Living in Liminal Space

A Philosophy of Blogging - Old School, New School - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Mary:  I thought it probably made sense to introduce our new blog with a story about how and why we decided to start this project and how we arrived at the name – Old School, New School.

via chronicle.com

75 Super Cool Blogs Written by PhD’s

No, it's not my apostrophe; that's what the page is called. This is an odd site - badly needs proofreading! - and it was quite funny to find myself listed there. But if you're visiting from the '75 super cool blogs' page, welcome!

For the best in academic information, go to a Ph.D. Blogs written by PhD’s have great content and sometimes very frequent content. There are some blogs that are mostly aimed at other PhD’s, but some are for the general populous. Enjoy topics of all kinds with expert information. You might even get some freebees.

via phd-program.com

Why so stubborn?

I have been trying to write about the (lack of anything resembling) curriculum for PhD in Aus today (unsuccessfully). And I keep getting stuck on this question: Why are PhD practices in Aus proving so resistant to change? The first public discussions were held on the subject in the mid-eighties; why are people so reluctant to even examine their practice, let alone think about changing it? How many people who are PhD supervisors could confidently answer the question "How do you educate or train researchers in your discipline?" on any but a skills-based level?

I don't have any answers, although I have come up with this:

Having adopted the Oxbridge model quite consciously in the 50s and 60s (without, however, the essential viva - why not? it's common in NZ), Australia enthusiastically adopted its new model. In an interview Steve Dinham pointed out that the first full generation of people who mostly got their PhDs in Australia (having been supervised by people who got theirs overseas) began supervising in the 80s, about the time when the numbers of candidates began a very fast increase, partly fuelled by the merger of CAEs (most of whose staff didn't have PhDs) into the University system, where they were under strong pressure to get one. So maybe lack of experience of 'the way it's done' in other countries may have combined with the necessity to incorporate into the PhD cohort and bring to completion greatly increased numbers of students, some of whom were one's colleagues - or at least were not 'traditional' candidates in their mid-twenties - may have mitigated against reflective practice in this small, but rapidly expanding and vital area of Higher Education. This pressure, along with the changes in Government funding of the late 1980s and early 1990s, could quite reasonably be seen to have supported continuation of practices that are essentially unchanged from 19th-century British pedagogies - practices that are currently being highly modified in the UK.

Maybe some kind of post-colonial reluctance to adopt parts of other models exists in Australia. There is certainly a large conservative force operating from the standpoint of 'it's not broke; don't meddle with it' - which could be partly the result of the increase in academic workloads. Except, of course, it may be broke. How would we know? We never examine it. Lee and William's groundbreaking 1999 article 'Forged in Fire' and Johnson, Lee and Green's 2000 followup article "The PhD and the Autonomous Self' began limited debate among the few people who were prepared to look at the issues from a conceptual viewpoint. Ruth Neumann wrote a long report for the Federal Government in 2003, pointing out a wide range of problems. None of these have systemically addressed in institutions until very recently, and then in a generally managerial rather than conceptual way. Ticking more boxes does not necessarily equate with increasing reflective practice, improving the lived student experience or examining the barriers to satisfactory completion.

Do any of you have any thoughts or insights on this? (This is the first time I've announced a blog update on twitter - will it make a difference to commenting?)

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 creativity here, and I welcome your thoughts on my ramblings. Please don't let the slightly increased difficulty put you off.

Some thinking about institutional blogs

Sarah Stewart around this date.

Henry Jenkins comes a bit late to the party

Here he is on why academics should blog.

Reflction on the value of edublogging

I can't believe how many insights and ideas, book leads, articles and interesting contacts I get from my edublog reading. I really think now that if I hadn't started my blogs I probably could have written the whole thesis as an autoethnography, a la Life Online, using my experiences understanding PhD process through reading and communicating with PhD bloggers in the blogosphere. Unfortunately I couldn't have predicted this when I first thought about all this as a serious project, three years ago now. But of course this can only enrich my final thesis. The place of the bloggers in my project is shifting from the centre of the project to the threads of a wonderful tapestry background. And my research question/puzzle/problem is shifting too. It is becoming something like  "what the practice of blogging reveals about he pedagogy of the PhD in Australia."

Some useful new articles in JCMC

Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs
Interesting take on relationships between these two factors

Psychological and Social Influences on Blog Writing:
An Online Survey of Blog Authors in Japan
Cheifly interesting for their assumptions about bloggers

Gender Differences in British Blogging
It's funny how as a 'blogger' I often feel quite 'othered' when reading articles by academics (or journos for that matter) who are clearly not bloggers themselves. (The excellent and interesting article in the Herald on Saturday about blogging by a literary blogger points up the differences really well, as did the one by Elegant Sufficiency in the Sunherald a couple of weeks ago. Evidence, perhaps , of the useful ness of blogging as a reflective tool?) Also, a strong slant toward business angle in blogging - authors are from a business school.

The authority of the blog

Paul's thoughts on this: http://teusner.org/2007/06/08/thesis-4-authority-and-rebellion/

The 'blog as castle' image is a nice one. I still think of blog as soapbox. but castle is more solid. Although soapbox is portable, which is more like the moblog. Hmmm. Maybe castle is too permanent an image.

Also, from Mathemagenic, some thoughts on referencing weblogs: http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/07.html#a1903

The Blogging of Everyday Life

Tama Leaver

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/leaver.shtml