Author: Sharon McCulloch

Academics’ experiences of professional networked learning

/ Sharon McCulloch

The project team have been presenting our findings on academics’ experiences of professional networked learning at the 2016 Networked Learning Conference. The slides can be found here: NLC10may2016_slides

It was a thought-provoking conference overall, with many sessions, including Helen Beetham‘s and Magda Bober‘s talk, echoing some of the themes that have emerged from our research. Helen talked about the disaggregation of professional roles in academia, including the blurring of boundaries between personal and professional time and identities. This is a major concern for our own participants – almost without exception, people talked about the pressure / drive to check email using portable digital devices, even when when not ‘at work’, and about concerns around the ways their identity could be constructed online. Magda talked about the ways in which students and staff in HE use mobile devices, and the symbolic meanings these held for these two groups.

What can and can’t metrics tell us?

/ Sharon McCulloch

Tuesday 26th April sees the third of four interactive workshops on the role of metrics in academic life, run by the Academics Writing  project, alongside  Masud Khokhar and Tanya Williamson of Lancaster University library, called What can and can’t metrics tell us?

Higher education institutions in the UK have to justify how they spend their research funding and demonstrate that this spending resulted in high quality research outcomes. This is achieved mainly through the REF (research excellence framework) and bibliometric measures associated with it. The research activity of individual academics, departments and institutions is measured in various ways and the resulting data used for a range of purposes. But are we asking the right questions? And are we using the data in an appropriate way?

This interactive workshop is part of the Designing the Academic Self series, and explores the ways in which quantitative indicators of research output are used, by both institutions and individuals. We begin by exploring what exactly are we trying to measure, and consider how well are the metrics we generate can do this. We will talk about case studies of how metrics are currently being used in different UK institutions, and will consider the potential positive and negative effects of these on academics.

To book a place, visit Eventbrite 

To blog or not to blog, that is the question

/ Sharon McCulloch

Our PI Karin participated in a public lecture in Lancaster last week on the theme of Teaching, Tweeting, and Trolling – Our Online Worlds.  In addition, I had the pleasure of going to Sweden to give talk at Stockholm University’s department of English on behalf of the Academics Writing project. In both of these talks we shared findings on how academics’ writing practices have been affected by technological changes.

We asked our participants if they did any writing on digital platforms such as Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, and found a bit of a trend across the disciplines (bearing in mind that our sample is too small to draw generalisations). Not many of the mathematicians used these platforms, while historians tended to speak rather more positively about them, even if they didn’t actually use them much.

The reasons our participants have given for not engaging with these new genres of writing include a perception that they were trivial or inconsistent with their professional identity. For example, one participant (a statistician) said, “I don’t necessarily approve of Twitter and Facebook so I tend to avoid them”. But these feelings of disapproval were not shared by everyone, and others were keen to use these platforms.

One History professor said, “I lay awake sometime last week thinking maybe I should have a blog. Haven’t got around to it. But the blogs I do read, some of them are terrific.” Another historian expressed similarly positive views: “I am really interested in the idea of blogs and sometime, maybe when I retire, I might get into blogs. I think they are really fun. I don’t do Twitter either. All those modes of communication seem quite interesting.”

The language these historians use speaks of the potential pleasures and creativity of these forms of writing, yet their take-up is constrained by the need to produce other, more privileged genres. This was particularly clear in David’s comment, “A lot of the work is grey literature where people have written blog pieces. I think that’s opened my eyes to what’s possible in that area but yes, if there’s time – I think it’s always a question of time. Again, that work is not valued by the university as far as I can see.” Although he saw potential in these forms of writing, particularly in terms of communicating to audiences beyond the academy, he acknowledged that peer-reviewed, scholarly publications take priority, partly driven by institutional demands to produce REF-able research outputs.

Where do you stand on these hybrid genres? Are they appropriate for academics? Should institutions value them more or would this simply add to already heavy workloads?

 

Dissemination events

/ Sharon McCulloch

As we reach the end of the first phase of the Academics Writing project, we are holding a series of dissemination meetings to share interim findings from the research and to invite responses and comments from those whose working lives the research may impact upon.

Because we have been asking our participants not only about scholarly writing, but also about teaching- and admin-related writing, there are interesting data about how academics decide what to prioritise among their workloads, the range of digital platforms and devices they use for writing, and how they create a space for themselves, both physically and psychologically, to get to the writing that really matters to them.

All of which has implications for how we prepare new researchers for their role, and for how their working hours and spaces are organised. Thus, the dissemination meetings are targeted not only at academics, but also at those involved in the professional development or training of early career researchers and doctoral students; those working in research management and support; those responsible for academics’ work spaces, and anyone with an interest in academic writing.

The meetings are on the 18th of March and the 19th and 22nd of April at universities around the North of England. If you’d like to attend, get in touch with Sharon on s.mcculloch@lancaster.ac.uk for more information. and we’ll send you details.

How are metrics affecting academics’ writing practices?

/ Sharon McCulloch

Academics are increasingly subject to a range of ‘metrics’, attempts to produce a quantitative measure of the reach and impact of research (and, increasingly, teaching). Research metrics include measures at the level of the individual, such as the h-index (a measure of an individuals’ research output and the extent to which it is cited), at the level of individual papers such as numbers of downloads or numbers of citations, and at the level of journals such as the ISI ‘journal impact factor’, worked out on the basis of citation rates across a journal’s outputs. Newer metrics – ‘altmetrics’ – try, in addition, to capture the wider range of ways in which research publications can have an impact in the virtual world, producing measures based on numbers of views, downloads, saves, shares and recommendations online. All these metrics are becoming increasingly important in recruitment to academic positions, promotion, and of course assessment of academic departments via research assessment exercises such as the REF.

The existence and influence of such metrics has a range of effects on academics’ writing practices. They impact, for instance, on the selection of journals to write for, genres to write in and topics to focus on. Academics are increasingly expected to engage in self-promotional virtual practices including maintaining professional webpages and academic social networking, and these activities can have a direct effect on the newer altmetric quantitative indicators.

The second of four interactive workshops takes place this week, exploring the ways in which quantitative indicators informed by digital technologies are influencing academics’ writing practices.We will report on preliminary findings from the Academics’ Writing project and attendees will have the opportunity to discuss their own experiences of using and being measured via metrics.

Workshop title: Designing the academic self: How are metrics affecting academics’ writing practices at UK universities?

Date: Tuesday 16 Feb 2016, 1.00 – 3.00 pm

Venue: Lancaster University, Charles Carter A15

This series of workshops is run with support from the Northwest Doctoral Training Centre, and is free and open to doctoral students, staff and researchers from Lancaster, Liverpool, and Manchester Universities. Please register your attendance via Eventbrite. For dates and themes of the whole series of workshops, click here.

The long word club

/ Sharon McCulloch

One of my pet peeves is conference speakers who sit down and put on their reading glasses. This is a sure sign that they’re about to eschew slides and read their paper aloud. Moreover, the paper will be crowded with abstract concepts described entirely through words of 8 syllables or more.

It may be called “a conference paper“, but this does not make it acceptable to inflict 30 minutes of unsupported listening on a tired audience. The projector is there for a reason.

I’d been moaning about this when my colleague Mary sent me a link to a blog post by Mark Carrigan,  in which he discusses  sociologists’ habit of writing in unsociably dense, turgid prose.  Carrigan quotes Les Back in the Art of Listening,  comparing academics to “bookish limpets” (2007, p. 163).  So if we recognise our own weaknesses in this regard, what should we do about them?

James Mulholland  has argued that rather than attempting to make complex research more accessible to general audiences, we should simply embrace esoteric knowledge and technical language as intrinsic aspects of dealing with complex ideas. Stay in your ivory towers, he urges, and write books that few people will read.

Carrigan suggests that blogging and tweeting offer possibilities for making academics’ writing more engaging and opening it up to a wider readership. While I’m not completely convinced that that academics who blog are not already preaching to the converted, I do think that Mulholland is missing the point somewhat. The debate is not about whether we should change the books we write, but how we might persuade more people to read those we do write.

The title of this post was inspired by / stolen from:

Gardener, S. (1992). The long word club: The development of written language within adult fresh start and return to learning programmes. Brighton: RaPAL.

Designing the Academic Self

/ Sharon McCulloch

Social media, metrics, preprints, websites – much of our academic identity is now tied up in how we mediate ourselves online. So what should we be thinking about and what should we do?

The Academics Writing Project, in conjunction with Lancaster’s Literacy Research Centre and the North West Doctoral Training Centre  is running a series of interactive workshops for PhD students and early career researchers on the use of social media and metrics, called Designing the Academic Self. The workshops are open to doctoral students, staff and researchers from Lancaster and Manchester Universities.

Friday 29 January 2016, 13.00-15.00

Bowland North

SR10

 Session 1: Who does the Internet think you are?

Sharon McCulloch, Diane Potts, and Tanya Williamson, Lancaster University

Rescheduled from Dec 2015 – please note that this session is on a Friday.

You must register to ensure a place.
Tuesday 16 Feb 2016, 13.00-15.00

Charles Carter

A15

 Session 2: How are metrics affecting academics’ writing practices in UK universities?

Sharon McCulloch and Karin Tusting, Lancaster University

You must register to ensure a place.
Tuesday 26 April 2016, 13.00-15.00

Charles Carter

A15

 Session 3: What can and can’t metrics tell us?

Masud Khokhar and Sharon McCulloch, Lancaster University
Tuesday 24 May 2016, 13.00-15.00

Charles Carter

A15

 Session 4: Metrics through a critical lens

TBC

The first workshop, Who does the Internet think you are? is a discussion of if and how emerging academics can be pro-active in creating or ‘designing’ a coherent online presence, including practical matters such as selecting your online name and keywords, as well as the pros and cons of commonly used sites for showcasing academic work. Click here to register for the first workshop.

By the end of the four Designing the academic self sessions, attendees will have a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of metrics and how such tools can extend the audience for one’s work; of evolving academic writing practices in the face of new modes of dissemination and measurement; and of the critical questions such changes are provoking.

The only linguist in the room

/ Sharon McCulloch

On 15th September, I presented some early findings from the Academics Writing project at the Quadrangular Conference on Technology, Organisations and Society.  The slides from the presentation can be found here. The conference was jointly organised by Lancaster University, the University of Cambridge, University College Dublin and the London School of Economics, and was hosted by Lancaster’s department of Organisation, Work & Technology. In this sense, it was an interdisciplinary event, with talks by academics from economics, history, political science, social anthropology and other social sciences. I was, to my knowledge, the only linguist in the room. However, the Academics Writing project is also interdisciplinary to some extent, and the conference theme Organisational Practices within Contemporary Landscapes seemed closely related to our own exploration of writing practices in universities as workplaces. So off I went, to boldy go where no linguist has gone before…

Like Karin, when she presented at the European Conference on Literacy, and David, at the International Conference on Language in the Media, I noticed many nods of recognition from the audience, suggesting that our findings resonate with others’ research in related areas and/or with their personal experience as academics. However, I was also asked a question that really got us thinking: “You’ve started from assumption that things have changed, but how do you know they have?” I was particularly thrown by this question because the presentation focused on academics’ use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, ResearchGate and the like, most of which only came into existence in the last decade. For a linguist, the mode or genre of language use is an integral part of the literacy practice being enacted, and it wouldn’t make sense to claim that language itself is separable from this. In this sense, we cannot claim that academics’ writing has remained unchanged aside from the fact that it now occurs on these digital platforms. The constraints and affordances of these platforms, both materially and socio-culturally, must influence the nature of what is written. Our data supports this view.

Our data also shows that the use of these platforms is influenced by pressures relating to indisputable changes in higher education, such as the pressure to demonstrate impact beyond the academy, and the importance of metrics in assessing academics’ contribution to knowledge (or perhaps, more accurately, their value to their department and institution).

But perhaps there has been no radical transformation. Academics have always networked. They have always disseminated their research. So perhaps little has changed at a structural level. Will we look back one day and wonder what the fuss was about? Or do we need to pay attention to even small changes, lest gradual erosion washes away the ground beneath us? What do you think?

 

No email is an island

/ Sharon McCulloch

As one part of the Dynamics of Knowledge Creation project, members of the project team are researching our own practice and providing autoethnographic data on interesting themes to emerge from the research. One of these is the fragmented nature of academic work, and the role that email plays in this.

We each received between 3 and 106 emails per day, with the more senior team members receiving by far the most. These included personal messages, newsletters, circulars, and spam as well as emails that required a response. One team member deleted 68% of the 84 emails she received on the day she tracked her email habits, and sent only 5 messages, but it is sobering to bear in mind that this is an academic who is semi-retired!

One team member pointed out that “no email is an island”; those that require action often include links or attachments to everything from events websites to manuscripts, often involving hundreds of pages of reading. Our common strategies for handling emails included checking multiple times per day, dealing with the quick and easy messages first, flagging or marking as “unread” those that require further thought, and aiming for (but never reaching) the Nirvana of “Inbox Zero”.

Many of our research participants have described checking email early in the morning, or late in the evening, perceiving email as a distraction from their “real” work. But are academics unusual in this regard? It would appear not. According to Chui et al. (2012, p. 46) high-skill knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek managing e-mail. In 2011, French IT company, Atos, announced their aim of going email-free after estimates that employees got an average of 100 emails a day, only 15% of which were deemed useful (Chui et al., 2012, p. 30). The same year, in response to union complaints about work-life balance, Volkswagen limited its servers to sending emails to staff between 7:00 and 18:15.

How would you feel about imposed limits like this? Is email a distraction from your “real” work? How do you manage the volume of emails?

Conference talks this month

/ Sharon McCulloch

Conference season is upon us, and the Dynamics of Knowledge Creation team is sharing early insights on different aspects of our data analysis. This week, Karin is presenting a paper entitled The University as a Workplace: New Directions in the Study of Academic Writing at the BAAL annual meeting at Aston University in Birmingham on the 4th of September.

On the 8th of September, David is presenting on The Mediatisation of the Literacy Practices of Academic Knowledge Production at the 6th International Conference on Language in the Media in at the University of Hamburg.

Finally, on the 15th September, Sharon is giving a paper on the use of techno-biographic interviews and what they can reveal about academic identity at the Quadrangular Conference on Technology, Organisations and Society at Lancaster University’s Management School.

We will post links to the slides shortly.