Academics’ experiences of professional networked learning

May 10, 2016June 30, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

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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.

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What can and can’t metrics tell us?

April 19, 2016June 30, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

Tuesday 26^th 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

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To blog or not to blog, that is the question

March 22, 2016June 30, 2016 / 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?

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Dissemination events

March 2, 2016June 30, 2016 / 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.

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How are metrics affecting academics’ writing practices?

February 15, 2016June 30, 2016 / 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.

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The long word club

January 25, 2016March 22, 2016 / 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.

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SRHE conference paper on disciplines in Higher Education

January 14, 2016March 22, 2016 / Ibrar Bhatt

Last month (December 2015) I delivered a couple of papers at the annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education. One of them was on this project’s findings so far. The Powerpoint is below:

Acads writing srhe 2015 from Lancaster University

One of the things I discussed with my audience was the strange things happening to disciplines in Higher Education, and the new disciplinary identities emerging. Since identities permeate academics’ writing practices for research, teaching, and even admin work, the paper generated a lot of interest and discussion. Some of these were also tweeted about:

Listening to @ibrar_bhatt talking about academic writing practices captured 'live' through screen recording – fascinating idea #SRHE2015

— Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) December 10, 2015

#SRHE. is the REF definition of in discipline creating smaller more narrow minded communities? Listening to @ibrar_bhatt raises important ?s

— portygadfly (@betterbyfar) December 10, 2015

"How many genres do we have to deal with?" asks @ibrar_bhatt – new performance metrics create new forms of academic writing #SRHE2015

— Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) December 10, 2015

Is "text creep" part of the increasing pressure to account for time us? Big Data's capacity to track every stroke? @ibrar_bhatt #srhe2015

— portygadfly (@betterbyfar) December 10, 2015

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Designing the Academic Self

December 1, 2015March 22, 2016 / 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.

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Affect and academics’ writing

October 30, 2015March 22, 2016 / Ibrar Bhatt

As part of the ‘autoethnography’ component of our research project we have been documenting the team’s views associated with the affective and emotional aspects of their professional writing. We decided to explore this particular aspect of academic professional life, as the affective experiences of academic working life (its joys and pains) are closely bound up with successful and unsuccessful experiences of writing (acceptances of papers, completion of monographs, proposals, feedback, etc.).
Here are some of the responses to the questions we asked in the autoethnographic survey:
1) Tell me about a piece of writing you did which brought positive feelings or joy?

I am quite a synthetic thinker and I enjoy the creativity involved in researching ideas and putting them together in an argument in a new way, or developing a storyline from disparate data and viewpoints.

If I am satisfied with a piece of writing (and this might just be an email that I feel I have successfully crafted), I sometimes go back and read it over several times, enjoying the achievement of it.

I don’t feel the same level of satisfaction when I prepare and deliver an oral presentation which is too unpredictable. I feel more in control of my ideas and self-presentation when I write.

I get satisfaction and pleasure from writing, but wouldn’t say it has ever made me “really happy”. To me, writing is mainly an intellectual endeavour rather than an emotional one.

My writing process goes something like this: initial enthusiasm, leading to a first burst of work on something; getting stuck, accompanied by a conviction that this time, it will all be impossible; relief when something clicks and I see how it will be possible (this is usually when I get from ‘idea’ to ‘an actual argument’).

2) What specifically was it that caused you to be happy?

In terms of process, the satisfaction came from seeing the book as a project come together from the original seminar, through negotiating publication with a good publisher, working with contributors and co-editors, designing the book cover etc. In terms of the topic, helping a new field to come into focus.

With pen and pencil writing, I don’t usually enjoy the act as it tends to be messy and untidy.

Content gives me anger, regret and sadness, but not the act of writing itself.

Online I like writing when I do it unnoticed. I hate being rushed, and I try never to circulate drafts if I am not happy with them.

I was satisfied to recently get a chapter from my PhD published – because it had always nagged at me that I hadn’t got journal articles from it and should have done.

3) Tell me about a piece of writing that you did, the memory of which you associate with negative feelings

A piece of professional criticism which I was commissioned to write. Though I stand by the content of the piece, I don’t think I fully understood at the time how my writing was being used politically by the commissioning body and the whole thing felt very uncomfortable – but perhaps uncompromising criticism is always difficult and confrontational – not my normal style.

I wrote an article for a public media outlet. I did it with some edits from their editor who kind of ‘sexed it up’ a bit. There was a really positive response on social media about the issues I raised, with very few negative comments. Some of the negative comments however got to me. It hasn’t changed the way I write. It’s just toughened me up a bit.

I tried to write a book based on my previous big research project, but didn’t, despite spending a lot of time on bits of it – I think mostly because of other life and work stuff happening which got in the way. I was disappointed in myself – I see myself as someone who gets things done but there were a couple of years when I didn’t. I also feel that although I didn’t have an actual contract, I let down the people who had said they might publish it.

4) What irritates you most about the professional writing that you do (teaching, admin or research)?

I hate doing boring routine stuff. I think this is why assessing repeated exam answers, for example, is such an effort for me.

I found it hard being required to annotate student scripts online with feedback comments but this was really about a technology that wasn’t fit for purpose. I tend to mark when travelling or at other times when I’m not near a large screen computer and mobile technologies are fiddly for this kind of writing.

I loathe filling in templates for things like annual reviews or references etc. Wherever I can, I take the headings as guidelines for writing in a narrative way and avoid filling the boxes.

Writing abstracts is demanding. You have to know what you want to say, or have to discover it by the act of writing. I was doing one this morning for a plenary in a few months, and I don’t actually know what I want to say. I tried staring at an empty, fresh, new Word document and that didn’t work. I moved away from my computer and tried with a pen and paper. That gave a set of bullet points, but not a well-argued abstract. So a lot of wasted time – it wasn’t the right time for writing something new.

I honestly don’t think there is anything that irritates me about the writing I do.

I don’t know if anything irritates me. Technology can be annoying sometimes I suppose.

5) What do you like most about your writing?

The feeling of “flow” of being absorbed in the moment of writing so that you don’t keep track of time.

The internet has also brought a new dimension to my writing as I frequently search online while I am writing to find references, citations, perhaps read a related article, watch a video or follow a trail that informs me about a concept or aspect of my topic more deeply.

The recognition from peers if it gets it. But the best is when my writing reaches people I never expected it to reach and they value it.

What I like most about my writing is when it has an effect. For example if I review an article for a journal and my writing is useful and has an effect.

I like the process of doing it, and it’s nice for my ego when people cite the resulting text. I don’t pay that much attention now, but the first time I discovered that someone famous had cited my work, I could scarcely believe it.

I like the feeling of thoughts clunking together. I like the neatness of a well-structured piece of writing. I like finding just the right word to make a sentence work.

6) What do you think about this quote from the writer Dorothy Parker? “I hate writing, I love having written”Do you feel the same? Try to explain your answer.

Yes, I agree. Those horrible hours chained to a computer and not going out for fun, contrasted with the satisfaction of seeing something I’ve written appearing in print. But the opposite can be true too. Enjoyable mornings can pass working and making progress on an article or a chapter.

I understand what Parker means. Writers of all types often say that the process is torturous. There must therefore be all the more satisfaction in having done it, and being rewarded for all that hard work. I love having written, and in that sense I agree with Parker, but I also like writing. It seems rather indulgent not to.

I know what she means. I often hate the idea of writing, but when I’m not writing I feel edgy. When I’m writing regularly I feel much saner. Though I’m not sure I love having written either – I am often reluctant to look at things I have published.

We are finding that affect and its associations with academics’ writing is emerging quite a bit in our research data, chiming with other research that focuses on the social aspects of writing and the importance of motivation and supportive culture in which academic work can emerge (e.g. Cloutier 2015; Murray 2015).

Do the responses above correlate with your experience? If so, how? And if not, how would you respond to the questions we posed?

References:

Cloutier, C. (2015) How I Write: An Inquiry Into the Writing Practices of Academics, Journal of Management Inquiry, DOI: 10.1177/1056492615585875

Murray, R. (2015) Writing in Social Spaces: A social processes approach to academic writing, Abingdon: Routledge.

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The only linguist in the room

October 3, 2015March 22, 2016 / Sharon McCulloch

On 15^th 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?

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The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation

Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace

Academics’ experiences of professional networked learning

What can and can’t metrics tell us?

To blog or not to blog, that is the question

Dissemination events

How are metrics affecting academics’ writing practices?

The long word club

SRHE conference paper on disciplines in Higher Education

Designing the Academic Self

Affect and academics’ writing

The only linguist in the room