Blogging as an ethnographic tool to study PhD development

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Blogging as an ethnographic tool to study PhD
development

• Some thoughts and questions

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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• We can post unpublished entries that are saved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 others blogs and
  commenting on them

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What does a PhD blog look like?

• My public PhD blog
• http//manainkblog.typepad.com/faultlines/
• Pauls blog
• http//teusner.org/2006/11/13/nexus-analysis/comm
  ents
• Kevins blog
• http//theory.isthereason.com/
• Jeans blog
• http//creativitymachine.net/
• Sarahs blog
• http//e-mentoringresearch.blogspot.com/

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How is the PhD conceptualised?
Project
reading the literature
doing the research
PhD!!!!!
writing up
Product (thesis)
marking
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What else could usefully be examined?
Project

• Process

PhD!!!!!
Product (thesis)
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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)

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What I want to know is

• To what extent can blogging help support
  candidates in the process of development that
  characterises the PhD?

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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)

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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 youre never really there?
• Its the ethnography you do by the seat of your
  pants

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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)

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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.

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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).

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Postgraduate pedagogies?

• Development of autonomous scholar (Johnston, Lee
  Green, 2002)
• Related to the basis of online pedagogy?

• Community of practice? (Boud Lee, 2005)

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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)

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• 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.