Recently I directed a course entitled “The Socially Innovative Researcher” in the Chancellors Conference Centre in Manchester. I was joined by a team of experienced colleagues from the University of Manchester (Dr Jim Boran, Dr Lynn Clark, Dr Emily McIntosh & Elizabeth Wilkinson) and the wider Vitae network (Dr Chris Russell, Dr Nathan Ryder & Janet Wilkinson) as…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 3 years to get…
This week myself and Janet Wilkinson are running a workshop specifically for part time students. There are two significant new elements to how we’re doing this; firstly the workshop will be be split over two consecutive evenings (in the past we have run this on a Saturday) and secondly we are going to have some…
Read more The Effective Part Time Researcher – The ultimate balancing act?
This week we ran a workshop entitled “The effective researcher- the middle years”. This is a workshop aimed at those who are midway through their doctoral degrees and are looking for reassurance and guidance about how to keep things on track. It is well known among PhDers that there is a period of difficulty –…
At the end of November my good friend and colleague Janet Wilkinson from Three Times Three helped me to deliver a session for the UWE Researchers’ Forum. The theme for the forum was “toward a research active lecturing post”, a topic that concerns lots of researchers and academics. On the one hand there are staff…
At a recent doctoral student conference hosted by the Department of Arts at the University of the West of England, Professor Gina Wisker from the University of Brighton, author of the Postgraduate Research Handbook and The Good Supervisor, was invited to speak about her research. The slides she used at the conference are reproduced here with permission. What are examiners…
This week, Emma Gillaspy (Vitae NW Hub Manager) and I presented a workshop at the Vitae International Researcher Development Conference [#vitae12] on the topic of using social media. This time it was aimed at folks, who like me, are employed to support the development of researchers. The background to this is that researchers are changing…
Read more Social media for researcher developers: what’s in it for me? #vitae12
Around 18 months ago I started writing a blog on Posterous [http://ps-spencer.posterous.com/]. It was my way of keeping my thoughts about the researcher skills development workshops that I run out of my head, allowing me to focus on other things that were coming up. I really like the simplicity of the Posterous platform, it makes…
From the makers of PhD Comics…. This is essentially a competition to communicate your research in an accessible way. It’s part of my life to encourgae researchers to do this, I’ve written about communication here and here. That’s why I’m glad that Jorge Cham is raising the bar and injecting a bit of fun into…
Today I am running a short session with UWE colleagues who support researchers who are applying for research funding. There are three main reasons why I think this should be explored:- Social media tools can really help with horizon scanning – keeping up to date with what funding calls are out there etc. The ability…
The Digital Doctorate 