a common process. It might give administrators, students and supervisors a reason to look again at their preconceptions around PhD. But it might not, and that's not primarily why I'm doing it. But I want it to.

Interview log update

Have now interviewed Prof Assaad Masri (Eng). Am interviewing Cynthia Nelson from the ITL on Monday. I now have the classic ethnographer's dilemma: Have I interviewed enough people? What if I've missed someone who will give me something new and different?

I think I've got enough, and they are to some extent repeating what others have said, which is A Sign. I have talked to someone who is a position to have an overview from Science (Agriculture), Arts/Humanities (History), Fine Arts (Music), Social Science (Education & Social Work), Health Sciences (Medicine), Applied Science (Vets & Enginieering). So there's a mix of theoretical and professional, and breadth across the disciplines taught at the Uni. I did wonder about Architecture (as they have a lot of marginal and cross-disciplinary people, and range from planning to design), Nursing (again for breadth, although that might be difficult as that is where my partner works and is known), Health Sciences (which is really Allied Health and which might be useful for the same reasons as Nursing). Once I've interviewed Cynthia on the plans for supervisor training I might take a break from interviewing for a while and consider what I've learned.

For when you get overwhlmed by your project

When I started the PhD I didn’t want to be a researcher, but wanted time and space for a research-based practice: being able to reflect, to explore conceptual world behind what happens day-to-day and then bring those insights back to work. What I didn’t realise that once you do a PhD you become a researcher :)

 Lilia Efimova sums up the PhD process

On interviewing

Now that I have done eight interviews and have the remaining interviewees in my sights, I am thinking about the ethics and the process of interviewing in a different way.

I've done my share of interviewing, for newsletters of various kinds, for eLearning exemplar sites, on journalism courses etc. With all of these interviews (usually unstructured or semi-structured), you are interviewing to get information for your story, and some colour with the odd quote. Once you've done the interview you need to identify your 'angle', and when you write you use that angle to focus what you have learned.

In an ethnographic study, you are interviewing your 'key informants' for, well, their key sources and pieces of information. But although you might want to pretend that you are reporting them in a naturalistic way, you are of course interpreting what they say even as you sit in front of them. Listening to my interviews again I am learning a lot about my own conceptions as I listen to what I say as well as to what my subjects say. I can hear myself interpreting as I listen, so now I have another layer to look at!

Jen Ross (bless her cotton socks!) has raised the issues of transcription as translation at exactly the right time for me. She makes the point that the transcription is a different document from the interview tape; that it reveals things that may not be evident on the tape; things like pauses and comments from the interviewer that the listener may 'erase' without realising. Her story of the tape that was inadvertantly transcribed by two different transcibers is fascinating. I haven't yet decided if I will transcribe my interviews; I am enjoying listening to them and thinking about them and making notes as I do so. But if I do transcribe them I will be much more alert to the issues that the textual reproduction raises than I would have been before.

Commenters on this blog

I've had to add moderation to this blog. For some bizarre reason it seems to attract much more spam than my other blog does (although it has about 5% of the readership), and I was getting irritated at having to delete spam comments several times a week. If you don't want to register at typepad but would like to contact me or leave a comment, you can email me (link at the top of the sidebar).

A lot of what I do here is a record for me, but occasionally I do have a flight of creatvitiy here, and I welcome your thoughts on my ramblings. Please don't let the slightly increased difficulty put you off.

The dangers of cross-disciplinary study

Yesterday I went to a PhD student seminar in Architecture, which was on eLearning pattern design and was quite interesting. However, one of the students present, a man who is very new to the Uni and to Australia, was quite concerned that the student presenting wasn't planning to evaluate her subjects rigorously enough. (Her PhD was to create a kind of kit for creating elearning objects using pattern design principles, and the evaluation she was doing was of the users of the kit, using structured interviews, not of the designs they created.) He explained that in his home country of Iran he had created a virtual reality device for amputees, that could help them rebuild their muscles without the need for complex equipment. Sounds like a potentially great contribution to rehabilitation. However, he explained, he had a problem: he wasn't sure that the device he had created was really useful to the amputees, or whether they were just being polite in telling him that it had helped them. So he subjected them all to lie-detector tests to ensure they were speaking the truth. Yes, really. There was no hint in his story that anyone involved in his project (I think a Masters) might have thought that was not an appropriate thing to do.

I thought that if he'd had a health person on his supervisory team they might have found a way to measure increase in muscle strength and mass, which might have filled his need for certainty. Or maybe not. I wonder how he'll find dealing with the Sydney Uni Ethics Committee on his next project?

And more interviews

On 5 March I interviewed Angela Brew.

Today I am interviewing Merran Govendir, and on Thursday I will be interviewing Bruce Sutton. Still have to chase Assaad Masri and Cythia Nelson, who haven't replied to my email.

This is fun! I am starting to get repeating information, so I guess I'm getting near the end of this part of the process. But everyone has added something different that is of interest.

Interviews continued and useful links

Interviewed Yvonne Soper Wed 18 Feb.

Others conducted so far:
Brain Paltridge 14 Nov 2009
Peter Macallum 29 Jan 2009
Jill Krill 2 Feb 2009
Alison Bashford 24 Feb 2009

Now requested:
Bruce Sutton (Chair of Academic Board)
Assaad Masri (Eng & IT)
Merran Govendar (VetSci)
Angela Brew (co-ordinator of the 'old program' for Supervision training at ITL

Cynthia Nelson (the Current ITL goto person for supervisor training

Note also (I may already have this) case studies from the ITL supervision casebook.

And here's the university's guidelines for supervision.

And here's the DOG page - how many time have I looked for something like this? Maybe it's just been put up as the position is disestablished this month?

Interviews redux

Following a lead from Jillian Krill, I've got an appointment next week to interview Yvonne Sloper from the Careers Service, who has apparently done some research on PhD students. That's one I wouldn't have thought of.

Interviews

Wonder if it would be worth interviewing the DVCs of Education and Research and comparing their views? One comes from SocSci and the other from Science - might be an interesting way to get broader views from the top.

Interviews requested today

Alison Bashford    Acting DDOGS
Jillian Krill    Chair of PhD awards subcommittee of Academic Board
Peter McCallum    Chair of Graduate Studies subcommittee of Academic Board

The mythical PhD handbook

This morning I conducted an interesting exercise. Pretending that I was looking to enrol in a PhD at the University of Sydney I searched the site for general information about PhD degrees, to almost no avail.

The easy page to find is the one with lots of puffery about how faaabulous Sydney is for PhD students. It's links are weird - e.g. if you click the one labelled postgraduate applicants you get taken to a site for coursework in the faculty of nursing. There are links to a couple of professional master's degrees but very little else. But this is the page that you will be taken to whenever you click the link for 'student handbook' on any postgrad research site.

Slightly more difficult to find (requiring a search) are the academic board and other regulations for the awarding of the PhD.

Searching for just 'PhD' will take you to lots of obscure places - the Electron Microscopy Unit, for instance - before you find the Academic Board site. "Doctoral" sends you first to the Institute of Transport and Logistical Studies - I'm sure a popular place to do a PhD - before Academic board for some more useful stuff.

If you go the faculty sites you can find their postgrad student handbooks - but a cross-disciplinary student might not know which faculty they want to enrol in. I certainly didn't - I could have been in Education or Arts (cultural studies). And the one in Education isn't easy to find either.

Nowhere can I find a handbook that brings all this information together for prospective candidates. There's some publications from the Learning Centre, but they are nearly ten years old. The SUPRA (student union) handbooks are the best resource, but there's nothing on what the university wants students to know about its process and policies.

I did quite easily find a link to the ITL's supervisor training program. However, their link to the now-mythical 'handbook' downloads the Fac of Health Sciences student handbook and. like all the other links, takes you back to the page of puffery with no handbook linked from it.

Abstract for CoCo symposium

Are blogs an effective way to assess student reflection?

Blogging is promoted as a way to increase students’ ability to record their reflection on their knowledge development and/or their practice in real time, and thus to assess developments in their understanding. In this roundtable we will discuss the nature of blogging as a tool for reflection, but also the nature of reflection as it is practised in Higher Education. By assessing blogs or other texts that capture student responses in (or close to) real time, are we teaching students to report only acceptable reactions to events, rather than promoting honesty and awareness of real change, or the lack of change? How can we measure and assess the value of change reported by a student?

There was a full house for this discussion, and it went really well. I think that I will put an abstract in for a short paper on this topic at ALT-C in Manchester.

My summary of contributions that emerged from the discussion:

• when I assess reflection I'm looking for evidence that a student is beginning to think about how the profession operates when they go on practicum
• when I assess I'm looking for how a student is questioning their own belief system
• I don't want 'touchy-feely' reflection; I want to see how the student is intellectually grapppling with what they're doing on clinical and how their classroom learning applies to real-life situations
• I never read the 'raw' reflections as they're being written, although I check that entries are appearing regularly. I tell the students that these are a private space for them. What I read and assess is the 2000 word assignment they submit on how their field experience has changed their view of their future work environment.
• One person who reported sending students off on practicum with instructions to keep a blog (including a short workshop on how to blog, upload pictures etc) found that the students didn't use the blogs at all. Discussion centered around ways to motivate them, and included setting simple concrete tasks to start them off (eg post a picture of the place you're working; post short bios of the other staff where you're working; post summary of at least three things that happened in your first week and what you learned from them
• Two people reported at some length about their experience of students recording their experience of putting on plays in a teacher education course. The blogs were group blogs and quite a lot of the discussion was done in the blogs. They found them very successful for their needs, which were to record the students talking about the process of creating the drama.

One of the weirder spams I've received

You'd imagine that there can't be anyone online who doesn't understand the function of a personal blog these days. You'd be wrong.

Hi Witty,

I'm interested in writing a guest article on your site Faultlines in order to increase my writing profile. I'm not sure what the process is for submitting an article for your review or if you have certain requirements, but if you're at all interested I'd appreciate you getting back to me, and I can send you an article for you to consider for publication.
 
I'm planning on writing something related to your existing articles, but if you have something specific in mind just let me know. All I'd ask in return is a by-line with a link pointing back to my site (http://www.phdamericanhistoryonline.com/) at the bottom of the article.
 
Again, if you're interested, let me know. Below are a couple of samples of recent feature articles I've written:
 
http://www.phdamericanhistoryonline.com/all-about-graduate-ip-programs/
 
http://www.phdamericanhistoryonline.com/strategies-to-market-education/
 
Thanks for your time and I am looking forward to your reply.

Thanks,
Kelly Kilpatrick

I'm not sure what s/he thought s/he was going to write about the process of getting a PhD in Australia. And a quick glance would have revealed that this blog is a thought dump, not a place for formal writing.

Am I being too tough? Nah. Writing on other people's (obscure!) blogs is not a good way to raise your writing profile. Kelly should get his/her own blog.

Lilia Efimova

Her posts on the blog networking study, beginning Nov 20 2008 are really worthwhile. (Well, all her posts are worthwhile but these are especially relevant to me.) They start here.