Ph.D @ ALT_diss # ALT_diss

1. Ph.D @ALT_diss #ALT_diss sarah j. cox Dr. Andrea Beach Committee ? [open to suggestions]

2. Awareness of Social Media • Facebook close to 100% • Twitter 80% • Google + 70% • 7 out 10 internet use 1.5 billion social media network sites.

3. Apprehending the phenomena In my household there are two students pursuing their Ph.D.’s.  Statistically one of us will complete and one of us will not.  If you are now reading this, then the chances are I am the one who made it.   The reality is fifty percent of students pursuing a Ph.D. succeed in their scholarly endeavor and fifty percent do not. (Lovitts, 2001).

4. Doctor-drop out (Smallwood, 2004) in the United States has hovered at the fifty percent range for nearly fifty years. Alarming the attrition rates are invisible as those who leave doctoral programs do not often want to share the reasons for leaving. Smallwood, S. (2004).

5. Research Query What kinds of knowledge do Ph.D. students exchange online: A content analysis using a hybrid of Bloom’s Taxonomies.

6. Conceptual Frame: What kinds of knowledge do Ph.D. students exchange online: A content analysis using a hybrid of Bloom’s Taxonomies. Taxonomies Knowledge-seeking Content Analysis Social Media Blogs Ph.D. students Social Exchange Theory Knowledge-sharing

7. Theoretical lens • Social Exchange Theory – Why? • The value of Online communities depend on ongoing participation in terms of two key activities: • Knowledge-seeking • Knowledge-sharing [Phang] • Any social interaction is the rewards minus the costs. Hypothesis – asserts that…

8. …people evaluate all social relationships to determine the benefits they will get out of them. It also suggests that someone will typically leave a relationship if the effort, or cost, outweighs any perceived benefit - tangible and intangible exchange of activity [Homans 1961]

9. Vortex of Pro-Quest A comprehensive review of the literature on Ph.D. attrition over forty years (Jones, 2013) highlights six overarching issues for Ph.D. students. • Program design • Teaching • Writing and research • Post doc opportunities • Relationship with supervisor • Experiences of being a Ph.D. student.

10. Content Analysis • Elo and Kyngäs (2008) describe content analysis as a way to systematically and objectively describe phenomena found in documents • Leedy and Ormrod (2001) define the purpose of content analysis is to identify patterns, and themes in human communication • Neuendorf (2002) states the goal of content analysis is a “numerically based summary of a chosen message set” (p. 14) • Process for content analysis is designed to achieve the highest objective analysis possible by defining the process of the qualities and characteristics to be examined

11. Why Content Analysis • 1st dissertation was ‘Popular representation's of the witch in 15th & 14th century pamphlet literature • This was back in the early days of Content Analysis – hand-coding, labor intensive.

12. This study is both nominal and relational. The custom codebook/dictionary provides the means of analyzing the data. The data itself is relational as it has been collected starting with a benchmark and then looking at those social networks related/rated by the original network = reputationalstrategy.

13. Methods: tools Codebook design: a sketchy outline Hybrid redesign A priori design - before the facts. Analyze the knowledge dimensions of Ph.D students connecting through social media • Blooms Taxonomy • Anderson and Krathwohl’sRevised • Andrew Churches Digital Taxonomy

14. Code: derived from Knowledge dimension • Conceptual Knowledge • Metacognitive Knowledge Rationale: potential to map knowledge seeking and sharing – where are the gaps in student understanding & skill-set? Assessment-using taxonomies flipped.

15. Smith (1999) on invisibility in Cyberspace and the relationships formed in online social networks, argues that frameworks designed for conducting research online take into account the nature of the Internet itself. • It is a noisy place and observed conversations in one online forum do not provide data that can necessarily be witnessed in another forum. • Now imagine the position of undertaking doctoral studies against a backdrop of noise interference that is both myth and factual data providing a fifty fifty chance of success.

16. data collection/Extraction Blog sites Ph.D. specific “The Thesis Whisperer” [TTW] beginning data collection point Technorati use to collect basic data + power analysis [Authority]

17. The Internet offers social researchers unrivalled access to the minutiae of daily life • Using data from websites, forums and social networking sites continues a long tradition of unobtrusive methods in social research • Unobtrusively acquired online data can make otherwise ephemeral aspects of everyday life amenable to research • Unobtrusive Internet research can reduce the burden placed on those whose behaviour is being researched[Hines,2012]

18. Applies linguistic and/or statistical techniques to extract concepts and patterns that can be applied to categorize and classify artifacts [posts] • Transforms “unstructured” information into data for application of traditional analysis techniques. • Unlocks meaning and relationships in large volumes of information that were previously unprocessable by computer.

19. What is Authority? Technorati Authority measures a site's standing & influence in the blogosphere. With the October 2009 redesign of technorati.com, we’ve changed the Technorati Authority calculations to better reflect the continually changing attention of the blogosphere. Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.

20. Stats we can undertsand: 11,000 likes, 1,822,402 hits, 203 countries, 91,000 USA; 105,000; 129,000. The most commented on post in 2012 was The Valley of Shit

21. “The Valley of Shit is a terrible place to be because, well, not to put too fine a point on it – it smells. No one else can (or really wants to) be down there, walking with you. You have the Valley of Shit all to yourself. This is why, no matter how many reassuring things people say, it can be hard to believe that the Valley of Shit actually does have an end. In fact, sometimes those reassuring words can only make the Valley of Shit more oppressive”.

22. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary extracts linguistic aspects of text LIWC matches text against pre-compiled lists of word stems assembled – custom-dictionary

25. Significance Importance of study: in no particular order. • Provide further insight to the potential knowledge gaps of students pursuing a Ph.D • Provide data to support H.E. Institutions in building, reframing, making programmatic changes to Ph.D curricula. • Quantifying knowledge sharing and seeking behaviors and the relevance for Bloom’s, and subsequent incarnations, taxonomies models to assess learning. • Potential to articulate and provide commentary on the nature and role of self-directed learning among Ph.D. Students online. • Contribute to scholarly research in the social sciences; particularly Education with regard to the use of Social Media • Demonstrate and push the boundaries of what is achievable through research using social media as a platform.