General

Welcome to UWE!

/ Paul Spencer / Leave a comment

On Monday evening of this week, I put on an event for newly registered postgraduate research students at UWE, an event that had been postponed from October. It is something that we run every year to provide a space for new research students to get together from across the whole university. I think this is important because it introduces the idea that there are other researchers around who, whilst not being in the same discipline, are on a similar path.

We opened the event with an introduction from the Director of the UWE Graduate School, Neil Willey. His slides are here:-

Grad_School_Welcome_.pptx
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Neil opened by highlighting one of the Doctoral Descriptors, the criteria for the award of a research degree, to explain that the goal, the end result is to come up with an original and significant contribution to knowledge. He pointed out that it was this that ultimately is the most satisfying, exciting, infuriating element of what most people refer to as a journey. He then went on to explain the place that the new UWE Graduate School will have in supporting postgraduate research students in that journey.

The main element of this gathering is that we invite current research students to pass on their thoughts about what it is like to be a research student to others. I only provided the title:- “What I know now, that I wish I’d known when I started” to the wonderful research students who volunteered to come and talk:- Anja Dalton, Billy Clayton, Amy Webber and Sarah Dean (take a bow folks!). The insights they gave astounded me because if I tried to write down all the hints & tips about being a research student that I could think of, I still wouldn’t have been able to cover everything that they did!

Here’s a flavour of the presentations with thanks to Billy, Amy & Anja who gave me permission to reproduce their work here:

RBI_talk.pptx
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ALWPhDWritingStories.ppt
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RBI_PGR_welcome_event[1].ppt
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I learned things from these presentations, the most common theme in describing a research degree is around a journey toward a summit and that there is a collective term for research students studying for a PhD; the PhDers!

Billy also raised awarenes of a crippling syndrome that pervades many in academia, the imposter syndrome. In fact, only this week Athene Donald wrote about this on her blog..

I then summarised the skills development programe I run at UWE for researchers within which I revealed some of the nuggets of wisdom gathered from years of being a researcher, brought to life through the medium of the Piled Higher & Deeper comic strips. Here’s the overview of what I said:-

Skills_development_overview_2012.pptx
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Finally I summarised the PhD using the fabulous Illustrated Guide to a PhD by Matt Might which helps us all keep the magic of what we do into some sort of perspective.

IllustratedGuidePhD-Matt-Might.pdf
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PhD – The Movie to be screened at UWE

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About 6 months ago, the news of the forthcoming release of the Piled Higher and Deeper live action film had me all excited. Then I promised to try and find a way that it could be screened at UWE – I just needed to find the right reason….

I have. Put Tuesday 24th April at 4pm in your diary folks! 

Update: UWE research students & staff can now register here (may need to log in if off campus)

Phdmovieposter

Phd_mike_02

phdmovie_adverts_2.pdf
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phdmovie_adverts_1.pdf
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And here’s the trailer….

 

 

 

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Digital Researcher #druwe Feb 2012

/ Paul Spencer / 9 Comments

On Wednesday the 1st February, we ran a workshop at UWE on the use of social media in the context of research. This follows on from a similar workshop that we ran in June 2011 for researchers and a workshop in December for researcher skills developers from the SW and Wales.

This time I was joined by John Igoe from Vitae, the website development manager and all round digitally literate bod to co-facilitate the day. John is also the project manager for one of the JISC funded programmes entitled “Developing Digital Literacies”

We have been practicing what we preach in the period leading up to the workshop by using online tools to collaborate in working up a programme for the day. The prezi we used is below.

John & I didn’t meet face to face to prepare the content for this workshop (although we do know each other reasonably well) so we used online collaboration tools to shape the content for the day.

Prezi was used to make the presentation which you can edit remotely & collaboratively. We used the direct messaging function on twitter to make suggestions and google docs to record our thoughts on the order of the programme–

druweprogramme.pdf
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We started out the morning by highlighting some of the hopes & fears that researchers have about using social media tools…

Hope_and_fears

Hopes

Basic overview of what is out there

Getting research out there

To become more aware of others with similar interest & activities to my own

Catch up with colleagues who use twitter/blogs naturally

Which button do I press?

How to quantify opinion (or research data) gathered via social media tools

Fears

Maintaining privacy

Managing a digital reputation

How do I edit the digital me?

Will this become another distraction?

I fear that I have been brainwashed by Clay Shirky‘s Cognitive Surplus too much!

Digital Identity

We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.

“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman

Twitter

We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe

https://twitter.com/#!/ZeeniyaKamil/status/164670413316698112

Power of networks

We discussed a little bit of network theory, illustrated by this video for a TEDx talk by Zella King

Managing information overload

We had a look at portals and aggregators to help manage information streams.

Using social media tools in research

We discussed how research is social & iterative, the benefits of engaging with folks far and wide about your research outputs and how to use tools to make the finding out about knowledge a little easier. We had a play around with some social citation tools, e.g. CiteULike, Zotero & Mendeley

Blogs

We discussed why folks blog – a variety of reasons including:- organising thoughts, mind dump, getting feedback at an early stage etc.

This blog is a just one such example!

Netiquette

Summed up with “Common sense!”

Other sources of information

Here’s a list of things that I have come across recently on the topic of social media in research (clearly not exhaustive!)

A blog about blogging in an academic research context from Imperial College – some really interesting advice and guidance here.

The Networked Researcher blog site which promotes the use of social media tools for researchers – “Digital Professionalism – what not to share”

The British Library – Help for Researchers – “Web 2.0 as a social science research tool”

The Guardian Higher Education site – discussing benefits of blogging as a researcher – “How blogging helped me find my research voice”

The Research Information Network site – “Social Media: A Guide for Researchers”

Thanks to the researcher who attended both physically and virtually!

To progress, or not to progress, that is the question..

/ Paul Spencer / Leave a comment

Updated 22nd February 2013

This week I ran a workshop for research degree students at UWE entitled “The Progression exam”. This is a formal milestone in the research degree journey that pretty much every doctoral candidate at any university will have to overcome. Some call it a “transfer” exam, others a “progression viva” but whatever the nomenclature they all have an aim similar to the following: –

a formal test of progress in the early stages to ensure a suitable basis for continuation on the programme has been established

Whenever I run a workshop on this topic or the related “Writing up” or “The Final Viva” workshops I always try to do two things:-

1) Provide knowledge about the process

2) Reduce anxiety by reassuring doctoral candidates

Recently at UWE we established a Graduate School at UWE with a new (and hopefully improved) web presence that puts all the information about research degrees in one place. We have created sections that relate to the major milestones including the progression exam.

Disclaimer: One should read my post in conjunction with the latest rules governing PG Research study.

Those rules are set out in section K of the UWE Academic Regulations here.

The slides that I used in the workshop are below:

Recent changes

In summary there have been three key changes that were brought into force in September 2011

  1. When a progression report has been submitted, a viva will automatically follow
  2. There will now be two independent examiners for a progression exam
  3. The Research Degrees Award Board (RDAB) is the body to which appeals go relating to progression

Update: It seems that the workshop is useful for research students!

Leadership in Action – The Prequel #LiA

/ Paul Spencer / 2 Comments

This time next week I will be one of the facilitators on a course entitled “Leadership in Action”. This is a version of the Vitae course offered to researchers (both students and staff) to allow them the time/freedom/space to practice leadership in a variety of settings. This particular course is one that has been sponsored by the South West & Wales regional hub of Vitae which allows places to be offered free of charge to researchers from within the region.

The course is structured to allow all the participants the opportunity to take the lead on one of the series of case studies that examine leadership in different contexts. All participants will also have a ‘buddy’ who will be there to offer one-to-one feedback. All of this will be interspersed with “leadership insights” that we facilitators will offer up in bite sized chunks to, hopefully, inspire researchers on the course to think about. These insights are really just thoughts on leadership from our perspective.

The overarching theme for this Leadership in Action course is “Authentic Leadership” and my insight is all about finding the “why” of what we do. I’ve written about this sort of thing before so it was perhaps not too difficult for me to produce a summary of what I’ll be trying to get across.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about.

Much of the insight has been taken from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” and his TED talk based on the same topic..

Focus on… The Digital Researcher #drsww

/ Paul Spencer / 21 Comments

This week Tristram Hooley and I ran a workshop on behalf of the SW & Wales Vitae Hub entitled “Focus on… The Digital researcher and you“. This is one of a series of workshops aimed at those staff in universities who support the devlopment of researchers.

The aim of the day was to take a closer look at the use of social media in the context of research not just from the perspective of the researchers we support but also as a means by which we can improve our own professional practice.

In recent times there have been discussions in the researcher development community about how to improve on what we do; to find different ways of engaging with research students, staff and their supervisors.

Tristram and I worked together on preparing for the day using Prezi, an online presentation platform that makes it easier to collaborate. Here is the presentation that we used:

dig researcherDigital Researcher #drsww on Prezi

 

One of the things that I am interested in is using social media to collaborate and/or share practice with researcher development folks. During the workshop we will be exploring how we might do this.

All thoughts welcome.

 

What makes a good researcher?

/ Paul Spencer / 5 Comments

One of the things that is central to the world of researcher development is the question of “what makes a good researcher?” In other words, what are the skills and/or competences that researchers should aspire to or seek to acquire to become good at what they do?

Around 10 years ago a bunch of folks from the UK Research Councils and the UK GRAD programme (the predecessor to Vitae) set about describing what skills a doctoral candidate should have developed by the time they complete a PhD and it was published as a Joint Statement on Skills.

This statement included the transferable skills that Sir Gareth Roberts espoused in his report to HM Government, “SET for Success” (2002). It was the catalyst for many of the researcher skills development programmes that are now on offer and provided a useful framework for researchers themselves to reflect on their own progress as a researcher.

Fast forward a few years, there were people in the Higher Education sector who felt that the Joint Skills Statement was limited by the fact that it stopped at the end of a doctoral degree and that it didn’t reflect the changing emphasis on engagement and impact of research with society. This in turn led to a project to design a comprehensive framework that would describe the researcher development journey beyond the PhD.

In 2010, the successor to the Joint Statement on Skills was launched, the Researcher Development Framework (RDF).

The RDF sets out the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of successful researchers and are grouped into four major domains, 12 sub-domains which are then further divided into 63 descriptors which are designed to aid researchers to understand what areas they should focus on to become a “good researcher”.

It was also conceived to provide skills developers like me with a comprehensive framework with which to design activities and workshops to help researchers to understand where they are in their own development.

The RDF can appear a little daunting to the uninitiated, so my advice is to try and view it at the broadest level until it feels more familiar.

I’ve started to introduce the RDF into the skills development programme I offer by colour coding the workshops listings to correspond (broadly speaking) to the major domains.

I’m interested (as ever) in the views of researchers and/or colleagues on how to improve the integration of the RDF into the programmes we run.

Vitae have produced an online planning tool designed to help individuals to self-audit against the descriptors of the RDF, have a look…

 

If you are interested in using the RDF Planner and are a UWE researcher then please use the form below to get in touch.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Getting Your Research Noticed

/ Paul Spencer / 1 Comment

At the end of September we ran another Researchers’ Forum at UWE, the theme of which was “getting your research noticed”. What we were trying to do was to provide researchers with the opportunity and space to consider how they could go about building up a reputation as a researcher.

We spent the morning in the company of Kate Tapper from Bud Development who facilitated a great session on how to answer the question that most researchers dread:- “So what do you do?”. Kate had four main messages to get across on that day:-

1) Start with why

2) Don’t throw jelly at people

3) Tell stories

4) You are wonderful

The slides she used on the day are here:-

I have written about “Authenticity & finding your why” elsewhere on the blog which explains the idea behind Simon Sinek’s concept of “start with why”; the basis of having impactful conversations with people.

I really like the analogy of not throwing jelly at people when trying to explain research; it conjures up images of researchers desperately churning out more and more data in the hope that some of it will stick in the minds of the recipient. The phrase comes from a book by Andy Bounds called “The Jelly Effect” and is well worth a read.

Much better then to have a story to tell about your research, why are you excited, enthusiastic, passionate about what you do as a prelude to trying to tell anyone how or what you do. We are humans after all and humans like stories.

Kate also touched on a number of issues around courage and vulnerability which are qualities that make us wonderful. It reminded me of a TED talk I watched recently by Brene Brown on that very topic and sums up everything that Kate was trying to say on this.

The afternoon session of the Researchers’ Forum was spent focussing on strategies that researchers from across UWE had adopted to build their reputations in two broad categories:-

1) Building a reputation through publications

2) Building a reputation through communicating to a wider audience

What was fascinating that there were many of the themes that were explored in the morning session that also came up and centred around telling stories, having something interesting to say, to take risks by publishing in more than one area of specialism and making connections.

We were grateful to the panel members, Dr Emma Dures, Professor Jonathan Dovey, Professor Robin Means and Professor Katie Wiliams for giving their thoughts on publication strategies.

Katie Williams shared these top 10 tips for academic writing:

 

We were also grateful to Professor Alan Tapp, Dr Carinna Parraman and Dr Clare Wilkinson who shared their knowledge and expertise of interacting with a wider audience.

Carinna Parraman used a Prezi to showcase the work of the Centre for Fine Print Research.

Clare shared thise presentation with us about the work of the Science Communication Unit with advice on how to engage wider audiences.

A final note is to say a big thanks to professor Robin Means who has been the academic lead for the Researchers’ Forum for the past 5 years and will be passing on the baton to Professor Glenn Lyons.

The convenors and Kate

The convenors and Kate

Robin Means, Kate Tapper & Glenn Lyons at the UWE Researchers’ Forum, September 2011

Never the Twain Shall Meet

/ Paul Spencer / 2 Comments

I recently attended the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in Manchester. This is a gathering of folks who are involved in the skills development of postgraduate research students and research staff where updates on policy and strategic initiatives are discussed. It also serves as a way for all of us skills development types to share practice, find out what’s going on etc.

I was leading a workshop at the conference entitled “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Bringing Research Leaders and Early Career Researchers Together to Discuss Career Development” together with an independent facilitator, Kate Tapper from Bud Development. What we set out to do was to share the experience we had of organising an event for the UWE Researchers’ Forum designed to bring research staff and their managers (Principal Investigators or PIs for short) together to have some discussions about the best way to support the career development of research staff. The main way we did this was to use metaphors to critically examine the issues around career development of researchers yet remaing objective and impersonal.

We thought this worthy of sharing because of the difference in perspectives between the research staff and their PIs was really interesting. The Prezi I used in the workshop is shown below.

 

Never the Twain Shall Meet on Prezi

We had been planning to run this development event for sometime before we did because research staff were telling us that they felt that their PIs needed to be more involved in assisting researchers to make career development choices. I was a bit nervous about how it might work because not all PIs share the same views on how high a priority should be placed on skills development (particularly of the “generic” or “transferable” nature) in terms of the perceived success of a researcher. I was also nervous about how likely it was that we could attract a significant number of PIs to a career development event for early career researchers given the other considerable demands on their time. I am not alone in sensing that trepidation as was confirmed at the Vitae Conference.

So here’s what we learned from running this event:-

  1. We needn’t have worried about the PIs & Researchers not being engaged; they were!
  2. More communication/constructive dialogue between PIs and researchers would be beneficial
  3. The perspectives of the PIs were quite different to those of the researchers
  4. The researchers wanted more information about how things work in research
  5. The PIs felt the need to shield researchers from the external strategic pressures placed upon them
  6. Researchers wanted to make the choices that were right for them as individuals, even if that meant “jumping ship” or changing course

The outcomes of this event were:-

  1. We organised a follow up event where senior managers explained how the funding of research works at UWE and how it fits together with institutional research strategy including how we are approaching the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
  2. The Researchers’ Forum has attracted more research staff representatives for the planning group
  3. The Researchers’ Forum is having an increasing influence on research staff issues at UWE
  4. More PIs and senior managers are engaging with the issues raised by research staff and are willing to contribute their knowledge/experience to research staff events

I’d really appreciate hearing from researchers or researcher development colleagues about their experience of bringing researchers and their managers together to work on improving the career development prospects of research staff.

 

Authenticity & finding your why

/ Paul Spencer / 8 Comments

“Why?” is a question I’m faced with a lot recently, partly because I have small children who tend to utter this word an awful lot, but mostly because explaining the “why” of research has never been more important. I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time now spurred on by recent events like the “Focus on Resilience” course I attended recently, the social enterprise workshops that I have been running and the numerous communication of research activities that I deliver either directly or with talented people like Piero Vitelli.

A couple of years ago I stumbled across a TED* talk from Simon Sinek entitled “How great leaders inspire action” and it really got me thinking about how the concepts he described relate to the world of research. Let me explain.

(* TED talks are addictive, you have been warned…)

In his talk Simon recounts how he noticed a pattern among inspirational leaders and/or organisations in the way they communicate; he cites Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and Apple Inc. as examples of being very successful at inspiring action in others. What Simon Sinek did in a nice simple way was to reflect that communication process as a model which he calls the “Golden Circle” 

why

The idea is really simple to explain; most people communicate in the following order, by talking about what they do, sometimes they will also be able to explain how they do what they do that is different from others but very few people can clearly articulate why they do what they do.

In the case of inspiring people, that order is reversed. They can clearly convey why they are doing something, is oozes from them in terms of passion, enthusiasm, conviction & belief. It’s their cause, the raison d’etre for doing what they do. The difference is that inspiring people understand what motivates them and are clear about the need to communicate that to others.

If we put aside the fact that Simon Sinek is a marketing expert and much of his work is around how organisations (corporate, charitable & military) should communicate to their patrons, the basic message can be easily translated into the world of academe. Let’s take the example of a typical presentation that you can think of at an academic convention or conference. They are usually pretty poor in terms of their presentation. Most will labour the what they do in minuscule detail and some will spend lots of time explaining the how, the methodology, the line of investigation that makes their findings more relevant or better than their peers. Yet the most interesting part usually comes in the last slide or two, the wider context, why this work is a valuable contribution to the field of study.

Imagine a world of academia where scholars spend the first few minutes of a presentation inspiring their audiences by demonstrating their passion and enthusiasm for the subject and, more importantly, attempting to make an audience understand why they should give a damn?

The lesson is simple, find your why and let others see it. That is what makes you authentic as a person, to have that clarity of direction and you know what? As a presenter it is what makes an audience care about what you say.

If you want to see a demonstration of an inspiring presentation from someone who is passionate about what they do and really works to make an audience understand why they should care then look no further than TED again (see I told you it’s addictive!) and watch Benjamin Zander. He is the epitome of authenticity.