Academic media video

At last I've been given the link to the video I did about my research. Here it is.

Its subtitle isn't quite correct because:

• First, I’m not a doctor yet, although I will be in a couple of months as I’m through my viva.
• Secondly, the words refer to the OUBSS, not the OUBS – too many esses!

But it's heaps better than my attempts in 2010, and it does allow me to summarise my research. And I'm an extra in a maths video here.

Progress Monitoring Reports

It's time for PMR - the six-monthly chore when we have to complete our Progress Monitoring Report. So it's timely that in today's Higher Times Education Supplement Tara Brabazon writes here:

Motivated students and experienced supervisors build a successful doctorate. Any obstruction that separates students and supervisors slows academic progress. This is not a radical statement. It is obvious. If students attend meetings with administrators rather than academic specialists, or submit forms about their progress rather than progressing their scholarship, then their time is reduced for research.

Yes - waste of my time. My fellow third year was worrying about it:

"I have to update my training record and it's taking me ages."
"So why do you have to do it for the PMR?" I asked.
"Because there's a question on the PMR" she reads it out "Is your training record up to date?"
"Oh that! I just put 'yes'."

I got cynical about the PMR's worth the time the office forgot to send them out and a student had to ask for them. If only a student notices them missing, who are they for? If you go to the effort of creating something, and maintaining it but no-one or nothing else ever uses it then it is worthless, an inefficient use of time. Don't do it.

Media training

I went on a media training day,a full day session organised and run by Janet Sumner in the Open Broadcast Unit (OBU) in Milton Keynes. Its purpose was to develop skills for on-line delivery of courses and research, such as podcasts and youtube videos.

It was the best training day I've been on for ages!

They started fast, within half an hour having us in front of a camera and asking us:

• Tell us about your research?
• What are your findings?
• How might we use your findings?

There were four trainees and three trainers, so one trainee would be in front of the camera man and the interviewer, while the third trainer briefed and rehearsed the other trainees. By coffee time we were back viewing the rushes (Rushes are the raw material which are cut down into show reels or final TV programmes) and assessing our performances.

1. we watched the rushes of each trainee in turn.
   
2. the trainers asked for the trainee's assessment,
3. each trainer gave their assessment

So we got a lot of feedback:
Avoid lists and jargon. Give examples - crowbar in your stories. Practise telling the stories you want to share. Make the point. Know what point you want to make. Pitch it at an intelligent fourteen year old. Weight the special words. Practise your one-minute piece to camera (PTC). Learn your script by heart.

Over the interviews in the morning we stumbled and stuttered, some more than others. By the end of the afternoon we'd worked with props, done a PTC and self shoots. The self shoots revealed how relaxed we could be when interviewing each other. So we'd got something to aim for.

I was fascinated by my fellow trainees' work who told us about:

• systems (Kevin Collins)
  
• recycling (Chris Thomas)
  
• Buddhist Finance (Mike Lucas)
  

I'm not expecting to be on television any time soon, though, if you want to see me, you should soon be able to find the edited clips on the Open University youtube channel. This training can help prepare for questions at the viva though, and I need every opportunity I can get to practise communicating verbally.

If anyone offers you the chance to do this training, grab it. It's brilliant.

Post grads as legitimate peripheral participants

Legitimate peripheral participants are participants in an activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991), but on the edge of the activity, hence peripheral. They are legitimate when they are meant to be there, involved and usually learning. Post grads are in training in research so are legitimate and peripheral, but I'm not sure that they get to participate in research activities.
Research activities include:

• teaching,
  
• analysis,
  
• coding,
  
• perhaps interviewing and transcribing.

Open University post grads don't get training or any opportunity to teach, as I've previously mentioned.

The doctoral training workshop (DTW) sessions provide some training, but not learning by doing. For example, the DTW includes a session on interviewing, but not on transcription, or on coding of qualitative data. It's up to the PG to read up. And if you don't realise the issues, then you don't deliberately read up on the skills. Until I read Kvale (1996), and then Tilley (2003), I had considered transcription a chore, not a skill that required reflection. I believed I could create an objective representation of the dialogue that had taken place. But now I'm not so sure and have questions:

• where do I punctuate?
• was that remark a query or a statement?
• which transcript is more accurate - mine or that of the paid transcriber? For example, one of us heard "certain reviews" and the other heard "similar views".

As a legitimate peripheral participant, post grads could be learning from skilled teachers and researchers. For teaching, each PG should be assigned to an OU course with requirements to research relevant literature including web links and current news for the course team, perhaps also proof reading tutor marked assignment (TMA) questions and tutor notes. PGs could be trained on electronic asynchronous forums where they could moderate and be web masters for the course, They could learn about teaching through giving electronic tutorials - the OU uses Elluminate.

For PGs doing qualitative research, they need the chance to shadow experienced interviewers, observing how it's done. They could transcribe someone else's research, and then discuss issues arising from it, so having the experience to reflect on their own transcriptions.

I don't have enough experience to think yet what "sitting next to Nellie" experience a post grad following a quantitative approach would benefit from.

I suspect other universities not just the OU, fail their post grads on these skills, but if the PhD is really a training in research, then post grads must participate in research, and as trainees, they are peripheral. Universities that espouse learning, must legitimate that participation.

---

LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing
TILLEY, S. A. (2003) "Challenging" Research Practices: Turning a Critical Lens on the Work of Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 9.

Qualitative analysis

I've just realised that I could use NVivo, could have been using NVivo, to extract and analyse data from my literature review.

Why did no-one point that out before?

• Because supervisors don't need to know much about software and aren't going to point their students at it.
• Because there isn't training in using software, but training that is either about the product (e.g. Word, NVivo, Endnote) or about the process, and not how to integrate the two.

The best integration the OU has provided in the last two years was through the Professional Academic Communication in English sessions (PACE) when one of the lecturers explained how she'd used Endnote to keep notes and print them off or insert them in Word.

Here are slides that discuss the training issue, from the 2006 ESRC research methods festival. And here's a paper from Silvana di Gregorio on using NVivo to analyse literature for the review. And here's a discussion on qualitative data analysis.