Dear conference organiser…

Like all of you I’m sure, I receive an almost constant stream of invitations to academic events and conferences by email.

I rely on mailing lists to keep me informed about what is happening, but lately I have started to get irritated about how difficult event organisers make it for me to share information. I have even  started replying with ideas for how they might improve their communications strategy.

These replies were, of course, politely worded suggestions. This is the sarcastic letter I wrote in my head.

Sunny Locale: wish you were here

Dear conference organiser,

Thanks so much for sending me the notification of your upcoming event “Exploring the multi-dimensional dimensionality of performance based social network theory” organised by the Society for Serious Thinkers – it sounds fascinating.

I particularly like the fact that you have chosen to hold the conference in Sunny Locale
this year. That’s nice for our northern hemisphere colleagues, who will be suffering through winter.

I’m not sure I can afford the outrageous $2500 registration fee, especially since I will have to prepare a paper if I have a hope of getting my university to pay for it. Nevertheless I do hope I will see you there because I so enjoy the conference dinner. What can be finer than discovering the joys of line dancing after a few too many red wines?

I’m not sure how long it is since you have looked at the profile of the people on your mailing lists. You might not have noticed that quite a few of us academics have blogs and many more are active on social media. I have upwards of 4000 followers on Twitter now myself and I would love to spread your message to my network. I’m sure some of them will be interested in a conference in Sunny Locale on the multi-dimensional dimensionality of performance based social network theory.

You know, those people who follow my work on social media are connected to many others – have you read that interesting book “Connection: the surprising power of social networks and how they shape our lives?”. You might want to pick up a copy. According to these authors, we can ‘catch’ all sorts of things, like being fat, smoking or alcoholoism – even happiness – through our social networks. I’m sure you want to leverage the power of those networks to promote your conference.

Unfortunately, you are not making it easy for me to share the news of your event.

Let’s start with email – I get a lot of it. Luckily I didn’t set up an auto re-direct on your mail. I never open some of those folders. I read your email on the train on my new iPhone and it did that neat thing of making an ical event straight from the date you put in the text. Wonderful. But what about all those other people I talk to on social media? How am I going to tell them?

What a pity you didn’t include a ‘tweetable” form of the text in the email with a hashtag for the event. A hashtag is the difference between a Thick and a Thin Tweet and the key to making an information rich ‘tweet package’. A hashtag helps me talk to the other people who areinterested in your conference and even do some ‘pre-networking’. A hashtag is a boon for all those PhD students of mine who are interested, but will not be able to afford to fly to Sunny Locale.

I could, perhaps compose a tweet myself. I prefer to use Twitter to talk to my network – I have Buffer app which will send the tweet straight to Linkedin and Facebook for me, which saves me time in maintaining an active presence everywhere (that’s exhausting!). Thanks for providing that 1500 word description of the conference theme and the 20 or so sub streams (surely my work will fit into one of them), however I only have 140 characters to play with on Twitter. It’s going to take me 20 minutes or so to understand the theme enough to condense it. You are lucky I really want other people to come so I will spend the time, here’s what I came up with:

@thesiswhisperer: Hey! Check out this: “”Exploring the multi-dimensional dimensionality of performance based network theory” sounds great! Who’s coming with?

Oops – that’s 139 characters already. Pity your conference title is so long! I haven’t even told my followers that it’s put on by the Society of Serious Thinkers yet. Let’s try that again:

@thesiswhisperer: call for papers on social performance theory for conference in sunny locale from the Society of Serious Thinkers: ….

Oh. Wait.

You didn’t provide me with the link to a landing page on the web. I can’t possibly give my followers all the details in tweets.

Hmmm.

Just a minute? What have you attached to this email? A PDF? Brilliant. Goodness look at the lovely picture that you have put on there (did you take that yourself? Aren’t those smart phones great). Look at all the work you have put into centring that text over the image and the 5 different fonts you have used. I’m not sure that ‘comic sans’ really says “Society of Serious Thinkers”, but I’m sure you had heaps of fun doing it. Still no hashtag, but at least I have a webpage now.

Unfortunately you didn’t make that text on the PDF available for me to copy, you must have missed that setting when you were making it from your word file. Not to worry. I’m sure I can copy that link and get all those curly thingies – tildas aren’t they? – in the right spots. Probably.

People can always Google search you right?

Good luck with the conference! See you in Sunny Locale in November.

Sincerely

@thesiswhisperer

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A message from the student from up the back, on the left

We don’t often talk about undergraduate teaching on the Whisperer, but I am beginning to think we should since so many of us do it. Unlike primary and secondary school teachers, those of us teaching in universities do not always have the benefit of a specialist qualification (ironically the PhD itself is the defacto ‘qualification’ for becoming an academic… but that’s a debate for another time!)

My colleague, and ‘go to’ person on all things teaching related, Ruth Moeller was kind enough to write a guest post for those of you who are looking for some tips to improve your teaching. Ruth is the Senior Advisor on Learning and Teaching in the Design and Social context college at RMIT University and contributor to the Teaching Tom Tom blog. This post is written from the point of view of a student in your class who has some ideas for making your teaching better. Enjoy!

Dear Tutor,

Welcome back to a new semester. I hope you were able to take a time off over the summer! I know your research is pretty full-on when we are not about. I have been thinking about last semester’s tutes and would like to offer you some feedback and ideas. I want to make all our lives easier, so please take my ideas in the spirit in which they are offered.

Please start on time:

Waiting for “just a few more to turn up”, is punishing those of us who made the effort to get here on time. If you begin the ‘rule’ of starting on time and stick to it the others will soon learn. If you are concerned we will be missing important new stuff, start with a 10/15 minute review of the lecture/reading so we are using the time productively.

Names are important

I’d really like you to know my name – I know it’s hard when I am one of 300.  There are games and activities that can help with this, but an easy, no cost way to help is name plates. Yes, they may be slightly daggy, but it means that you can call us by name. It will also remind me of the name of the person sitting across from me whose name I’ve forgotten but who I’ve wanted to ask out for a coffee for a long time now…

3. Make the link

Your tute is a great opportunity for me to check I understood (or really didn’t) the key points from the lecture. Can I suggest you use the first 10/15 minutes of the tute to review, reinforce and reflect on the key points? (this may be the first time some of my fellow students have heard the material…).

I have some ideas on how to do this. You could ask us students to take a minute and write down 5 key points from the lecture. This is a chance for me to reflect on what was covered and then discuss with the group, or in smaller groups if the group is large. You might also ask “Are there any parts of the lecture that need clarification?” (Never “that you don’t understand” – I always feel like you are judging me when you say this). To address any points, you can either get other members to help explain their understanding, and /or do it yourself. This ensures that we understand before you add more.

4. Questions

“Does anyone have any questions?”

Silence!

I know it can be frustrating when you ask for questions and get none, or just from the same people all the time. Here are some ideas that may help:

• “Any questions?” is too broad and unfocussed. Try “What questions do you have about … “ this gives focus and is based on the assumption that there will be questions.
• “What comments or questions do you have?” Often I may not have an actual question, but I may have a point to make, or an example to offer.
• When you have asked a question – pause. Wait. Give me time to think. I need to formulate my question then respond (and never ask “any questions before we finish/go to lunch” – you have just signalled that we are out of here and I am thinking about that coffee date!)

We are all adults

Yes really, and one of the most important things that you can do to foster an adult relationship is to ensure that I am treated with respect and dignity. I should do the same to you.

There are many traps I have seen tutors fall into:

• If I give a wrong answer, try “what do others think?”, or “that’s a common mistake”, rather than “You are wrong, can someone tell me the right answer” – that puts everyone on edge.
• If I haven’t read or done the calculation sheet, don’t make a fuss. Yes, it’s annoying, but it is my loss not yours.
• If you need someone to read, ask for volunteers, not “I choose you!” – there may be may reasons why reading out loud isn’t for me.
• If I am late, again no need to make a fuss, just continue. Asking “why am I late, did I know what time the class starts?” etc doesn’t help anyone in the room.
• If I treat you or anyone in the group inappropriately – address the behaviour quickly. You have a responsibility to ensure that the tutes are ‘safe places’. An effective response is, “this is like a workplace and that behaviour is not appropriate for this environment”.

And one final thing, share your research with us, let us know what you are doing and how it relates to what you are teaching. This gives us a chance to see the discipline in a broader context and what opportunities there might be for us to contribute to it later on. When I think about all the tutors I have had, their research is rarely mentioned except perhaps as part of an introduction. It’s  certainly not used as illustration of what we are learning. We are interested! But just be careful of lapsing into ‘war stories’ about your thesis. What a buzz kill!

Thanks for listening and see you in class!

Kind Regards,
The Student from up the back on the left

5 ways to look more clever than you actually are

Not so long ago I missed my flight back from Sydney to Melbourne. When I realised I was eating dinner instead of being on a plane on the way home to my family I flipped out. Luckily I was with the wonderful @witty_knitter, who made me take some deep breaths and finish my sausages while she looked up the number for the airline. When I finally got through to a person at the call centre the conversation went something like this:

Call Centre worker: “It says here ‘Dr Mewburn’ – is that correct?”
Me: “That’s right”
Call centre worker: “And why is it that you missed your flight Dr Mewburn?”
Me: “I misread the ticket”
[a short pause]
Call centre worker: “How did you misread the ticket?”
Me: “Look, I have a PhD ok? It doesn’t make me immune from stupid”

Sadly this is true. A PhD involves an ability to learn new things and a certain amount of gritty determination, but it doesn’t make you immune from stupid. If anything, getting a PhD makes you  more aware of your limitations than you were before. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, if you know what I mean.

In my job I have the privilege to work with some extraordinarily intelligent people. I mean – really clever. Intimidatingly clever. Clever to the point where  I dare not open my mouth in some meetings for fear someone will discover I shouldn’t really be there. It’s not easy to live in a university and be of average intelligence so I have some coping strategies, developed by watching how clever people behave. The general principle here is: if I act like a clever person, I may become clever – or at least I will appear to be clever (which, existentially speaking, is the same thing).

So here’s 5 of my coping strategies – I hope you will write in with some of your own. Those of us who live by the ‘fake it until you make it’ principle need all the help we can get!

1) Wherever possible, be the one to speak last

When I first started going to meetings at the University I was always the first one to jump in and give my opinion. I think this was a hang over from my school days; I was the nerdy girl at the front of the class, always out to prove that I was smarter than anyone else. But being too eager to give your opinion all the time just doesn’t work in the professional world; more often than not people will think you are annoying rather than clever because you appear to monopolise the conversation.

I don’t always succeed in holding the nerdy girl inside, but at least I try. I can’t remember who gave me this advice, but I have tried it now for years and found it to be sound. If you wait and listen carefully to what others are saying it gives you time to reflect on and digest the conversation. If you speak last you are more likely to be the one who comes up with the unexpected, novel or creative suggestion at the end, rather than being the one who is just stating the obvious. If you can’t think of something creative, speaking last gives you the opportunity to connect what other people are saying together and offer an explanation or over riding principle which others will usually agree with – instant cleverness guaranteed.

2) Have some ‘pocket facts’ handy

As Mr Thesis Whisperer is fond of saying, the plural of anecdote is not data. Throwing a few choice statistics about your field of expertise into a conversation will make you look extremely clever, without too much extra effort. For instance, I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in meetings where someone says that such and such must be true about doing a research degree because it was true for them, or because they have heard so often they assume it is true. Statements like “research students are poor communicators and need to be taught transferable skills” drive me really crazy, so I try to have some ‘pocket facts’ on hand to counter these common assumptions.

Recently my friend Nigel Palmer did an analysis which showed that most research students think they bring skills into their PhD, not the other way around. The only skill that students consistently claim they developed while studying for a PhD is library and information retrieval skills. This shouldn’t surprise us because 55.2% of students come to research degree study from the workplace, not from undergraduate degrees and a significant number of them have had a gap of more than 10 years since they last studied. That little statistic usually stops that particular line of criticism of research students dead.

You’re welcome.

3. Learn the lingo

Every place I have ever worked or studied has had its own dialect. At RMIT university we are extraordinarily fond of acronyms. Here’s a list of the ones I use on an almost daily basis when I talk with colleagues:

• ATN
• DDogs
• RTS
• TEQSA
• AQF
• DIISR
• DEEWR
• PREQ
• CES
• DVC R&I

And that’s not counting the more esoteric ones, which I recognise, but don’t have to use often. Mr Thesis Whisperer calls these ‘TLAs’ (three letter acronyms) and they populate most advanced knowledge fields and institutions. Sadly, knowing the right TLAs, what they mean and how they relate to each other, makes you look clever. Luckily acquiring this sort of information is a bit like learning to spell: you only have to learn it once, and if you have a  decent memory, you will look clever for years and years.

4. Beware of jargon

Despite the fact that knowing the TLAs  is advantageous, if you speak in jargon too much the truly clever people will get suspicious. There’s an excellent chapter in Howard Becker’s book “writing for social scientists” (which should be renamed “writing for everyone”) which talks about the urge to “write classy”. It’s a trap thinking you can copy language you see in books and papers and it will make you appear more intelligent.

Now, I have absolutely no data to back this up, but in my experience of university life, most academics are not going to admit they don’t understand you, they just wont really listen to you (or cite your papers). People who can translate difficult concepts into language that others can understand are often more persuasive. Since persuasiveness often conflated with cleverness, speaking clearly and concisely is a winning strategy.  This is true as much for thesis writing, in my view, as it is for meetings and presentations.

5. Turn the problem around

Sometimes problems need simple solutions, not more complex ones. One trick which my boss shared with me recently is to ask: “what should we do less of?”. A disarmingly simple question, but an extremely powerful one. Take your thesis as one example: what can you do less of? The pomodoro technique is a good example of this principle in action. By working in shorter bursts, but with more focus and concentration, you can achieve more than sitting at your desk all day banging your head on the screen.

What do you think? Have you watched clever people in action while you are studying? What have you learned from them?

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PhD derision

Some years ago, while I was still studying, I took Thesis Whisperer Jnr’s to a party for one of his little school friends. While watching our youngsters get sugared up, I took part in the inevitable “so what do you do?” conversation, which, for middle class parents at least, is the equivalent of talking politely about the weather.

This was going fine until I told one of the mothers what I was studying for my PhD and she laughed in my face. Not kindly interested laughter either – out right derision. She paused after this and said “Why the hell would you bother doing that!” To add insult to injury, she went on to tell me she had a really difficult job – as a make up artist (seriously – I am not making this up). Taken aback by her breath taking rudeness, I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. To this day I regret not coming back with a snappy reply. Not that I have anything against make up artists, but I think doing a PhD must be at least as difficult as getting up early to put make up on cranky morning television hosts.

I was reminded of this incident during twitter conversations which followed Ehsan’s post:  “what to say when someone says – should I do a PhD?” (which also was ‘Fresh Pressed’ by WordPress – an honour!). In response to the post @fashademic remarked:

“Now we just need an answer for when people blankly ask, “what’s the point of that research?… my favourite was when someone asked, voice dripping sarcasm ‘how are you going to write 100 000 words on FASHION?’ (!!)”

It seems @fasademic isn’t the only one to suffer through these awkward social moments;  @airminded tweeted back:

“A friend’s 10yo son, when shown my bound thesis, was told I took 3 years to write it. His response: “What a waste of time!”.

It struck me that a list of ready answers, prepared in advance, about the value of PhD study would be helpful, so I asked people on Twitter how you might defend the choice to do a PhD and got an interesting range of responses.  I decided to break them down into ‘moods’ so you can pick the kind of response you fancy depending on the circumstance

1) The smart arse response

@boredpostdoc, whose research is actually sponsored by industry told me how sick she was of people questioning the point of her research. She suggested the sarcastic approach:

“Oh, you know, I want to research something pointless and waste taxpayers money”.

As a scholarship holder I too had to deal with people who thought there were better ways to spend money. My reply would be a flippant: “I am your tax dollars at work”. This always felt satisfying, if a little snarky.

2) The annoyed response

I don’t judge people for being make up artists – so why should they judge me for doing a PhD? @tassie_girl suggested the line:

“Because without people like me, people like you can’t advance your intelligence”.

Another good ‘annoyed’ response came from  @DrBekMarketing: “Only 0.01% of Australians have a PhD, do you want to be part of that group or the other 99.99%?”. Neither of these would have made me popular at the party, but I think I would have enjoyed myself more

Others on twitter pointed out that it’s too easy to get angry, so the next three responses are for when you are feeling more charitable.

3) The “saving the world one PhD at a time” response

Some people are studying how to cure cancer or how to make solar power more efficient – I think these people must have an easier time at parties than @fasademic or myself. But even my topic could be said, in some small way, to be saving the world. In one of my three minute thesis workshop I spend a lot of time helping people connect their research with bigger issues. Climate change is a great one because it touches on so many aspects of contemporary life.

For instance, my PhD looked at how architects gesture while they were doing design work. This had some implications for how you might help architects work and teach in online spaces. If you can help people work online, you don’t have to fly professionals around the world. Better online communication means we can have the best people working on our buildings – no matter where they happen to live.

Ok, it’s a bit of a stretch, but no one can argue that helping to tackle climate change, even in a small way, is a pointless way to spend your time.

4)The ‘let me make it interesting to you’ response

@bfwriter pointed out that part of the reason people tend to be dismissive of PhD study is that they don’t understand it. It’s a good idea to try to find the common ground hidden within your topic, as @saraktrigger remarked:

“I usually mention the lack of research and drop in a few interesting stories. Most people can relate to WW2 so that helps!”

Conveniently for me, everyone gestures when they talk (try not doing it and you will see what I mean), so potentially everyone could relate some of what I told them about gesture to their everyday experience. However, not everyone’s topic is that easy to translate.

One technique I teach in my Three Minute Thesis workshop is to look for the surprising or counter intuitive facts and ideas lurking in your topic and turn them into a ‘bit’. The concept of a ‘bit’ – or individual routine on a certain topic – comes from stand up comedy. Add many ‘bits’ with a similar theme together and you get a comedic monologue.  Here’s my gesture is really strange, here’s why bit:

It’s tempting to think that gesture exists to help us communicate, but that idea is troubled by the fact that even blind people gesture – and they gesture when they talk on the phone – to other blind people! Children who gesture in certain ways while trying to work out maths problems are better at it than those who don’t. In some mysterious way we don’t yet understand, gesture helps us to make speech in the first place – it might even help us to think.

During workshops people have told me amazing things they know as a result of doing their research, like that eating silver will turn your skin blue and that more males are prostitutes than females. In my experience developing a ‘bit’ around these kinds of facts is well worth the effort; I had many fabulous and illuminating conversations with complete strangers at parties after telling them my little gesture is really strange, here is why bit.

5) The philosophical response

Finally, some things are worth doing just because they stretch the boundaries of human knowledge and satisfy our curiosity. As @jazzlinguist put it, so poetically:

“Until space travel is viable, a PhD is how we explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before” (then she added: “The problematic Question I get is more often “what job will you get at the end of it” so maybe I’ll start saying starship capt”)

I’m definitely applying for star ship captain if the job ever comes up! Now I’m wondering how wide spread this phenomenon of PhD derision  is -  have you had to defend your right to do a PhD? What did you say?

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No Custard Pies!

This post is written by Karen McAulay, Librarian extrodinaire who has some sage advice for those facing PhD completion seminars and Vivas in the coming months 

Watching Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks facing the UK’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, surrounded by media hounds and with the world’s TV cameras scrutinising every breath, I couldn’t help reflecting that a doctoral viva voce (or defense) is really very civilised by comparison.

When I attended my viva, there was me, my supervisor, two examiners (one internal, who hadn’t worked with me before, and one external), and the professor chairing the viva.  Now, I appreciate that it’s different in other countries.  I understand that in the USA, you conduct your defense publicly – ooh, that sounds scary, whatever the size of the audience!  Whereas, until recently, the very distances involved in Australia meant that a viva wasn’t really very practicable and you are more likely to be asked to present to faculty.

But if you’ve got a viva voce or oral defense on the horizon, the fundamental purpose of this final hurdle is to get that thesis accepted, even if you have some revisions to do after the viva (or defense, or submission) itself.  These people want you to pass!  You’d like to think that they aren’t generally trying to trip you up, and that their comments and suggestions will be helpful and positive.  There certainly won’t be any intruders or custard pies, no flashing cameras, and no reporters.

So, how should you prepare for your big day?  Let me tell you what I did.

It goes without saying that you’ll know your thesis inside out.  Why not mark key points that you might want to refer to, with those little translucent coloured removable markers?

You’ll also need to ensure that you can cite key authorities to which you’ve referred in your text.  I spent a few hours in the days before my viva, just checking that my key authorities hadn’t published anything pertinent since I last referred to them!  (Write something without my knowing?  How dare they?!)

You know who your examiners will be, so spend a bit of time finding out about their output, too.  It does no harm to read their latest published papers or conference abstracts – even if it doesn’t have any obvious links with your own work – just to get an idea of what makes them tick.  If an eminent academic has a particular bee in their bonnet, you can at least prepare yourself for any niggles they might have about your own approach!

Read over your introduction and conclusion particularly carefully.  Okay, you’ve written and submitted your thesis, but you should try to look at it dispassionately, so that you can at least have a stab at answering the question, “In retrospect, is there anything you’d have done differently?”

If you can find colleagues to give you a mock viva, or if, like me, you’re lucky enough to have colleagues who actually offer to do it, accept with alacrity!  Ask them to pose tricky questions, because what you want to end up with is a little list of tricky questions along with some prepared answers!  There’s no need to memorise them until you’re word-perfect – the very fact of having thought through these questions will mean you’re more prepared for what your “real” examiners might throw at you.

Finally, try to make sure you have a good night’s sleep before your big day.  Keep the bottle of wine for the night after the viva!  My “mock viva” friends reminded me that a viva is actually a unique opportunity when you and your opinions will be centre-stage, offering you the chance to discuss what interests you most, in depth, with knowledgeable senior academics.  If you can convince yourself this is a rare privilege, you’re more likely to go into it with a positive frame of mind – looking forward to it rather than dreading it.  Personally, I’d rather go through my viva again than visit the dentist!

I found loads of useful tips in Rowena Murray’s book, How to Survive Your Viva (Open University Press, 2009), 2^nd edition.  It’s also available as an e-book, so you can access it via your University Library or buy it for your Kindle.

So – if you’re approaching submission time and a viva voce or oral defense is part of the examination process, then good luck from me and everyone else reading The Thesis Whisperer.  We’re all rooting for you!  Let us know how you get on.

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What if your CV is not enough? (part one)

Editor’s note: Recently I read an article in Forbes magazine which claimed the Curriculum Vitae (CV), which we all use to describe ourselves when we apply for jobs, will be replaced with your ‘digital footprint’ in the next ten years. In other words, people will understand you and what you do via searching for you on Google. There’s some evidence that how you behave on the internet already affects your employment prospects.

I don’t know if this future will really come to pass and the CV will die, but it’s an interesting idea for those doing a PhD to think about. If you need to have a clear digital identity to compete in the job market, what should you be doing now toward that aim? So I have asked a few of the PhD students who I think are already doing their digital identity well to write about the strategies they use.

The first in this series is Andy Coverdale, a PhD research student at the University of Nottingham who is exploring how social media facilitates doctoral practices and identity development. He blogs at http://phdblog.net and is on twitter as @andycoverdale. Over to Andy:

I use my blog to develop ideas, to disseminate work in progress, and to create links with other academic bloggers. My blogging practice is invariably informed and shaped by my role as an educational researcher interested in social media, but I wish here only to present a personal perspective based on my ongoing experiences as a PhD blogger, and explain how those experiences have come to influence and contribute to my doctoral studies.

Blog Writing Contexts

The discipline of regular blogging has helped me shape and refine my writing skills, and has been particularly useful when I’ve not been writing towards my thesis, such as during intense periods of data collection and analysis. Blogging has given me the opportunity to experiment with personal and expressive forms of writing, and challenged me to engage with non-specialist audiences. Whilst guides to blogging often recommend developing a consistent writing style, I’m happy to do the opposite. I have no problem mixing lengthy ‘academic’ posts with short, quirky anecdotes and musings, and integrating writing with multimedia such as images, video and sound files.

Blogs can encourage academic enquiry within a social and discursive environment, and celebrate diversity and freedom of expression. As PhD students, we should be instinctively curious. Many of my blog posts address ideas, concepts and issues beyond the relatively narrow focus of my thesis, exploring social, cultural and political aspects of my research field, and peripheral and interdisciplinary contexts.

No academic writing need exist in isolation. Restructuring and re-appropriating texts for different formats and different audiences is not only an efficient way of working but also a valuable academic skill. I have found blog posts can provide ‘building blocks’ of content for a thesis chapter, a journal article or a conference paper. But I think this process works equally well in reverse. I may find it useful to choose a specific topic, problem or argument from an existing text – writing I may have submitted to my supervisors, a draft paper, or part of a thesis chapter – and ‘blogify’ it; perhaps in response to another blog post or a current debate, to emphasise a personal perspective or experience, or to engage a different audience. And if you think about it, blog-like texts are prevalent in academic writing: in proposals, poster texts, and abstracts – in fact anywhere where you need to summarize, or disseminate to a specific or general audience.

Process and Documentation

Over time, my blog has accumulated to represent a comprehensive documentation of my doctoral practice, charting the incubation and development of ideas, concepts and arguments. As such, it provides a powerful and searchable narrative of my doctoral experiences and my academic and personal development. In adopting this approach, I concede some of this content is (and will become) academically naïve and critically contestable, or may simply be no longer relevant, but collectively it contributes to a transparent and authentic representation of progress that is routinely removed from formal academic dissemination. In this regard, I often find it useful to ‘self-comment’ on my posts, not only in response to another comment (which I always try to do), but as a ‘note to self,’ ensuring that developing ideas, new trains of thought and reflective processes are kept within context.

Engaging and Imagining Audiences

Like most PhD students, I am part of an institutional community of scholars that provides access to formal and informal peer support and supervision. But these can be inconsistent and limited in both scope and regularity. Blogs and other social media provide an opportunity to establish additional channels of dissemination, discussion and critical feedback beyond the physical and disciplinary boundaries of immediate research communities.

My blogging plays a central role in an ongoing arrangement of integrated social media practices that has helped me develop a sustainable network of academic discourse founded on relationships of trust, friendship and professional identity. I particularly value the support, ideas and critical perspectives of a small number of readers who have come to comment regularly on my blog. I recognise the nature of my research field ensures I have access to a critical mass of academics who are actively engaged in using social media, but initially I found it difficult getting visitors to my blog. I actively promote my blogging activities through other forms of social media, in particular Twitter, and comment when I can on other blogs. Bloggers choose their own ‘imagined audience,’ and whilst mine is partly derived from clues to their identity (through comments, retweets and analytical data etc.), I’m happy enough that it is largely inconsistent, transient and unknown. Much of the time I’m probably just writing for myself anyway.

Final Thoughts…

I admit, whilst some PhD blogs are highly revealing and almost confessional in nature, I adopt a degree of self-imposed professional reserve and editorial judiciousness. As such, I can hardly claim that my blog represents a ‘warts and all’ account of my every experience and emotion of doing a PhD. But if I am to claim my blog even slightly represents my doctoral journey, then it is only right that my blogging practice is, on the one hand, confident, coherent and developmental, and on the other, messy, hesitant, inconsistent and inconclusive.

I don’t think academic blogging should be immune from scrutiny and critique, and there’s no real excuse for sloppy or offensive writing or poorly constructed arguments. But I’m not overly concerned about so-called blogging etiquette. With its strong historical links to personal biography, citizen journalism and social commentary, academic blogging has inherited deeply embedded and culturally acknowledged values of subjectivity, informality, openness and experimentation. Blog writing needn’t be subject to impositions of formal academic protocols and orthodoxies.

There are many platforms for academic discourse and research dissemination where opportunities for risk-taking, provocation, creativity and personal reflexivity are virtually eliminated. A blog needn’t be one of them.

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What if your CV is not enough? (Part Two)

5 ways to Poster = Fail

This week I overheard @VGoodyear asking on Twitter about tips for doing poster presentations at conferences. I thought it would make a great post topic because there’s so little guidance in the ‘how to do a thesis’ books.

A poster is a good starting point for your conference career. It’s less confronting than giving a paper because you don’t get peer reviewed and you don’t have to get on stage and defend your ideas. Most of the time posters are looked at during breaks when everyone is milling around, so it’s likely that more people will see your poster than a verbal presentation. You will probably have to stand in front of your poster at least some of the time, so it’s a great way to meet people, especially if you are new to a recurring conference.

But doing a good poster is surprisingly hard. My first conference poster was an utter failure. This is a shameful admission because I am no stranger to the concept. I endured 8 or so years of pin ups in architecture school and worked in advertising.  But I’ve seen plenty of terrible posters since then, so I feel better about it now. I’m no graphic designer, but I consulted with my sister Anitra who is and I feel confident enough to tell you what NOT to do.

Here’s 5 things to avoid:

1. No story

The poster reading experience is more like being at an art gallery than reading a book. You need to tell a story of your research (or part of it) with images and text. Both have different design considerations.

Your poster must accommodate multiple people reading it at the same time, so breaking the text up is a good idea. However many posters end up with a lot of disconnected bits of text on them because the author hasn’t thought enough about the ‘story’ that holds it together. You can use standard story structures to create logical ties between each part; a time line is a good way to do this, or outline steps in a process.

Use images sparingly – more on that later – and consider what purpose they serve. They aren’t mere decoration, but every image adds more ‘noise’ to your poster. Excess noise, at the expense of ‘signal’, can make your poster hard to read. Image placement is a complex issue, so don’t be tricky with angles unless you feel confident; if in doubt line them up with imaginary grid lines. Remember that it’s hard to read detailed text at the bottom of a poster and hold a cup of tea at the same time, so the bottom of the poster is a good place for images and the title.

2. Badly chosen text

Where do I start with this one? It’s hard to know how much text you need, you want people to stand there for about 5 – 10 minutes at the most. Less is more in this instance – resist the urge to tell them everything. The idea is to provoke interest and questions, not tell the whole story of your research.

Sometimes people cut and paste text directly from their thesis draft, which is almost always a bad idea. At the very least your poster should contain an abstract that describes the purpose of the work and write it as plainly as you can – you can’t rely on all conference attendees having the same knowledge and background as you.

3. Horrible typography

It’s hard to manage the text on a poster, but remember that people are reading it at two scales: from far away and close up. You should aim for no more than three kinds of text: one for the title, a second subheading style and then body copy for reading. You will need to have a few headlines to guide people around the page, but not so many that they compete with each other – hierarchy is important.

Make it easy for yourself by arranging the bits of text in a way which takes advantage of the way English speakers tend to read: it’s the same way they write – from left to right and top to bottom. Anitra suggests you start with 15pt font for body text and 24pt font for subheading and more for the title, but be sure to test it out in a full scale mockup and see how it looks. Remember that text is easier to read if it’s flush to the left and ragged to the right (ie: not justified to both sides, which can create unsightly ‘rivers’ down the paragraph).

4. No ‘hero’ image

Images are great to illustrate your text and provide interest, but remember trying to emphasise everything usually means you end up emphasizing nothing. One of your images should be the ‘hero’ – it should be eye catching and bigger than all the rest. The purpose of the hero image is to seduce people to your poster, so it should speak about the project in some way. Don’t be tempted to put it at an angle to make it more obvious and never run text over the image unless you have a good grasp of basic graphic design principles.

5. No takeaway

I recommended having a more detailed handout pinned up next to your poster, or ready to hand, which people can take away with them. This should be beautifully written and include all your contact details – clip a business card to it if you have them as people are more likely to file these. Forgetting to include a takeaway means missing a fantastic self promotion opportunity. You never know where that piece of paper will end up – maybe in the hands of someone who wants to give you a job!

So that’s my top five – does anyone have any other tips to offer? Have you seen any good ‘hacks’ to the poster presentation format which you want to share?

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5 classic presentation mistakes

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Can you hear me?!

While we’re talking about public speaking, can you spare a minute to think about people with hearing impairments? Last week, here in the UK, was Deaf Awareness Week (2^nd - 8^th May).  I normally talk about researchers and  libraries on this blog, but since I have a minor hearing impairment I have a vested interest in this event.

I attended a meeting last week.  Now, I may wear hearing aids, but they don’t have a ‘T’ setting for telephone and induction loop. (I won’t go into technicalities – but I don’t generally need these settings, anyway.)  So, there I was, in a roomful of 25-30 people.  When one person was speaking at the front of the room, it was fine.  But then we split up into three groups for discussion.  It was noisy!

Hearing aids tend to pick up more sound behind the wearer than a person with normal hearing would generally notice.  I could neither HEAR the other people speaking at the furthest point in “my” circle, nor SEE them speaking.  Even without knowing how to lip-read, it does help to watch people’s faces, but most people were facing the group leader – and facing away from me.

At this stage in your career, you may not have given a thought to the practicalities of speaking so that hearing-impaired people have the best chance of hearing you clearly, so I thought it maybe wouldn’t go amiss to give you a few tips.  (You can then bask in the praise when you get an unexpected appreciative comment for your thoughtfulness and clarity of diction!)

• There ought to be an induction loop in most lecture theatres.  However, you won’t know for certain, and sometimes they aren’t working.  So, if a mic is available, make sure you use it.  And begin by asking if everyone can hear you.  That’s all! You don’t need to make a meal of it.  If someone asks you to speak up, take heed.  Speak clearly and confidently – you don’t need to shout.   (It also helps if you don’t gabble!)
• If you’re taking questions from the floor and your questioner is softly-spoken, do repeat or summarise the question more loudly and clearly, for the benefit of everyone present.
• If you’re organising an event and need to have break-out groups, then ideally, having separate small rooms is preferable to having all the groups in different corners of one big room.
• If you know there’s someone with a hearing impairment in your audience, make sure they can watch your face – don’t mumble – and don’t cover your mouth as you speak.  Don’t be embarrassed to repeat or rephrase what you’ve just said, if you think they may not have heard you.
• In an informal, social situation, I find it useful to sit round the edge of a room, with my back to a wall – it’s easier to hear the person I’m talking to, than if we sit in the middle of a room with sound all around us.  So if you’re taking a hearing-impaired friend for a coffee, a meal or a quick beer, this little bit of thoughtfulness may help you enjoy each other’s company all the better.

You can find loads more tips on being ‘deaf aware’ on the RNID website. Thank you for reading this – you’re already helping to make the world a better, more equal place!

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What the wiki?!

How a librarian can be a post grad’s best friend

WIFM

At a recent conference I was impressed by one presentation by a PhD student: an observational study of learners in online environment. The theories were interesting, the method was sound and the results were interesting, so I was surprised that I was the only one asking a question at the end.

Following the Thesis Whisperer rules of Networking, I sought the presenter out at the tea table to continue the discussion. The student was more than happy to talk, in fact she seemed relieved someone in the audience had ‘got it’ and thanked me for asking a question. She was a bit depressed at the seeming lack of interest in her work and wondered if the topic was just too ‘theoretical’ for this conference crowd, who were mostly educational technology specialists.

While it’s true that not many people in the audience were professional types who did not have PhDs, they weren’t dummies. In fact the room was full of the sort of people who could do PhD if they really wanted to. In my opinion the student’s problem was not ‘theory’ or the level of sophistication of the people in front of her, but a failure to connect with the audience.

As my friend Jonathon says: “If your audience didn’t get it – it’s your fault, not theirs”.  In this case, while the student adequately explained the theories and her interpretation of the data, she failed to explain why it mattered for this particular audience. There was no clear sense of the “What’s in it For Me” (WIFM). As a consequence, some of the audience left half way through and others looked like they were taking the opportunity to nap off some of the jet lag.

When you think about it, an academic audiences are not so different; the WIFM still needs to be there. The reason academics have a higher tolerance for theory is because academic work is largely theoretical. I enjoyed the student’s presentation because the theoretical insights were interesting for my own theoretical work. Although the student’s work could have solved some practical problems for the rest of the audience, she didn’t point these out. This was the kiss of death for question time: even if some of the audience found it interesting on an abstract level, they couldn’t think of any questions to ask so the presentation fell a little flat.

I’ve been thinking about this issue of theory and the WIFM factor because I was invited by the University of Sydney Nursing school to come up and give the keynote at their 2010 research week in July. Keynote addresses are given at the start, and sometimes and the end, of academic conferences and events, usually by well known scholars who have an interesting point of view – so I was flattered they asked me.

Giving a keynote is a big responsibility because it is meant to help set the tone for the rest of the event. A good keynote gets you thinking differently. Most keynotes are what Rugg and Petre (2010) would call “consciousness raising papers”. Papers which are speculative and attempt to provide the audience with another angle on current problems. Good keynotes are interesting, provocative – even emotionally moving. The very best one I have ever seen is by JK Rowling at the commencement address at Harvard University which actually bought tears to my eyes.

I am a keynote virgin, so I immediately started to do some research on how to go about it (ok, by ‘research’ I mean typing ‘How to do a Keynote’ into Google). After reading lots of advice my hunch is, despite the differences in scale, what makes a good keynote is the same as what makes a good academic presentation of any sort. However the problem of the keynote, as a format, foregrounds certain questions of presentation style. If you plan to be provocative or interesting, researching the audience in advance is vital because you need to be able to imagine how they are likely to react to your propositions.

When we approach a normal conference or seminar presentation we tend to think we know the audience already – but do we really? This post from the Public Speaking Blog had a good list of things you should try to find out about your audience before you craft your presentation. All the suggestions are good and useful, but one in particular stood out for me: try to understand the challenges facing the audience.

It can be easy to misunderstand the nature of the challenges the audience is facing in their professional life. Our hapless student thought she could provide a theoretical explanation and that would be enough. She illustrated the theory with data, but she never told us what problems it would help with and how exactly an understanding of the theory could be applied in practice. She could have done this easily with a case study or a story, rather than just giving us her interpretation.

You can get a better grip on the challenges your audience face by asking yourself: what do my audience have to do in their daily work? If you can help them do  it, you have the WIFM. But you don’t get very far just lecturing professional people about ‘the right thing’ to do – you must convince them that you understand the nature of the problem. Most problems in professional life are complex and those who deal with them want to see that you know this. This is where empathy comes into the picture.

Empathise with your audience and their problems and you are most of the way there. Take this blog post as an example – you, dear reader, are trying to pass your PhD, not just write a thesis. I know what that’s like because I’ve done it myself. I know from my own experience that doing presentations to people outside or tangential to your discipline is something you will probably have to do at some point. The WIFM in this post is some insight into why some of your presentations might be falling flat and a couple of techniques that can help, but – because I understand the complexity of the problem – I wouldn’t dare tell you that this post has all the answers!

So I am interested in what you think. Do you think this advice is helpful? Have you encountered some presentation advice which you think would help us connect better with a wider range of audiences? Meanwhile I’m off to finish that key note (which I think will be called: “What I learned about doing a PhD by reading really trashy novels”

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5 classic research presentation mistakes

Presentations  for a faculty or disciplinary audience are subtly different to those you give at a conference, but not talked about as frequently. These ‘internal’ presentations are important because they tell your colleagues what kind of researcher you are; it helps you socially and academically to perform well to your peers.

This topic occurred to me as I sat in on a couple of examinations (vivas), completion seminars and a confirmation or two in recent weeks. I have sat through literally hundreds of assessment presentations if you count my years in purgatory architecture school. So here’s my top five classic research presentation mistakes, but I’m going to stick with the verbal problems here because there are many great presentations about graphics, such as ‘how not to suck at powerpoint’ and ‘how to make you presentation boring’.

1) TMI

Too much information (TMI) is the most common mistake I see and one I have indulged in a few times myself. I see it most often in completion seminars where the student has a full draft and can no longer see the forest for the trees. You know that you are heading for TMI when you start to feel like you are drowning in facts and figures which don’t seem to relate to each other. The presentation can seem full of tangents, where the student veers off course to explain, often in painful detail, definitions, counter arguments, collection problems and the like. It’s frustrating to listen to because you feel like the student is never going to get to the point. By the time they actually do, you have lost interest and started thinking earnestly about lunch. A presentation like this is unlikely to make you look like a lightweight, but it can make you look more confused than you are.

2) All theory, no action

It’s a difficult line to walk with theory sometimes. Not enough can make your project look lightweight; too much can make it look like you spent 4 years gazing at your navel and not *doing* anything. Recently I watched a creative research viva, which involved some design work along with a theoretical ‘exegesis’. The student spent the majority of her presentation explaining the theory behind practice based research in exquisite detail; in fact she did rather a good job of this, but she didn’t leave enough time to talk about her project work.

It must have seemed like a good strategy because her examiners were not from the design research field, unfortunately these people had already read her text, which went through much of the same explanation, and the rest of the audience were designers – who already knew the arguments. Instead of reassuring the examiners that her research approach was legitimate, the second lengthy exposition gave the perverse impression that the student was defensive and unsure of herself. I think it’s best to keep explanations of theory short and precise, but tell the audience you are happy to address it during question time. It makes you look smarter if you can answer theoretical questions on your feet anyway.

3) Why are we here?

Sometimes students race through an explanation of data without enough lead in for me to understand what the problem was in the first place. Without an explanation – however cursory – of the bigger world in which the research is situated I cannot understand fully why the research matters. A more troubling manifestation of the ‘why are we here?’ problem is when the student that doesn’t tell us what the research means at the end of it – data and interpretations are offered but there’s no sense of what might come next, what use the research could be or how it changes anything in that bigger world beyond the thesis.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like to see that the researcher has some questions remaining, or that there were questions which are raised by doing the research in the first place. Perhaps people leave these out in an effort to make the research seem ‘finished’ or ‘under control’? I’m not sure – but please tell me why I am here because otherwise I could be doing my own work and I will come away from your presentation feeling cranky.

4) Undigested text

Oh boy – where do I start with this one? Reading straight from your paper or thesis is almost always a mistake. Most academic text is not, as they say in the music industry a ‘radio friendly unit shifter’. We all know that what sounds delightfully erudite on the page can come across as pompous out loud… but it’s a trap which so many of us fall into again and again. I’m as guilty as the next person of reading out chunks of written text rather than working on removing the ‘clutter’ for a clearer verbal explanation. Earlier in my career I did it because I was afraid of looking dumb, now it happens when I haven’t taken enough time to prepare my presentation. Someone estimated that a good one hour presentation takes about 30 hours to prepare – they are probably right.

5) Question time = fail

Being able to give a good performance during question time is a vital skill because it shows people what kind of academic you are when you are when you are off script. Unfortunately a lot of academics are old hands at asking tricky questions of research students – and they know all the brutal ones. The most common one in a confirmation presentations is “What is your research question?”. It’s an easy hit because usually the question (if there is one – rather than half a dozen) is so convoluted that it is easy to make fun of or rip to shreds. Sometimes it’s merely the tone in which the question is delivered – of barely concealed derision – which is unnerving, especially to beginners. I think the key is to stay calm and take your time to answer. It can help to write the question on a piece of paper.

So – what presentation mistakes would make it to your list?