PhD – Page 2 – sue watling

SoTL, WATTLE and action research

Sue Watling / March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 / MATLHE, PhD, Student as Producer, Teacher Education, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Professor Patrick Crookes, Wollongong Academy for Tertiary Teaching and Learning Excellence (WATTLE), spoke at a Colloquium event this week about teaching scholarship i.e. ‘taking teaching seriously’. Conversation on the difference between Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) was useful. For me, they align with being research informed and research engaged. Both are the language of Student as Producer and EDEU’s new MA in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (MATLHE) which goes for validation on 20th March. These are interesting times for scholarly debate.

To be research informed, or engage in scholarly teaching, is to be aware of pedagogical research, theory and literature, to evidence reflection on practice as an individual and in response to feedback, and be involved in the production of knowledge at a local level. The Scholarship of teaching and learning is about being research engaged, actively involved in the production of new pedagogical knowledge which is peer reviewed and publically disseminated. SoTL might not involve teaching and this brings the theory-practice divide to mind.

My research is positioned in the gap between e-learning theory and the reality of e-teaching. Theory might join the dots and suggest conclusions but unless it emerges from practice, it will do little to sustain links between the student and their VLE. It will always be harder to log on and engage than walk into a timetabled lecture or other learning experience. Five Step Models and Conversational Frameworks look hopeful on the page but initiating and sustaining virtual interaction remains a challenge. You could say the SoTL with regard to VLE has been responsible for some of what Feenberg calls the failure of e-learning*.

At the Colloquium we talked about Boyer’s definition of scholarship which referred to teaching and not learning. How we teach and how we learn are the pedagogical yin and yang. They belong together, are two halves of a whole. This is why Action Research is so relevant. It links teaching and learning, involves collaborative inquiry and represents a pedagogy of partnership.

Yet taking an action research approach to a doctorate, means addressing the research community’s concerns it will not be replicable, generalisable, robust or valid. My practice is an integral part of my research. Not only am I becoming a better online teacher. I’m discovering how students prefer to be taught in virtual spaces. The research has already generated guidance, been presented at conference and had its first peer reviewed publication. Action research is a powerful tool, not least because it involves reflective critique, one of the hallmarks of SoTL. But as insider research, it’s status is tarnished.

Different decades see different themes. It used to be widening participation, then enhancing the quality of teaching and learning with technology, and now it’s student engagement. Who knows what the next theme will be. What is clear is the need for more bridges between theory and practice. SoTL could be a useful opportunity to encourage and support research into the real world places where teaching and learning happens.

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Feenburg, A. (2011) Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/copen5-1.pdf

Multiple ‘ologies…

Sue Watling / February 6, 2015 / PhD

The spectre of the Phd has moved in. Taken up residence. Where I go it goes; car, office, home. There’s no escape. I’ve reached the stage the ‘DIY PhD’ books tell you about. I hate it! Last week I wrote about the funnel effect, the logistical nightmare of having too many words and not enough space. This week it’s been the question of validity or the doctoral dilemma – how do I know it’s any good? The sad answer is you don’t – not until someone else passes judgement.

Validity includes lots of positivist measure of excellence like reliability and replicability; the ‘integrity of the conclusions’ (Bryman 2003:30). But the concept of validity itself is contestable. In the red corner there’s the quantitative view of reality as observable, measurable and infinitely knowable while over in the blue corner qualitative reality is more vague, forever open-ended and uncertain.

The Methodology chapter is a challenge. This is where it all comes together or falls apart. It’s a matter of pinning yourself down philosophically – for the purpose of the dissertation at least. There are so many alternative constructions. They can’t all be wrong so it’s a bit of a winner for the blue corner although the reds won’t have it. To a positivist we’re all as predictable as time and tide. Richard Dawkins versus Karen Armstrong. I know who I’d rather have dinner with.

Taking up a position midway between the corners, with an ontological realism and epistemological constructivism (see, I’m learning the language), there is a critical realist approach where the world is knowable but knowledge is fallible. This suggests a possible answer the crisis of validity where ‘There is no single interpretive truth [only] multiple interpretative communities, each with its own criteria for evaluating and interpretation’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000:23). Which in itself is something of a certainty, because one thing you can be sure of, another new philosophical lens for viewing reality is likely to be coming along quite soon.

Affliction of doubt; a common doctoral disease like procrastination

Sue Watling / February 1, 2015February 1, 2015 / PhD

I’m calling it the funnel effect. The process of writing up my dissertation is like fitting an umbrella the size of a planet into a box the size of an ant. Every day I find new pieces of information which weren’t there before and I gather them up – that’s me in the corner – with a Phd head and increasing sense of panic. How to know which words to use? Not find them in the first place, I’ve 100’s of 1000’s of the pesky things in 50 shades of font design. It’s more about how to identify the ones I need.

Then – instead of narrowing them down – I get side tracked and end up adding even more. Today it was phenomenography which is one of those linguistic research tricks to see if you can pronounce the word never mind produce a description of what it means. For some reason, known only to the deep web part of my brain, I decided action research was like ethnography because as the researcher I was in the position of observer – so maybe I wasn’t doing action research at all. Affliction of doubt is a common doctoral disease. Somehow, and only google history can explain this one, I ended up in a phenomenographical paradigm and another hour had passed. At least by then I’d forgotten about the ethnography .

Now I’m blogging which is another diversion and distraction technique. I’m good at D&D’s. In a previous life I would clean the oven rather than get on with the task in hand. It became a joke how a clean oven signified an assignment deadline. Today I have the internet. It’s amazing I get anything done at all. I’ve a weakness for cute kittens and babbling babes– have you seen the one about….

I get up early, make coffee, greet the laptop and begin. Three hours later I’ve done nothing of any value towards my dissertation other than add a few more hundred words which I’ll probably take out again tomorrow. Oh, and a blog post, aspirationally tagged PhD but in reality it should be the other P for Procrastination. They could give me a doctorate in that ten times over!

Getting the blogging habit back

Sue Watling / January 20, 2015January 20, 2015 / blogging, PhD

Habits can be hard to break. It took me years to stop smoking. The line between addiction and habit is blurred. I’ve blogged for years. It was my soap box, work record, window on the internet, my weekly reflective habit. Then it stopped and now I’m struggling to get the blogging habit back.

It’s not as if I’m short of words. Me and my laptop have bonded these past few weeks. In a threesome with the settee, I’ve written tens of thousands about VLE, critical realism, digital education, e-teaching and more.

But the blogging habit broke.

As I fell – slip – trip -snap – into the world of broken fibulas and fracture clinics, my life fell apart too. Become immobile in the winter and your world shrinks. I couldn’t even get to the allotment. My grape vine still needs pruning! In theory, this loss should have created space for blogging. I could have become a blog-a-day woman. Instead of scrabbling to fit a blog post into Friday mornings I had blog freedom. And I used it to stop blogging.

It was as unexpected as the trip itself. A trip of the non-travelling kind. You can make a metaphor out of most things in life, but I’m not too sure what to make of this. I missed the pin point where something sticks. A blog is a map; it’s where I pin things down each week. Usually with regard to digital inclusion, TELEDA, my PhD, or some digital scrap which has intrigued me.

Something magic happens when you take a thought and reproduce it in words. It works verbally – a la rubber duck syndrome – and it works when you recreate an experience in writing. There’s a flash of insight or resonance which is part of the whole learning experience. A regular blogging habit is an alchemical opportunity to focus on something which has happened and study it more closely.

I need to break the habit of not blogging and get the blogging habit back!

Happy New Year

Sue Watling / January 15, 2015 / PhD

Work in Progress

A broken ankle supports the development of a conceptual and theoretical framework for my PhD!

Out of the maze into the labyrinth

Sue Watling / December 16, 2014December 16, 2014 / PhD

My doctoral journey has been a maze. Full of dead ends when I wanted it to be a labyrinth with one winding path into the centre, direct with singular intent. I was trapped in Maze City, setting off on false paths, choosing inappropriate directions, getting totally lost. It’s taken a long time to find what I was looking for but with hindsight I can see it was necessary.

A Phd is like a mirror; it reflects who you are and where your interests lie. I didn’t realise how personal it would be although choosing Action Research has reinforced the personal dimension. I thought a PhD was a project. You made your choices about what to do and how to do it then wrote it up like a big essay. Well, not quite that simple but it was more complex than I anticipated. Getting out of the maze and into the labyrinth has been quite a challenge.

There’s confusion about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. Even the OER refers to them as the same thing. I don’t understand why. The difference is simple. A maze is designed to get you lost. To frustrate and confuse. Mazes are puzzles. They pose problems to be solved. A labyrinth holds no physical secrets. It has a single path into the centre and out again. You can’t get lost in a labyrinth. There’s only one way to go.

A maze is a useful analogy for a PhD. For mine at least. I went off in so many different directions which turned out to be dead ends, made so many new beginnings. Each time thinking this is it – I know where I’m going – only to find I was lost again. The piles of books and papers grew. I chased every reference believing the next one might just have the answers I was looking for.

Everything you hear about the Phd is true. You have to let it take over your life. You’ll be trapped in that box of pathways and passages for some time. I only got out of the maze when the literature started to repeat itself. They tell you that will happen as well but it’s not the literature so much as the resonance. The literature never stops, it just starts to funnel, ever so slowly, as each dead end in the maze helps you put another theoretical approach to one side.

When it came to epistemology and ontology it wasn’t just the words I struggled with, it was finding a meaningful interpretation. It would be easy to adopt a surface approach to these components but the Viva is called a Defence for a reason. It’s hard to defend the choices you’ve made without being able to justify them and this is what being in the maze teaches you. It’s the linguistic duality of signs. We recognise dark because it’s the opposite to light. What isn’t working for you – as in every dead end in the maze – will lead the way to what does. The process is necessary because unless your choices have meaning you’re unlikely to find the links you need to hold your dissertation together.

It’s a dialectical dilemma. Nothing fits but you keep searching. It isn’t until you realise you’re creating rather than finding yourself that the fit begins to take shape. Once this idea has resonance you’re ready to step from the maze onto the opening loop of the labyrinth.

Out of the mess of random dots a shape appears.

Sue Watling / December 12, 2014December 12, 2014 / PhD

With a PhD you are never lonely. At least, not in the cognitive sense. There’s always something to read, write or reflect on. My enforced immobilisation has been in the company of text. No longer piles of paper and books across my floor. I’ve become neurotic about picking up the smallest bit of anything. Instead I’m surrounded with books on the settee, the coffee table and three dining chairs positioned for the purpose. I won’t slip on paper but I need to take care not to trip over chair legs.

For some time I’ve had problems with PhD boundaries. My reading was unstructured. Books started but not finished. Journal articles would arrive and I’d forget why I wanted them. Some times I’d forget by the time I picked up my printing. I was searching for research validation, for recognition – like a mirror on the pages.

It took time but I’ve found it in slim volume called The Action Research Dissertation*. Dated 2015 it explains how the AR dissertation is the new kid on the block. Not only do the authors give valuable advice on how to prepare for defending your AR, they also offered the resonance I needed. The aim of the action researcher is to study themselves ‘… in relationship to the program [they’ve] developed or to fold the action research immediately back into the program in terms of professional or organisation development…’ (2015:42). I couldn’t have put it better myself; the problem being I didn’t believe researching my own practice this was enough. Some deeply embedded discourse about the nature of academic research was telling me my choice was inadequate. It didn’t fit with anything I was reading and I didn’t know anyone else undertaking a practitioner based doctorate.

Overnight, it feels like boundaries have appeared and this affirmation of my research genre is another threshold on the PhD journey. I’m reminded once more of Castenda in the Tales of Don Juan who describes how he had to find his spot on the porch. He tried a dozen places until one felt right.

‘…I wanted to find it without doing any work because I had expected [Don Juan] to hand out all the information. If he had done so, he said, I would never have learned… I would never have had the confidence needed to claim it as true knowledge. Thus, knowledge was indeed power. (1968: 20)

No matter how qualitative your research, how critically reflexive or emancipatory, it’s still contained within academic discourse and subject to external processes of validation and rigour. In that respect all research is positivist yet there have to be moments on your research journey when intuition draws the lines between all the random marker points. This is where I’ve arrived. Out of the mess of random dots, a shape appears.

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*Herr, K. and Anderson, G. L. (2015) The Action Research Dissertation; a guide for students and faculty. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

PhD as art installation of unread texts; bring on #AcWriMo 2014

Sue Watling / October 17, 2014 / Academic Writing, PhD

The best thing about mess is its synonyms; clutter, litter, muddle, mishmash. Word pronunciation doesn’t get better than this. Sometimes life gets messy. Mine has gotten messy and the biggest mess of all is the Phd. A mess in the messiest sort of way.

There’s barely room for me on the settee or my feet on the coffee table. I”m surrounded with books of two kinds; open or closed, all unfinished. Ditto the papers; printed in haste with misplaced enthusiasm. Regretted later. Scribbled on pages 1, 2, sometimes 3 before the underlining and highlighting stops. I have scraps of notes everywhere. I’m good at notes and buying notebooks. These are my random ideas, written before they flit back where they came from. My PhD has become an art installation of unread literature while the NVivo laptop has dust on it, hidden under more piles of paper in the corner. A messy space is an unproductive space. The Phd is in a bad way; it needs resuscitation.

I’ve signed up for Academic Writing Month to get myself back on track.

It’s a write-a-thon by the PhD2Published team who along with The Thesis Whisperer provide social networking for doctoral researchers. The idea of #AcWriMo is you publicly declare your writing intentions, set your goals and get writing for a whole month with support provided by Facebook and Twitter. Academic writing is a problem no one talks about. Everyone needs to do it but not many find it easy or know about sources of support. There’s an assumption we pick up a pen and it all comes naturally. Writing is your alternative voice but while the ability to speak in public is recognised as a skill to be learned, writing in public rarely gets attention. #AcWriMo offers the opportunity to get something written and links up a network of people engaging with the same issues. The wisdom of crowds and all that can be a powerful motivator.

Here are some reasons why you should consider #AcWriMo …

You choose your subject; it might be an ongoing project which has got stuck or something completely new. Either way, it will create time you didn’t think you had.
Even if you don’t meet your goals, you’ll write more than you would have done otherwise.
Academic writing is a skill and like all crafts needs to be practiced; #AcWriMo is a safe place to explore the power of words and make progress.
It will lead to a sense of achievement; you’ll feel better afterwards than when you started
You are not alone! You get to experience the networking effect of Twitter and/or Facebook. Across the world there are people struggling to find time to write and #AcWriMo brings them all together.
A month is long enough to change attitudes and behaviours; taking part might lead to new and beneficial writing habits.
In the west the days are shortening, mornings and evenings are dark and it’s getting colder. What else will you do with all your extra time indoors?

I’m not yet decided on my writing subject. I have problems with boundaries as evidenced by the ways my PhD floats off and gets lost. It’s absent at the moment. If I want to bring it back my subject needs to be e-teaching and the absence of voices in the literature. Rhetoric and reality. Fiction and fact. Postmodern v critical realism. But I’d also like to do something around creativity and academic writing or reflection as literacy. Clearly the first challenge is to find a subject and I set myself the public target of doing this by next Friday. Gulp!

Digging digital dirt; the times they are a changing…

Sue Watling / October 4, 2014 / digital exclusion, digital inclusion, digital literacies, EDEU, social impact of the Internet, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Sshhh….don’t say it loud but accessibility is a dirty word. No one wants to talk about it. The subject of inclusive digital resources raises eyebrows and elicits sighs. The unspoken thought ‘here she goes again’ hangs palpably in the air.

This week I’ve been digging the digital dirt. Issues are coming to the surface, into the light and do you know what? People are listening. Something has changed. The time might have come. IT Matters. Let’s talk digital.

Information Technology enables participation. Digital data has the edge over printed text. It’s uniquely flexible; size, shape, colour and contrast can all be changed. The alchemy of text-to-speech and speech-to-text is a modern miracle. There’s no technical reason why anyone should not be able to access digital means of information and communication. Barriers to access are socially constructed. The early web pioneers knew this:

‘… it is critical that the web be usable by anyone regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities.’ (Berners Lee, 1997)

‘…if we succeed making web accessibility the norm rather than the exception, this will benefit not only the disability community but the entire population.’ (Dardailler, 1997)

The damage caused to digital democracy by Microsoft’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) and hand-operated mouse has disenfranchised millions. Attention to inclusion hasn’t kept up. When the platforms of the public sphere are digital, without the means of participation you are excluded. I know because it happened to me. I have Uvietis; a genetic condition with treatment which involves blurred vision. This is how I learned about inaccessibility and became involved with a local organisation for people with sight loss. Dodgy eyes showed me the reality of digital exclusion, and the sadness of realising although there are a few who really care, too few is not enough to make a difference.

Digital divides are complex and multi-layered. They cross all social strata but concentrate where disempowerment already exists. Evidence suggests if you are socially excluded you are most likely to be digitally excluded as well. This is a uniquely 21st century discrimination but like all opportunities for social change, the bare bones are already there, waiting for the catalyst to give them shape. Drivers for change can arrive unexpectedly. Here are some of the conversations going on at Lincoln which might just make change happen:

Government changes in the DSA (Disabled Students Allowance); teaching resources will need to be reviewed to ensure they fill gaps created by loss of funds for technology to support learning.
Internationalisation; language barriers can be reduced by providing teaching materials online, in particular lecture content which can be revisited and revised.
Flipping the classroom; providing lecture content for students to access online and using contact time for more interactive teaching activities, supports inspirational teaching and the student engagement agenda.
Digitisation; not always fully accessible and raising awareness of restrictions imposed by Publishers is creating interest in how other Libraries are dealing with this.
EDEU; the new unit’s plans for integrating digital confidence and capabilities into Teacher Education and CPD programmes calls for a framework which can and should be inclusive in design and delivery.
Blackboard; plans for introducing baseline templates (e.g. Starter, Intermediate and aspirational Gold) could and should include attention to accessibility.
Corporate Identity; opportunity for UL to become known as a digitally confident and inclusive university.

There is more. This summer I coordinated institutional wide responses to the UCISA Digital Capabilities survey which reinforced – like the UCISA 2014 report on Technology Enhanced Learning – lack of time and resources as the key barrier to developing digital practice.

This is where EDEU can help. EDEU has a new educational development and enhancement team By the end of the year there will be six of us to talk to about digital divides and exclusions. We can scaffold and support; help with developing alternative formats for multimedia and ensure accessible text and images. Get in touch. Let us know you’re interested in using virtual learning environments to enhance your teaching. We are EDEU and inclusion is our middle name.

I’ve been digging in the digital dirt and coming up with clean hands. It feels good to have people listening. The times they are a changing – indeed.

Berners Lee, T (1997)World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Launches Web Accessibility Initiative. WAI press release 7 April 1997. www.w3.org/Press/WAI-Launch.html

(Dardailler, D 1997 Telematics Applications Programme TIDE Proposal. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) http://www.w3.org

Scientists sneak Bob Dylan lyrics into articles as part of long-running bet http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/29/swedish-cientists-bet-bob-dylan-lyrics-research-papers

EDEU shaped futures: development is another word for change

Sue Watling / September 12, 2014 / EDEU, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

There’s a lot of development going on. We are EDEU, a new Educational Development Unit. Our job titles include the words Development and Developers. We are Staff Development and Continuing and Professional Development. In the literature of professional support for higher education, development can be prefixed with academic and learning as well as educational but what does the development part mean? Who is developing what? Trying to pin down meaning often reveals the slippiness of language. The closer you get to the words the more they shape-shift. The term educational development is loose and while I appreciate the flexibility of open endedness, some starting points are worth having.

The literature of SEDA, the Staff and Educational Development Association, refers to academic development and the enhancement of learning, teaching and professional development http://www.seda.ac.uk/ In a 2009 paper Forms of knowing and academic development practice, Sue Clegg writes how Academic Development is the ‘primary site though which the ‘subject’ of ‘teaching and learning in higher education’ has come into being.’ Against a background of changes in higher education, debates around the purpose of the university and the contested identities of teaching and research, she describes how academic development slipped in as a ‘defined set of practices and epistemologies’, taking on ‘…a more strategic role in reshaping institutional provision to fit more closely with government priorities’ with academic developers finding themselves ‘…positioned precariously between senior management and academic staff.’ Clegg 2009 p407. I prefer the analogy of bridge to precarious perch but with EDEU’s remit including implementation of the teaching, learning and digital education plans – plan being another word for strategy – an element of inbetween-ness can be identified.

At EDEU’s first AwayDay the eclectic nature of our existing and future work was revealed. Using the cool tool Ketso, we mapped out the constituent parts.

Technology Enhanced learning branch

A key outcome was the need to identify support for digital technology as scholarly rather than techie. Clegg writes how research into higher education is essential to understand academic practice. This is particularly relevant with internet technologies. We need to know where we came from and how we got to the places we are today. The use of VLE benefits from critical reflection. Not only should educational engagement be pedagogically driven, it must be informed through critical engagement with the published evidence base.

The Ed Dev team decided supporting a DIY approach to VLE, one which provides scaffolded learning, rather than DIFY (Do It For You) is the way the way to go. Narrowing divides between those who support the networks and those who use them for teaching is still about drives and drivers- you have to know your plugs from your sockets -but it’s also about the wider emotional impact of change, in particular from a traditionally face-to-face practice to an online one.

Words are a bit like technology. They mask what’s going on underneath. Reflection on the slippage between educational and academic – when paired with development – is ultimately pedantic because at the end of the day, it’s the definition of development which matters and this is about informed support for change. EDEU started with difference in terms of faces, spaces and working practice and there’s going to be more of it ahead because an EDEU shaped future is where development is another word for change.

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Clegg, S. (2009) Forms of Knowing and academic development practice. Studies in Higher Education, vol 34, no 4, 403-416