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Between infrastructure and improvisation: designing the Online MPhil/PhD

Between infrastructure and improvisation: designing the Online MPhil/PhD. Martin Oliver Richard Freeman Centre for Doctoral Education UCL Institute of Education. Overview. Digital technology and doctorates Sociomaterial perspectives Examples of digital practices

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Between infrastructure and improvisation: designing the Online MPhil/PhD

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  1. Between infrastructure and improvisation: designing the Online MPhil/PhD Martin Oliver Richard Freeman Centre for Doctoral Education UCL Institute of Education

  2. Overview • Digital technology and doctorates • Sociomaterial perspectives • Examples of digital practices • The development of the Online MPhil/PhD • Lessons learnt

  3. Digital technology and doctorates • The digital as a necessary point of reference for all doctoral study

  4. Patterns of digitally mediated doctoral activities (Esposito, 2014)

  5. Digital support Doctoral students have used blogs and wikis to share their work, and reflect upon and document their progress. Self-organized systems through which some of these activities are enacted have also been formed. For example, #PhDChat is an active online community initiated by doctoral students. Individuals in the community use social media to update each other on their progress, share resources, learn about the profession, socialize and support each other; creating video trailers to describe, promote and highlight academic artifacts such as books; help-seeking with professional activities (e.g. research, teaching). (Veletsianos, 2013)

  6. “Neither digital or open. Just researchers.” • Researchers already use technologies widely • They do not see themselves as being in a special category of ‘digital researchers’ • Cultivate online personas • Used to seek recognition • Additional to, not a replacement for, conventional measures of reputation (Esposito, 2013)

  7. How should we design a curriculum to reflect and support this situation?

  8. Sociomateriality Humans, and what they take to be their learning and social processes, do not float, distinct, in container-like contexts of education, such as classrooms or community sites, that can be conceptualized and dismissed as simply a wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that assemble these contexts, and incidentally the actions and bodies including human ones that are part of these assemblages, are continuously acting upon each other to bring forth and distribute, as well as to obscure and deny, knowledge. (Fenwick et al, 2011: vii)

  9. Infrastructure Information infrastructure is a tricky thing to analyze. Good, usable systems disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use, the harder they are to see. […] Through due methodological attention to the architecture and use of these systems, we can achieve a deeper understanding of how it is that individual and communities meet infrastructure. (Bowker & Star, 2000: p33)

  10. The campus is best thought of not simply as a constraint but, to borrow Brown and Duguid’s phrase, as a ‘resourceful constraint’ (Brown & Duguid 2000: 246), one it would be premature to write off and which those developing distributed learning need to take seriously. […] The campus – or more generally, the co-location of learners, teachers, labs, class-rooms, lecture theatres, libraries and so on – refuses to lie down and die. Those seeking to develop distributed education should understand the support a campus setting gives the educational process and should be prepared for the necessity to find new ways of providing that support in a distributed education context. (Cornford & Pollock, 2005: 181, 170)

  11. Space We recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny. […] We recognise space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded in material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far. (Massey, 2005: 9)

  12. Improvisation The learning context being produced is understood as an “ecology of resources” – a matrix in which the prospective researcher shapes, manages and makes sense of the different “potential forms of assistance”, be they human or material resources or tools – that are available in their formal and informal learning ecologies. (Esposito et al, 2013: 24)

  13. (Re)assembling the Social Behind the innocuous epistemological claim that social explanations have to be ferreted out, lies the ontological claim that those causes have to mobilize forces made of social stuff. […] To explain is not a mysterious cognitive feat, but a very practical world-building enterprise that consists in connecting entities with other entities, that is, in tracing a network. (Latour, 2005: 103)

  14. Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute? • Led by Lesley Gourlay • Longitudinal, multimodal journaling with 12 students over 9-12 month period (Gourlay & Oliver, 2013) • Focus here on 3 PhD students • A structured sequence of interviews • Digital ‘biography’ • Multimodal documentation • 2-3 further interviews, building student analysis of data via presentations • Institutional ethical approval

  15. Google Scholar and Google in general is my third half of my brain. So this is a screen short of […] the drive at IOE, where I can store my data […] I had a day where I’d saved my data on USB stick where the data was corrupted. […] And I experienced my old Mac’s hard drive breaking beyond repair, loosing everything on it. […] I now store everything on my N Drive. Some times I’ll do something in my room and then immediately when I am done, synchronise it with my N Drive via the portal. IOE promises my data is safe there, because it’s protected threefold – I hope they’re right. (Fredrick, Interview 3)

  16. That’s really interesting how much I use the iPad for a start everywhere and anywhere... And I have the information there all the time constantly, and I just feel as though I don’t have to be anywhere physical at all anymore… (Django interview 3)

  17. Sally’s map

  18. Removing the agency of texts and tools in formalising movements risks romanticising the practices as well as the humans in them; focusing uniquely on the texts and tools lapses into naïve formalism or techno-centrism. (Leander and Lovvorn, 2006: 301)

  19. Online MPhil/PhD: Rationale (Oct 2014) • Timely (MOOCs, tablets, smartphones and Skype) • Cheaper: no living in London, no travel, able to work • No need for visas • Support existing students who need to relocate • PRES 2013: 41.5% distance learning

  20. Decisions • Fees – identical • Supervision – identical • Certificate – identical • Available FT/PT – identical • All for an equivalent experience

  21. Studying on Online MPhil/PhD • Moodle • Texts: ejournal articles; ebooks and PDFs • Activities: Forums; Blackboard Collaborate • Designed for synchronous and asynchronous study

  22. Structure • Spectrum: Two ends, not stretching from one • Put the student in control of blended learning • Supervision, Research Environment, Library, Student Support • Research Methods, Generic skills

  23. Building on existing expertise • OMRes Educational and Social Research (Dr Will Gibson) • Five years of experience in purely online environment, including • Lessons learnt: facilitating engagement for students based worldwide

  24. OMRes modules Start point is any of the three terms (Main start in term 1)Part-time: Year 1 modules completed and then start Year 2.

  25. OMRes modules • No assessment, but mandatory • Important part of nurturing an online research community Also: • What is a Doctorate • Academic Writing for Doctoral Students • Information and Literature Searching

  26. Other resources • One-off sessions of online generic skills • UCL Software Database • Ever expanding range of e-resources and institutional commitment to expansion • Graduate Seminar, Poster Conference, Summer Conference

  27. Lessons learnt • Seems successful, BUT • Small numbers (21 in first year) and intensive support • Asynchronous interaction the norm, with most watching recordings of synchronous at the time convenient for them (weekends popular)

  28. Lessons learnt • Introduced a Facebook page just for them • Not for everyone or every discipline • Our students tend to be ‘mid-career’ and most are working in an academic context (school, FE or HE) – and some in UK • Students still like to visit!

  29. Conclusions • Designing for diversity • The importance of knowing your students • 'Online' still involves real people, places and things • May not be possible, where work demands specialised materials (e.g. labwork) • Where does our responsibility for this start and end? • Structure can enable choices, rather than curtail them

  30. References Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000) Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Cornford, J. & Pollock, N. (2005) The University Campus as a ‘resourceful constraint’: process and practice in the construction of the virtual university. In Lea, M. & Nicoll, K. (Eds), Distributed Learning: Social and cultural approaches to practice, London: Routledge Falmer, 170-181. Esposito, A. (2013). Neither digital or open. Just researchers: Views on digital/open scholarship practices in an Italian university. First Monday, 18 (1). http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3881/3404 Esposito, A. (2014). The transition ‘from student to researcher’ in the digital age: Exploring the affordances of emerging ecologies of the PhD e-researchers. PhD Thesis, Open University of Catalonia. Esposito, A.; Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2013). Chronotopes in learner-generated contexts. A reflection about the interconnectedness of temporal and spatial dimensions to provide a framework for the exploration of hybrid learning ecologies of doctoral e-researchers. eLC Research Paper Series, 6, 15-28.  Fenwick, T., Edwards,R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.  Gourlay, L. & Oliver, M. (2013) Beyond 'the social': digital literacies as sociomaterial practice. In Goodfellow, R. & Lea, M. (Eds), Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology, 79-94. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leander, K. & Lovorn, J. (2006) Literacy networks: following the circulation of texts, bodies and texts in the schooling and online gaming of one youth. Cognition and Instruction 24 (3), 291-340. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open Practices and Identity: Evidence from Researchers and Educators’ Social Media Participation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(3), 639-651. http://www.veletsianos.com/publications/#sthash.1sSVwCOd.dpuf

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