In praise of the humble whiteboard

On Saturday I was shopping in Big W (everyone has to sometimes) when I wandered by this aisle. What I saw made me stop to snap a photo with my shiny new phone because I was so excited.

What is it? A bunch of whiteboards of all sizes – some with a pinboard full of extra corky goodness attached

Put away those iPad dreams for a moment, because I think a whiteboard is just almost the best thesis tool that money can buy. Why? Because it can help you to think in novel and interesting ways.

There’s a lot of thinking that has to go on during any research degree. Some of it is thinking through doing – such as the process of making things or conducting experiments. This is the kind of thinking artists and designers are more likely to wax lyrical about than scientists, but I would argue every discipline does it.

The other kind of thinking is more reflective kind which mostly happens in and through the medium of writing. Sure, we may have the odd idea while in the shower, walking in the park or cooking, but these ideas generally need to find their way into writing in order to be tested out and developed further.

One reason writing is such a good thinking tool is that it encourages us to think in a linear fashion - one word in front of the other. In this way we can build up ideas and chain them together in a coherent argument. In writing we can reflect on the ideas and add the evidence, definitions, side arguments and all the rest which our arguments weight and heft.

This is a good thing – most of the time. But many people find they can only sustain a linear mode of writing for about 1500 words. Certainly this is the case for me. I can write about 2 pages at most before I have to stop and review where I am going. You may be able to go for longer – but inevitably, if you keep working words in a straight line, your writing will start to lose coherence.

This is because stuck in the line by line, word by word business of writing it is easier to lose sight of overall purpose; how the part we are writing relates to the whole. I have never yet met anyone capable of writing a whole 90,000 thesis in this stream of consciousness / linear way (but feel free to write to me if you have!).

To re-orient during the writing process most of us will stop to read back what we have written. The danger here is Editing. Too much editing at the initial drafting stage is, more often than not, the enemy of done.

Robyn Owens, in the excellent (if badly named) ‘Doctorates Downunder’, calls this editing-as-you-go ‘the spiral method’ of writing. She warns that the spiral method, while good for creating coherence, can lead to the ‘one step forward, two steps back’ problem where work is done – but little real progress is made. You probably have experienced this: found yourself opening your document, tinkering around with paragraph number one for what seems like five minutes, then looking up to see it is already lunchtime.

A whiteboard gives you a different kind of space to work your ideas; a way to draw back and seek out higher ground from which to survey your whole thesis or chapter. On a whiteboard you are not committed in quite the same way as you are in a word processor. Ideas seem more playful, tentative and open.

Most importantly I think is that you can more easily draw diagrams which help you to arrange ideas in novel ways. Of course you can do this on paper, but on a whiteboard it is significantly easier to rub stuff out and move things around.

One of my favourite exercises for this purpose is the ‘clustering’ or ‘spider’ diagram:

Here I started with a theme in the central bubble called ‘Research Student Experience’. The next step is to try literally ‘draw out’ sub themes or related ideas in new bubbles connected with ‘legs’ to the original bubble. The next set of ‘legs’ contain references to papers which talk about each of these aspects of the research experience.

This diagramming method enables me to find relations between the ideas and the authors that I am reading – great for lit reviews. Each of the bubbles might simply translate to a subheading in your thesis. Then you can rub out the diagram – preferably after you have snapped a picture with your snazzy new phone so you have a record of your thinking.

I would be interested to hear from others about uses for whiteboards in research practice – I’m sure there are many!

Are you addicted to your PhD?

On the tram this afternoon a friend commented that learning is a very inefficient process. I think this is especially true for PhD students, partly because it is so easy to get distracted.

When I was doing my PhD I suspended my facebook account -  but the fridge was still a great source of distraction. Aside from eating I managed to get distracted by email, web surfing and – worst of all – Obsessive Article Collecting (OAC) syndrome.

I’m sure I am not alone insuffering OAC syndrome. Plenty of students in our workshops tell me they suffer from it too.  The paper “Innovation in PhD completion” by Kearns, Gardiner and Marshall begins by describing a day in the life of a PhD student, which may sound familiar if you suffer from OAC syndrome:

“You’re sitting at your desk ready to start writing: it’s 9:30am . You think “I’ll just check my emails for 10 minutes and then I’ll get started on the literature review. You open up your email… it’s from an honours student in your dept [is looking for] a reference [in] your field – do you know where to find it? You think, “It’ll only take a few minutes…”. So you log into the library catalogue. Eventually with a sense of great satisfaction, it’s found and emailed off …

It’s 10:15am “well” you think “I may as well get the rest of these emails cleared”; glassware not cleaned in lab yesterday – send back saying it wasn’t me; astronomical society bash tonight – send back saying sorry I can’t come; interesting reference from co supervisor – send back saying thanks and go look up the reference – feel very satisfied when found, printed, stapled and put in a pile with 40 other articles. It’s 11am “Well it’s been a busy morning, time for a cup of coffee with Ben…”

I chuckled, but felt slightly pained, at this accurate description of some of my PhD days. The authors go on to describe an excellent therapy program they have put in place to try to reduce these kind of ‘work deferment behaviours’. But while I was reading the paper I was struck by the repeated use of the word ‘satisfied’ in relation to finding journal articles.

Here’s the thing. Of all the work avoidance strategies, hunting for articles must be one of the most deeply satisfying. It can be hard to stop once you get going – why is this?

Lately I have been browsing a little through the literature on Information Addiction, which I have to say is a little confronting (especially since lately I have had my finger poised over the Twitter ‘refresh’ button for #juliagillard).

The hypothesis behind much of this work is that finding information can cause a rush of dopamine  – which is called in behavioural science circles a ‘reward stimulus’. Over time our brains can become sensitised to the anticipation of the dopamine reward – even though the reward itself brings us diminishing returns. In other words: the sensation of wanting more information doesn’t have an ‘off switch’.

In an interesting post in science blogs, Jonah Lehrer points out that our information addiction is not random: we are not “indiscriminate curiosity machines”. Our cravings for information are personal – and in a PhD student highly so.

According to Lehrer, the brain isn’t “interested in responding to the reward itself” but wants to find the “first reliable bit of information that predicts the reward”. This might provide another explanation for OAC syndrome, especially when you take into account that we tend to get more hooked on finding out stuff we already know.

If consuming the information is not as addictive as looking for it, could it be that the act of searching out articles is a ‘fix’ that we start craving? If you can’t stop searching for articles – and don’t spend time reading them – are you hooked on your PhD?

Someone doing their PhD in this area will probably be able to offer more insight, but just for fun, I’m going to take my theory seriously for a moment and offer 3 ways of breaking the OAC habit, adapted from advice offered to smokers:

1) Go cold turkey: just stop downloading for a week and spend time reading what you already have.

2) Remember the four Ds: Delay, Deep breathe, Drink water or Do something else

4) Remove the props: disconnect from the internet so you cannot connect to databases.

Now I should probably encourage you to go and read some of those articles

Where do good ideas come from?

A PhD thesis or dissertation is supposed to make a “significant and original contribution to knowledge”. This can create a lot of angst amongst research students, partly because originality is often defined, but rarely talked about in actionable ways.

In “How to get a PhD”, Phillips and Pugh set out 16 ways to be original (page 62 of the current edition if you are interested), but don’t say anything at all about how to come up with the original ideas in the first place.

Similarly “Doctorates Downunder” has chapters full of useful suggestions for managing your time and enriching your study experience which may increase your chances of finishing your doctorate, they do not really help you become original.

Don’t get me wrong – it is good to know what originality means in relation to doing a PhD, but it’s far better to know what you have to do to produce enough original and novel ideas to fill a thesis.

The reason why so many books avoid this topic, perhaps rightly so, is that creativity is assumed to be a disciplinary issue or an individual matter. Either you know enough about your subject to see the way to produce novel ideas, or you are naturally a creative person who will come up with them anyway.

But is this really the case? Are there actions you can take that can help you come up with more ideas and solutions to research problems – regardless of discipline?

You may have figured out by now that I have a fascination with the issue of creativity in research – how it happens, how to promote it and how to think about it. This is why I enjoyed reading a paper which attempts to measure social interconnectedness and the relationship with ideas generation called “Social origins of good ideas” by Ronald Burt (2003) – recommended on the twitterverse by @hrheingold.

Burt explored the production and uptake of good ideas in a supply chain logistics company by exploring the nature of discussion networks amongst managers. He found that the network in the company was characterised by a ‘bridge and cluster’ formation. Most people discussed ideas with their immediate work colleagues (within clusters) but relatively few people would act as ‘bridgers’ and talk to colleagues across clusters.

Managers who had a diverse social network, ie: those who ‘bridged’ between clusters of smaller discussion networks, were “at risk of having more good ideas”. He supports this argument by a whole bunch of numbers which seem pretty convincing to me.

Now I could probably drive a truck through this method on the grounds that he doesn’t really into account the influence of materiality, such as physical objects and locations, and how they give shape to relations between people. You might question how generalisable this knowledge is, given that a logistics company is bound to have some unique constraints. But I think the findings are interesting none the less.

The hypothesis which lies behind this work is that, within a discussion cluster, information, beliefs and behaviours tend to become more homogenous over time. This is certainly a phenomena one sees if they work for any period of time in the same office or live in a family group!

Burt’s key argument is that ‘bridgers’ discuss ideas with a wide range of people, not just the ones closest to hand. As a consequence they are more likely to be exposed to contradictory ideas and alternative practices. If these bridgers are astute and thoughtful, they can see ways to transfer or combine ideas and approaches from elsewhere to their own problems.

In effect, Burt claims, “Creativity is an import export business”. A mundane idea in one area can be a spectacular one in another because the value of the idea is determined by the recipient of the idea – not the originator. Burt argues that: “the certain path to being creative is to find a  constituency more ignorant than yourself” (pg 5) and notes that this is a common tactic in academia (!)

Here’s where it gets interesting for people doing a PhD. Think about it for a moment: what do you spend most of your time on while doing your PhD? Probably doing experiments, making stuff  (or whatever it is you do) and/or reading the work of others. Hopefully you will also be hanging out with your peers and talking to your supervisors.

These are good ways of generating ideas – but is it all you could be doing? One thing administrators and academics in my university constantly complain about is that it’s hard to convince PhD students to attend lunchtime seminars put on by other researchers.

When I was doing my PhD it always seemed like a waste of time to break my flow and attend such events unless I knew the person who was presenting, or the topic of the seminar seemed especially relevant. I always assumed that the discussion was unlikely to have any direct relevance  – but what about indirect relevance? Might I have missed out on many opportunities to cross breed exciting new idea hybrids?

So I will finish with some questions for us to ponder. How can you create an ideas ‘import export’ business? How much time do you spend in discussion about ideas with others? Who are they? Do you need to find more people who will expose you to different ways of thinking and doing? Since no one likes a free loader, what might people in these other areas learn from you?

What shiny should I buy?

Apple are geniuses at showing us how technology can be used in novel ways within our everyday lives. The latest and greatest of all these gadgets is, of course, the iPad. I have heard all sorts of uses they have been put to: as an ebook reader, as a toy for the kids, as a way to access online recipes while cooking and so on.

My dear husband calls these little technological gadgets ‘shinies’. Most of us love to buy the shinies – and I am no exception. Lately I have come across a couple of posts from professors singing the iPad’s praises as a research assistant. So – is the shiny new iPad something you should buy to help you with thesis?

My friend @deanp – an enthusiastic early adopter and PhD student – outlined some of the benefits and disadvantages of his new iPad in an email the other day. He likes that he can check email on the run, read news and blogs, as well as access other documents in many formats. In particular he likes to put notes on PDFs and draw diagrams with the simple vector graphics tools.

@deanp claims that the battery life on the iPad is good, which means that it can probably be used to watch videos on the couch for hours … but I shouldn’t promote this feature as it sounds to me like this could make the iPad the enemy of done. Some people have complained that the iPad is too heavy, but @Deanp reckons it is fine for long hours of holding and playing with.

So far it is sounding pretty good, but on the downside @deanp claims that the iPad’s full word processing feature is let down by difficulties in integration with referencing software like endnote. He also acknowledges that it’s not great for taking notes in lectures (but, dare I say it, we still have paper for this). He is a little annoyed by the lack of Flash and found the lack multi-tasking meant he had to make some adjustments to his working style. @Deanp likes using ‘Keynote’ for presentations and has a connector which enables him to plug into monitors and projectors.

I’m not sure that the iPad is a real laptop replacement yet – but this is certainly the direction that Apple and other tablet developers seem to be heading in.

This conversation made me think about the other shinies which make great PhD companions. For instance – I do love my new Android phone for many things, but not the least for the way I can call up book reviews and my research notes at the library shelf. I am interested to hear from others what technology they find indispensable in their research life.

So – what shinies do you have? How do you use them in your research? Which ones would you recommend to other PhD students and why?

5 ways to kill your darlings

Sooner or later each thesis writer finds themselves holding the knife – the virtual one of course. I’m talking about the process of cutting words out of your thesis or dissertation text.

Many PhD students may have trouble imagining they can reach, let alone exceed, the magic 90,000 word count. Yet, by the end, almost everyone has war stories about having to lose large portions of text: “I got to 120,000 words and my supervisor told me to lose 40,000! That’s a whole Masters thesis!”

There are generally two reasons you have to cut:

To match a specified word count (our university sets it at 90,000 for a PhD – not counting appendixes) and/or
to cut out text that no longer ‘fits’ because the direction or focus of the PhD has changed.

Cutting words becomes more difficult as the thesis gets longer. This is because things you say in one place start to affect things you say in other places. You may set out with good intentions, determined to slash and burn your text in an attempt to reduce the overall word count, yet it is quite possible to increase that word count by the time you are done ‘fixing’.

Many professional writers say that developing an ability to know what has to be thrown away is necessary to becoming a good writer. The notorious sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison said that a writer should throw out the first million words – because it’s only after you have written this much that you start to get good. I don’t think thesis writers should take this seriously as it might lead to dark, nihilistic thoughts which are the enemy of done. Being an enemy of done is certainly not our purpose here – we are pragmatists. A good thesis is a finished thesis, but it still needs to be chock full of wordy goodness.

Sometimes it can be those sentences that we love the most that are hardest to do away with. For me it’s those sentences which exhibit a particularly nifty turn of phrase – usually some kind of pun. I cling to them tenaciously, despite the fact that they are making my writing “flippant” (as my PhD supervisor put it once. Ouch.)

When holding the proverbial knife, it is good to remind yourself that the text is better off without these words, or as Stephen King put it more colourfully:

“… kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

(That quote is from King’s excellent “On Writing” by the way, which I probably should write a pocket review of soon – so don’t leave off your reading on global terrorism or particle physics for goodness sake).

On the premise that these successful writers should know a thing or two about the craft, here are 5 ways to kill your darlings:

1) Use that strike through tool. You know – the one that does this neat thing. Back in the day, way before word processors were invented, we used to be pretty good at the old strike through for dealing bits of text that weren’t quite right. Then someone invented liquid paper and it was all downhill from there. The strike through function enables you to keep the  text where it was and use it as a reference as you write around it. You can always un-strike through if you decide the original was better and you’re right back where you started, no harm no foul as they say.

2) Move the questionable text to the footnotes. This technique works on the principle of out of sight, out of mind. The footnotes give you a place to let the words go gently into that good night as the poet Dylan Thomas once said. By the time you come to your final polish you are usually in the position to pull the trigger and kill those darlings because the words clearly aren’t needed anymore.

3) Start a ‘maybe later’ folder. I got this tip from Dr Alex Selenitsch. When Alex was doing his PhD he kept having many ideas which weren’t right for his thesis, but were still good. He cut and paste them into a new document and stashed them in his ‘maybe later’ folder. I started one of these myself, but have yet to dip into it and resurrect any of the bits of writing stashed there. My ‘maybe later’ folder is a bit like the footnotes: an ideas graveyard where unwanted text can rest in peace.

4) Triage your text. Brent Allpress at RMIT gave me this idea when I was doing my masters degree. Go through your text and put a number against each paragraph: 1, 2 and 3. Keep all the 1′s, throw out all the 3s and try to cut the 2′s in half. I found this works only on short sections of text between subheads, but it is highly effective when preparing journal papers.

5) Preform bypass surgery: A good thesis is a highly integrated text – all  the various parts rely on each other to a greater or lesser extent. It’s a bit like your body: you will probably die if someone took out your lungs, whereas you can probably stand to lose your leg (no pun intended . Sometimes taking out a whole chapter or section makes more sense than trying to nip little bits out from all over the place. You can always think about moving the dead bit of text to the appendix (again – no pun intended. Maybe).

I hope this post has given you some ideas for next time you hold the knife. Happy cutting!

Why it might be good to admit you made mistakes – or learn French

One of my favourite books on the subject of doing a PhD is by Gordon Rugg and Marian Petre called “The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research” The authors talk about PhD students as academics in training who are being groomed to be future colleagues. What academics look for when assessing (or employing) a PhD student, these authors reckon, is a person who is similar to themselves. How can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

A post or so ago I made the case that a thesis is kind of like an avatar – the examiner uses it, in your bodily absence, to judge whether or not you have the right set of scholarly capabilities and attitudes to be admitted into the Doctor Club. But how can you work out what the right set of attitudes you need to show? A good way to find out would be to ask some academics.

On Friday I participated in a focus group to develop a new set of ‘academic capabilities’ for RMIT (it had nothing to do with the free lunch on offer I promise). The focus group was related to the drafting of a new strategic plan for the university. The question the group was asked to consider was: “If you had to replace yourself, what sort of person would you look for?”.

Now strategic planning sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry, but bear with me. What is interesting about the process for me is not so much the strategic plans that come out, but how the process forces academics to reflect on who they are. I think the group was a pretty representative sample of academics (albeit small). There were some lecturers, a couple of research fellows and post docs along with two professors. What did they have to say?

Well, the discussion revealed some interesting ideas about what academics think academics should be able to do and why. I may talk some of the others in later posts, but what stood out the most for me was creativity.

Of course there was some talk about creativity and the history of universities, in particular the idea of the academic as ‘maverick’ thinker or visionary - wizard in the ivory tower – who can see what others cannot. I am pretty skeptical of this idea of the lone genius academic who soldiers along at the frontier of knowledge.

While some in the room talked about people they had known who were successful at being lone wolves, I think it was significant that no one in the room put their hand and said they were one. I think this reinforces the idea that the ‘wizard in the ivory tower’ is a metaphor that never really described academic practices. After all the oldest universities developed from monasteries – how much more collective (and conformist) can you get?

Most of us around the table indicated we were creative in the more everyday sense of the word – as problem solvers. We agreed that creative problem solving is a quality which helps an academic get things done, despite the various barriers that might arise. Everyone at the table (including myself) saw themselves as a creative person and valued this quality in others for the pragmatic good it can do.

How might these ideas about academic creativity manifest in a thesis? My answer is to think about admitting to your mistakes.

Now many students might be a bit wary of including in their thesis errors: false starts, mistakes, miscalculations - stuff ups of any kind. The temptation is to produce a smooth and perfect thesis which shows you to your best advantage and generally I think this is a good thing to aim for.

But how can you best demonstrate your creative problem solving ability if you are always so perfect? If you never admit to mistakes you miss the perfect opportunity to show what a scrappy little problem solver you really are. By showing how you encountered and overcame difficulties you show an examiner that you would be just the kind of guy/girl that they would like to have in their department. Someone they could take their own problems to for help.

Now admitting to your errors might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Perhaps another way to demonstrate your creativity is to show how much you learned while doing the thesis. If you picked up an amazing new skill during your time you show that you have the right kind of attitude to be a great problem solver.

A woman in my office was once a circus acrobat and did her thesis on contemporary circus art. She told me that almost all of the literature on the subject of ‘new circus’ is in French (it’s amazing the things you learn in the lunch room). The problem was my colleague couldn’t speak French – not at all. So what did she do? She spent her first year taking classes and learning enough French to get by. She reckons she still can’t speak it – but she can read it pretty well.

That’s some serious effort, but perhaps effort not leveraged to the full extent if she didn’t tell anyone about it. I haven’t asked her about this, but if I was her supervisor I would have made her to include a bit of a researcher biography in the introduction.

An examiner would have to be pretty hardened not to be impressed if she mentions that she was once an acrobat. Not only does she gain credibility (this woman knows circus) she shows that she is flexible in more than body. If she casually mentions she had to learn French to do the thesis she gets brownie points for creatively solving a problem – and showing some resolve in the process.

I’m very glad I didn’t have to learn French, but everyone learns to do something they didn’t know how to do before – something which demonstrates what kind of person they are. How might you go about showing it?

How to write a lot

PhD students have to do a lot of a lot of reading. One of our philosophies at the Whisperer is to ease that burden by doing some of the reading for you. We can’t read about quantum mechanics or global terrorism, but we can read books on doing a thesis. With that in mind I present our first book review.

A while back Paul Gruba, co-author of “How to write a better thesis”, recommended a book by Paul J. Silvia called “How to write a lot”. Since I respect Paul’s judgment I dutifully went to the RMIT library, borrowed it and took it back to my office. I’m sorry to say from this point its fate was similar to many books I borrow – I skimmed the first couple of pages for the key messages then put it on my TBR (to be read) stack.

As is the way of most books that end up in TBR, “How to write a lot” gathered dust until the library hassled me to return it. Yesterday, gripped with that compulsive fear of being dull that teachers sometimes get, I went to the library to seek some inspiration for my upcoming workshop “Writing – from chunks to chapters”. I grabbed the book and, mindful of my failure last time,  took “How to write a lot” with me to read on the tram.

I got to page 44 by the time I reached my stop and I was hooked. My standard approach to books on writing is brutal. If they are boring and hard to read the person shouldn’t be trying to teach you to write. This one read, as they say, like butter. As an added bonus it made me laugh out loud in parts.

It was so good I assumed the author must be some old timey academic who had chosen to finally dispense his wisdom in this compact little volume. Imagine my chagrin when I looked at the publishing details and found out that the guy is 6 years younger than me. Crikey.

The takeaway message that Paul Silvia has for us in his book is that there is no such thing as academic writer’s block. He claims that, just as the  people who believe in UFO abductions tend to be the ones who get abducted, only those academics who believe in writer’s block get writer’s block. As he amusingly puts it:

“Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with the big paint sprayers who repaint your basement” (pg 45)

According to Paul Silvia, the key to writing a lot  is to schedule time to do it. But if I leave you with the impression that this is all there is to this book I would be selling it short. Dr Silvia is a psychologist and he makes some astute (and rather uncomfortable) observations about academic behaviour. In particular about the excuses we tell ourselves about our inability to write as much as we would like.

One of these excuses (definitely my preferred one) is that we don’t have time to write. Rubbish says Paul Silvia. The reason we don’t have time is we don’t make time by scheduling in writing along with all the other things we have to do. He accuses many academics of being ‘binge writers’ who think they will get their writing done only when they have a long stretch of time to do it. These writers may well be productive during a holiday or weekend. Dr Silvia points out this might be one of the reasons why academics can be difficult people to be married to.

Dr Silvia is a self confessed obsessive about his scheduled writing time and writes every week day from 8am to 10am. It obviously works for him because he has an impressive list of publications. My first thought on reading this was that he must not have children because that routine would be impossible for me. But maybe I am just making excuses?

I’m sure there are many of you who are like me – capable of being very productive writers if properly motivated. While finishing the last draft of my thesis I was working full time and could only write after 7:30pm when my 7 year old boy was in bed.  Writing at night was pure torture after a full day of writing at work, so I made a pact that I had to do at least an hour a night. If, after an hour, I was hating it I stopped. This worked for me and I finished – quicker than I thought I would. Often all I needed was application of bottom to seat and then I could go on for a couple of hours. If not I watched TV without guilt.

Paul Silvia must be interesting to live with because he even goes as far as using SPSS spreadsheets to track his word count. He claims this gives him a sense of achievement and an ability to be able to estimate how long it will take him to do something. I susoect I wont ever reach that level of nerdiness, but I think he is onto something.

Research shows that those dieters who keep a food diary lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. Maybe one way to overcome academic binge writing is to approach your thesis weight watchers style by tracking your energy input and output?

Anyway – go and read “How to write a lot” - if you can make the time. There are many other tips to increase your productivity and a surprisingly good section on grammar.

Related Posts

5 books to help you with your PhD

The literature review – knowing when to stop

Learning from ‘Avatar’

Tomorrow morning I will be giving a presentation to students at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) about ‘PhD Modes’. That is all the briefing I have anyway.

On the  last slide I get a bit carried away and talk about the medieval origins of doctoral study using William Clark’s  “Academic Charisma and the origins of the research university”. It’s an excellent book, but odd and self consciously post modern and therefore hard to read. Most PhD students would never bother, which is a pity because it lays out a fascinating argument about Doctoral scholars and how they became progressively ‘disembodied’ into text. It’s actually quite a useful way to think about becoming a doctor because it explains (I think) some of the oddities of the thesis/dissertation process and emphasizes the importance of authorship.

In a nutshell, Clark’s argument is that back in the day (around 600 years ago) if you wanted to be a Doctor (in Western Europe) you had to know everything. This was relatively easy because everything there was to know was in the bible. In order to graduate to doctor-hood  you studied the bible for the requisite amount of time and then took part in a public process called the ‘disputation’.

Basically the disputation was a ritualised event – Clark calls it a knowledge ‘joust’ - where the student stood up in public and defended the canon of knowledge against a series of  ‘unorthodox’ suggestions. The suggestions usually came from a crowd of your peers (who had been appropriately clued up about the kind of unorthodox suggestions you had answers for – probably over a pint of mead or two in the local pub). Your supervisor / mentor stood behind you while you fielded the ‘heterodoxy’ from the crowd and refuted it with syllogistic logic. Seated around the sides of the rooms were the other doctors and local nobles who were the official witnesses to the event and decided if you were worthy to become doctor.

So becoming doctor used to be a thoroughly ‘enfleshed’ affair in which you demonstrated your scholarly capabilities in public and in person. But with the invention of the printing press everything began to change. Clark takes some 300 pages to explain how the disputation system which relied on ‘speaking received knowledge’ in public changed to the circulation of papers. This circulation took place in private because the text started to be written for a select group of scholars (the disciplines) instead of for all scholars.

The text started to ‘embody the scholar’ because the text started to ‘speak knowledge’.

I like to think about this argument in terms of the movie Avatar:

A movie  I happened to like despite all the criticisms (mostly because of Sigourney Weaver – what’s not to love?) but I digress.

A thesis text is kind of like an avatar. It ‘stands in’ for your scholarly self and ‘speaks’ your knowledge and capability as a scholar (to the reader – and the  examiner) when you aren’t there. The examiner, as the most important reader, is like the witnesses to the old disputation – they decide if you are good enough at speaking knowledge to be considered a doctor.

Therefore to become a doctor your scholarly capabilities must be translated into the medium of text. As Sam Worthington discovered, things are different when you become an avatar. You have different capabilities because you take a different form; you both gain and lose in this transformation.

Before you think I have gone off into post modernist la la land – this transformation has some practical implications. For one thing texts say lots of things but they are really mute. Think about the examiner in the act of reading your text – they may come across something they think is wrong or something they disagree with. They may well wonder aloud why you haven’t done something, or said something. They may want to ask you if you understand some nuance or other. But unless you have thought of this possibility beforehand – and put it in the text -  there will be no answer. You aren’t there;  the text avatar is. It has to speak for you.

This is why it’s important that the thesis text is very, very good  – or as I like to think about it: big, blue, strong and sexy.

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A thesis workout schedule

A conversation with my sister on the tram tonight got me thinking about the similarity between doing a thesis and an exercise program.

I was trying (as I usually do) to convince said sister that she should do a PhD. During my rant she just sat there with that patient look that she gets when I start in on the topic. When I finished she told me I was selling it well, but she remembered me doing it. All she saw was how  stressed out I was during the ordeal and looked terrible I looked when it was over. She pointed out it had taken me well over a year to recover.

I acknowledged this was probably true, but that I had bounced back better than ever. What had that year given me? Recovery time.

Apparently when we exercise we need to build in recovery time for the body to repair the damage done during the training session. After intense exercise it is actually the recovery time which enables our bodies to do the work which makes us fitter. In fact recovery time is so important that Lance Armstrong’s trainer, Chris Carmichael, became quite famous by designing a maximum efficiency training schedule which featured clever use of recovery time.

I have reworked 4 key points of Carmichael’s training scheme for the Lance, thesis style:

1) Motivation. We all know you have to have plenty of it to finish a PhD. We can think about motivation being intrinsic (coming from within us) and extrinsic (coming from those around us). Which one is more important to you? How might you use this insight to increase your motivation? If you are extrinsically motivated you might tell others you are going to finish a chapter by a certain date to keep you honest. If you are intrinsically motivated, promise yourself some reward for finishing a certain amount of work – but make the amount achievable and the reward small so that you don’t give up before completing it, i.e. “When I have written this 1000 words I will take a break for coffee with a friend”.

2) Singularity of focus. Not all of us have the luxury of full time study, but even for those who do it can be hard to stay focused. One big problem is ‘yak shaving’ - doing lots of other seemingly useful tasks to avoid the big difficult one. This often manifests in obsessive compulsive article collecting . There are so many interesting, but tangential,  papers out there and they can be a great way to avoid reading the boring but necessary ones. A  practical solution one student shared with me was to sort papers into 2 piles: those which are directly on topic and those which are interesting for other reasons. Simply read two from the ‘on topic’ pile before you think about reading one from the interesting pile. This way you are not denying yourself the pleasure and potential benefit of diversion, while keeping it under control.

3) Efficiency. Lance Armstrong didn’t spend the whole day training. By training hard, but allowing time to recover he built his stamina and strength. Sitting and staring at the screen when you are having a bad thesis day can be tempting because it provides you with a comfortable illusion of work. But it isn’t efficient – there are always library books to return and laundry to be done and it is probably a better use of your time right now. But the key to efficiency, Lance Armstrong style, is to go hard before you rest. Free writing can be a good exercise to do before leaving the desk for a break. Try writing for 10 straight minutes about what is bothering you about your work – without stopping. Let the writing be sloppy – even work by hand if that helps. Don’t worry about sentence construction and elegant words. Let your hand lead your brain for awhile and see what happens. You might find this is enough to get you over the mini slump – if not, go and do the laundry.

4. Periodical task setting: Writing a thesis happens in fits and starts. It cannot roll out of you in a steady stream because you are not a power station. Doing a thesis is more like cooking or child raising: ongoing, creative and not entirely predictable. There are times when other things are happening in your life which affect your ability to work. A big week of marking undergraduate work would always throw me off. I learnt that there was no point to even try to write – or even read – while the crunch was on. But I still made sure I had a stock of routine tasks – filing, image cleaning, copy editing – which could be done without too much thinking during this period.

There you have it – a thesis work out program fit for the tour de France

Thoughts on the three minute thesis

This year RMIT is taking part in the three minute thesis competition – the first time it’s gone national. The idea originated at the University of Queensland, at whose website you can see some past winners.

The rules are pretty simple – explain what you are researching, how you are doing the research and why it is important in three minutes for an intelligent, but non disciplinary audience. Oh – and you only get a single powerpoint slide. And it is not allowed to move – or make noise.

This is a challenge for many students who have never thought about how to explain their thesis to their grandmother.

It fell to my lot to promote the competition amongst academics and students at my university. There was a level of skepticism and fear about the competition. One staff member asked: “If a student can tell you about their thesis in 3 minutes why bother writing one?’ Clearly I had my work cut out for me…

I decided to use education as my primary means of persuasion.  I ran some workshops to help students compose their three minute pitch. It surprised me how popular this workshop was and how many requests I have got to run it again, purely from word of mouth amongst students. It seems to be filling a need that was largely unrecognised before.

We complemented this with a ’3MT clinic’ to give students a chance to do a practice run under competition conditions and get feedback. Our clinic judging panel was comprised of research students, academics and general staff. The panel really enjoyed listening to all the great work that is happening around RMIT.

The 3MT is such a simple idea, but has so many great side benefits – here are just some of the comments from the evaluation sheets from the workshops:

“This workshop was really useful and helped me think about my thesis topic in a totally different way”
“The exercise has helped me be more concise – which is a problem I know I have”
“It’s just so useful to communicate with others about your research in this way – they give you new ideas”
“Encouraged deep thinking about my topic – surprising!”
“Students need to be forced to think critically on their own work and research. This session provides a safe, useful and critical place to accomplish this task”
“I met some possible research collaborators by doing this – thank you!”

This got me thinking how important this skill of translating our research into ‘everyday speak’ really is.

For one thing I think we would all feel better knowing that the people spending the tax dollars we give to research are doing really interesting and important work. The 3MT is the perfect way to do this because it’s about the length of time you can stand to listen to a PhD student talk about their work – especially if it is done badly!

The tight time line and inability to fall back into a shared language forces the students to concentrate on making a case for the importance and value of their research in non disciplinary terms. In other words, to explicitly relate their research to some bigger trends in world affairs than they otherwise might: climate change, over population, political unrest, terrorism, cultural awareness. Many are surprised when I suggest that perhaps these broader issues have a place in the introduction of their thesis.

Some have remarked that they feel a renewed sense of purpose when they can make others interested in their work. Given that PhD students are often dismissed as self indulgent, self important windbags sucking on the government teat (even by our own dear Prime Minister) we need assert the value  of taking the time to think about a topic with obsessive thoroughness. One way we can do this is making it interesting to the ‘outside’ – whoever that might be.