Learning from others
I’ve continued reading in preparation for this PhD journey, but lately I’ve been reading about the PhD – experiences from others who are going through the process. I’m finding others who are about to begin the journey, are early into the process of working on a PhD and/or Ed, or those who have finished the journey. These stories are certainly context specific, but there is something to be learned from each persons story and their experiences. I am happy that others have willingly shared their journey, while openly capturing their thoughts and events on their blog sites.
This reading and reflecting was prompted by a couple of events.
First, the news that Bonnie Stewart tweeted has been offered a tenure track position at the University of Windsor. She will be taking up residence in Windsor which means that proximity may allow for a closer academic networking relationship. The other factor to this is the potential for her to be indirectly involved with my PhD journey since I’m engaged in a joint program with Lakehead, Brock and Windsor.
The second event was an email from the Lakehead graduate student’s department, not indicating if I’d been accepted, but rather if I was interested in working as a graduate assistant. Since I know others may need the funds more than I will, and that taking this position may mean I would not be able to supervise graduate students myself, I deferred and declined. All this is reminding me that this path I’m on is set and my feet have started walking toward my destination. I need to continue to capture my thoughts, feelings and impressions as I go.
That’s when happenstance led me down the path to find Lisa’s blog about her learning journey and it was many hours later when I finally came up for air.
So, Lisa Hammershaimb is Pixels + Tweed [pixelsandtweed.com]. She is a design student who is currently completing a Ed at the University of Athabasca. She has blogged about her process and experience [lisasdesignjourney] She shared digital versions of her assignments using Academia.edu. She created categories and wrote about her courses as a progression through the program. The journey comes alive as record of her experiences and emotions.
Laura Gogia [lauragogia.com]writes a blog called Messy Thinking where much of what she learns, she shares here. It’s a little tricky finding specific or direct categories or easy ways to pull out posts about her PhD process, but this one resonated with me when it was happening so was happy to find it again in her blog collection – On having your dissertation defence live-tweeted and The Other Side, which leads to many other posts along her journey. Her Argument for Multimodal Scholarship is an interesting one which may connect to what I do or hope to accomplish in my PhD research stream.
Catherine Cronin is just wrapping up her PhD process. I caught a tweet on Dec. 21st about her handing in her dissertation on the shortest day of the year. She has blogged about the experience at catherinecronin.net but many of her previous posts are linked in, since she has recently opened up her own domain using Reclaim Hosting. She also has a profile on Google Scholar, Academia.Edu (done through her higher ed organization?) and ResearchGate.
Caroline Kuhn is a researcher in similar areas of interest and I’ve connected with her through the GO_GN network (also on twitter GOGN network). I watched her webinar where she describes her research and will continue to follow, learning along the way.
Reflections as a result of these rambling readings:
Academia.edu extensively uses advertising which impacts the reading experience, so it’s not a location where I’ll post my work. I have an account, one I started quite some time ago but never used. Now that I’ve seen how it treats academic papers, I’ll rethink using this as a repository for my work. But I’ll need to think of the implications. How will this impact my credibility as an academic author? Do I care? What other open and accessible spaces are available for academia? Which ones did I use in the MET program and are these still relevant? Laura Gogia posted one document on Issuu (Learning beyond the content report) which caught my attention, as an alternative to Academia perhaps. I’m also interested in how Catherine Cronin is using SlideShare (LinkedIn) to share presentation notes [Open Education and Digital Identities].
Categories and tags matter. On this blog site, as with other blogs, I set up specific categories that I think are relevant but I tend to think of my audience rather than my own needs. I’ll need to rethink how categories and tags can support the ‘research’ of my own learning and establish these strategically. Looking at Lisa’s blog site, she has categories for courses and academic writing which may be a helpful structure for me to mirror. Looking at Laura’ blog site, she didn’t necessarily use categories but the strategic use of tags helps me find and connect to posts of interest. With Catherine Cronin’s blog, it’s easy to find with the categories and tags found at the bottom of each post.
Being open doesn’t always mean what I think it means. More on that in the next post!
