Blogging as an ethnographic tool to study PhD development

1. Blogging as an ethnographic tool to study PhD development Some thoughts and questions

2. A brief description • A group of candidates at the University of Sydney (including me) are keeping weblogs on their process • The blogs are behind a firewall and not open to the world at large • We can post unpublished entries that are saved but not read by the others • We are also reading each other’s blogs and commenting on them Mary-Helen Ward

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8. What does a PhD blog look like? • My public PhD blog http://manainkblog.typepad.com/faultlines/ • Paul’s blog http://teusner.org/2006/11/13/nexus-analysis/#comments • Kevin’s blog http://theory.isthereason.com/ • Jean’s blog http://creativitymachine.net/ • Sarah’s blog http://e-mentoringresearch.blogspot.com/ Mary-Helen Ward

9. How is the PhD conceptualised? Project reading the literature doing the research PhD!!!!! ‘writing up’ Product (thesis) marking Mary-Helen Ward

10. What else could usefully be examined? Project Process PhD!!!!! Product (thesis) Mary-Helen Ward

11. What has been investigated? • What does the process mean to • the candidate? (Lee & Green, 1999; Johnson, Lee & Green, 2000) • the supervisor? (Pearson & Brew, 2002) • the university? (Neumann, 2004; McWilliam, 202) Mary-Helen Ward

12. What I want to know is… • To what extent can blogging help support candidates in the process of development that characterises the PhD? Mary-Helen Ward

13. Struggling with ethnographic methodology • Is my study naturalistic or interpretive? • How can I fairly represent my participants? • “… ethnography inscribes the human crises of a specific culture. It endeavors to connect those crises to the public sphere, to the apparatuses of the culture that commodify the personal, turning it into a political, public spectacle.” (Denzin, 1999, p.512) Mary-Helen Ward

14. Moving ethnography online • Is the internet a cultural artefact or does it constitute a culture? • What are the implications of doing an ethnography among people you may never see or hear? • What does it mean to join or leave a community when you’re never really ‘there’? • It’s the ethnography you do by the seat of your pants… Mary-Helen Ward

15. Why blog?  to update others on activities and whereabouts  to express opinions to influence others  to seek others’ opinions and feedback  to “think by writing” • to release emotional tension (Nardi, Schiano & Gumbrecht, 2004, p4) Mary-Helen Ward

16. Why use blogs? • They are always everywhere available – literally true with the introduction of moblogging  PhD candidates already familiar with the internet as a source of information, communication, and perhaps also support and organization  Participants retain control of their blog – it won't disappear at the end of a 60-minute interview.  Blogging emphasises the idea of PhD as process rather than project. Mary-Helen Ward

17. Additionally… • Blog as cyberdesk • Capacity to express personality in setup, colours, pictures etc • Blogging has “…the capacity to engage people in collaborative activity, knowledge sharing, reflection and debate, where complex and expensive technology has failed” (Williams & Jacobs, 2004, p232). Mary-Helen Ward

18. Postgraduate pedagogies? • Development of autonomous scholar (Johnston, Lee & Green, 2002) • Related to the basis of online pedagogy? Community of practice? (Boud & Lee, 2005) Mary-Helen Ward

19. Some final questions • What stories (and counter-stories) need to be told? • What spaces are there for different practices and voices in post-graduate contexts, including research in and for postgraduate studies and pedagogy? (Johnston, Lee & Green, 2000, p146) Mary-Helen Ward

20. Boud, D., & Lee, A. (2005). ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education, 30(5), 501-516. Denzin, N. K. (1999). Interpretive ethnography for the next century. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5), 510-519. Forte, M. C. (2005). Centring the links: Understanding cybernetic patterns of Co-production, Circulation and Comsumption. In C. Hine (Ed.), Virtual methods. Oxford: Berg. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Johnson, L., Lee, A., & Green, W. (2000). The PhD and the autonomous self: Gender, rationality and postgraduate pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 25(2), 135-147. Lee, A., & Williams, C. (1999). 'Forged in Fire': Narratives of trauma in PhD supervision pedagogy. Southern Review, 32(1), 6-26. McWilliam, E., Singh, P., & Taylor, P. (2002). Doctoral education, danger and risk management. Higher education research and development, 21(2), 119-129. Nardi, B., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or would you let 900 million people read your diary? Paper presented at the ACM Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, Illinois. Neumann, R. (2003). The Doctoral Education Experience: Diversity and Complexity (Commonwealth Funded Report). Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training. Pearson, M., & Brew, A. (2002). Research training and supervision development. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2), 135-150. Mary-Helen Ward