Blogging as an ethnographic Blogging as an ethnographic tool to study PhD tool to study PhD

developmentdevelopment

Some thoughts and questions

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A brief description• A group of candidates at the University of

Sydney (including me) are keeping weblogs on their process

• The blogs are behind a firewall and not open to the world at large

• We can post unpublished entries that are saved but not read by the others

• We are also reading each other’s blogs and commenting on them

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What does a PhD blog look like?• My public PhD bloghttp://manainkblog.typepad.com/faultlines/

• Paul’s bloghttp://teusner.org/2006/11/13/nexus-analysis/#comments

• Kevin’s bloghttp://theory.isthereason.com/

• Jean’s bloghttp://creativitymachine.net/

• Sarah’s bloghttp://e-mentoringresearch.blogspot.com/

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Project

Product (thesis)

PhD!!!!!‘writing up’

marking

doing the research

reading the literature

How is the PhD conceptualised?

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Project

Product (thesis)

PhD!!!!!

What else could usefully be examined?

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What has been investigated?• What does the process mean to

– the candidate? (Lee & Green, 1999; Johnson, Lee & Green, 2000)

– the supervisor? (Pearson & Brew, 2002)

– the university? (Neumann, 2004; McWilliam, 202)

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What I want to know is…• To what extent can blogging help support

candidates in the process of development that characterises the PhD?

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Struggling with ethnographic methodology

• Is my study naturalistic or interpretive?• How can I fairly represent my participants?• “… ethnography inscribes the human crises of a

specific culture. It endeavors to connect those crises to the public sphere, to the apparatuses of the culture that commodify the personal, turning it into a political, public spectacle.” (Denzin, 1999, p.512)

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Moving ethnography online• Is the internet a cultural artefact or does it

constitute a culture?• What are the implications of doing an

ethnography among people you may never see or hear?

• What does it mean to join or leave a community when you’re never really ‘there’?

• It’s the ethnography you do by the seat of your pants…

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Why blog?to update others on activities and

whereabouts

to express opinions to influence others

to seek others’ opinions and feedback

to “think by writing” to release emotional tension

(Nardi, Schiano & Gumbrecht, 2004, p4)

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Why use blogs? They are always everywhere available – literally

true with the introduction of moblogging PhD candidates already familiar with the internet

as a source of information, communication, and perhaps also support and organization

Participants retain control of their blog – it won't disappear at the end of a 60-minute interview.

Blogging emphasises the idea of PhD as process rather than project.

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Additionally…• Blog as cyberdesk• Capacity to express personality in setup,

colours, pictures etc• Blogging has “…the capacity to engage people

in collaborative activity, knowledge sharing, reflection and debate, where complex and expensive technology has failed” (Williams & Jacobs, 2004, p232).

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Postgraduate pedagogies?• Development of autonomous scholar (Johnston, Lee &

Green, 2002)

• Related to the basis of online pedagogy?

• Community of practice? (Boud & Lee, 2005)

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Some final questions

• What stories (and counter-stories) need to be told?

• What spaces are there for different practices and voices in post-graduate contexts, including research in and for postgraduate studies and pedagogy?

(Johnston, Lee & Green, 2000, p146)

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Boud, D., & Lee, A. (2005). ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education, 30(5), 501-516.

Denzin, N. K. (1999). Interpretive ethnography for the next century. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5), 510-519.

Forte, M. C. (2005). Centring the links: Understanding cybernetic patterns of Co-production, Circulation and Comsumption. In C. Hine (Ed.), Virtual methods. Oxford: Berg.

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.Johnson, L., Lee, A., & Green, W. (2000). The PhD and the autonomous self: Gender, rationality and

postgraduate pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 25(2), 135-147.Lee, A., & Williams, C. (1999). 'Forged in Fire': Narratives of trauma in PhD supervision pedagogy.

Southern Review, 32(1), 6-26.McWilliam, E., Singh, P., & Taylor, P. (2002). Doctoral education, danger and risk management. Higher

education research and development, 21(2), 119-129.Nardi, B., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or would you let 900

million people read your diary? Paper presented at the ACM Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, Illinois.

Neumann, R. (2003). The Doctoral Education Experience: Diversity and Complexity (Commonwealth Funded Report). Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training.

Pearson, M., & Brew, A. (2002). Research training and supervision development. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2), 135-150.