Recap: #ECRchat on Blogging your Research

This week’s chat was on the theme of “blogging your research” and was hosted by Charlotte Mathieson, a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.

Following on from the theme of the previous #ECRchat on Academics and Social Media, this week we talked more specifically about blogging your research. We had a good variety of ECR bloggers, writing both independent and collaborative, research and skills-based blogs. The chat explored how to blog about your research effectively, covering issues around the potential dangers of making too much information freely available as well as the advantages of engaging a wider audience, generating potential for research collaboration, and stimulating better academic writing. We also looked at the practicalities of blogging, such as finding the time and how to publicise your blog.

Blogging has generated a lot of discussion recently and in addition to some of the articles quoted in the recap of the previous chat, some noteworthy pieces include the Guardian Higher Education Network’s Live Chat on Academic Blogging: the power and the pitfalls, Rohan Maitzen’s article “Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice“, and a podcast from Oxford University on “Would you blog the truth?”

It was great to see such a lively and productive discussion about blogging, and to find out about so many more excellent academic blogs! Tweets with links to blogs are included at the start of the Storify.

Catch up with the chat via this Storify or read a full archive of the tweets: #ECRchat_tweets_2012_10_25

The next #ECRchat is on Thursday 8th November – UK participants note that the chat will now be at 10.00-11.00; Europe chat time is 11.00-12.00 (CEST) and Australia at 21.00-22.00.

Recap: #ECRChat on Finding a Good Mentor

This week’s #ECRChat was hosted by Liz Gloyn, a Teaching Fellow in Latin Literature at the University of Birmingham; her research interests focus on the intersections between classical Latin literature, ancient philosophy and gender studies. She can be found on Twitter as @lizgloyn, and blogs at Classically Inclined. Here is her recap of the chat.

There were several reasons I was glad that the poll for the #ecrchat I hosted on Twitter came up with the topic “finding a good mentor”. I am going to enter my first formalised mentoring relationship in the autumn, which has been organised by the department as a recognition that I’m staying on for an extra year and want to be moving on from the sort of teaching fellowship I currently hold. However, I also have a wide network of people I would call informal mentors, and my relationships with them have developed much more organically and serendipitously. My one previous attempt at a formalised mentoring relationship, brokered by a professional organisation, sadly didn’t get much further than exchanging a couple of e-mails – looking back on the experience, I can see there was a mismatch in what I wanted out of the relationship and what my assigned mentor thought they were able to offer.

These issues were at the top of my mind as I prepared the guiding questions for the chat, and at my elbow was Lily Segerman-Peck’s Networking & Mentoring: A Woman’s Guide, which I cannot recommend enough and from which I shamlessly cribbed! (I got my copy second-hand off Amazon almost ten years ago, and while it has dated, the central meat is still relevant.) One thing that came out of the chat was that in order to identify potential mentors, you needed to make the most of your networks to know who was out there who might have the knowledge and skills that you want to obtain for the next step in your career. Most people were aware of internal mentoring programs within their institutions (or their absence), but plenty of other places to look were suggested – other institutions and other departments, professional organisations, and outside academia altogether. Someone also gave the example of an informal peer mentoring group they have started (around the very civilized basis of monthly cupcake consumption) that might turn into some more formal in time.

Interwoven with thoughts about where one might find a mentor were what makes a mentor good for you. Crucially, there needs to be the right chemistry between the mentor and mentee (or if I’m being properly classical about it, the Mentor and Telemachus), which seemed to boil down to a sense of mutual commitment and interest, the mentor’s ability and willingness to communicate, and the ability to let you make your own mistakes after they’ve given their advice. One thing that became clear was that before looking for a mentoring relationship, it’s crucial to work out what you want from one – without a clear sense of your own needs, you won’t necessarily find the person with the skills and experience to help you. That doesn’t preclude advice coming from unexpected quarters, but it does affect both your attitude to your own career development and how you visualise developing relationships with potential mentors. It was also clear that there was no limit on how many mentors you can have – a team of supporters with different perspectives and an interest in you is a great resource to develop.

The final question I posed for the chat asked how you should approach someone you have identified as a potential mentor. The general consensus seemed to be go for it! Write an e-mail, ask for a coffee, and have a chat about what you think you and they can get out of this sort of relationship. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you’d like to read more from the chat, you can browse through the Storified tweets.

LIZ

You can also download the unedited archive of tweets from the chat here #ECRchat_tweets_2012_08_30.pdf

#ECRchat will be back at the same time next week with your host Hazel Ferguson. Topic poll coming to the blog soon. That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST), on Thursday 6th September.

Recap: #ECRchat on Defining Success Outside of the Traditional Academic Path

This week’s chat was hosted by Katie Wheat, a postdoc in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University. Katie completed her PhD in Psychology at University of York and blogs at Life After Thesis.

Today we tackled the difficult topic of “Defining success outside of the traditional academic path”. I broke the topic down into a few questions to help guide our thoughts. For example, we talked about what we mean by traditional academic measures of success and what their pros and cons are. Measures such as publication output, academic promotion path, and grants were discussed. Many chatters raised the point that pressures to fulfil the requirements of academic success may be detrimental to achieving real success. Such as, publishing parts of a story in order to increase the number of publications by a lab, rather than submitting a more satisfying and complete story.

Next, the discussion moved to the other things we do that may not be valued as highly, but perhaps should be. For example, networking and communication skills and activities take up a lot of time, but this time is not necessary protected or available. We also discussed outreach activities and whether ECRs are aware of the possibilities for recognition from their institution for this kind of work.

The second half of the chat was dedicated to a discussion of how we personally view success, and how we would encourage future academics to think about success. Lots of really positive suggestions came up, including the idea that success is closely linked to happiness. Furthermore, we should be aware of our successes at home as well as at work.

For me, I think the tweets really speak for themselves this week. You can get an overview of the chat from this Storify or download the archive of the entire chat here #ECRchat_tweets_2012_08_23.pdf

It was a difficult topic that needed a little more structure than some previous weeks but it was clear that people have a lot of strong positive ideas about success. There also seemed to be a lot of frustration surrounding how we measure up against the traditional academic measures of success, and how they may be almost unattainable in some case (e.g., a professorship), and even detrimental to success in other cases (e.g., rushing to publish incomplete papers). Overall, I found the chat to be inspiring and uplifting, even if one chat can’t fix the system we are battling against to prove our worth.

Looking forward to chatting with you all again next week!

Katie

#ECRchat will be back at the same time next week with your host Liz Gloyn. The poll to vote is up now. That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST), on Thursday 30th August.

Recap: #ECRChat on Work/Life Balance

This week’s #ECRChat was hosted by Andrew Frayn. Andrew completed his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2008.  He has taught at the Universities of Manchester, Salford and Central Lancashire.  He is currently completing a monograph, Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914-1930. Here is his recap of the chat.

I was interested to see in the vote for the second #ECRchat that ‘Work/Life Balance’ received no votes.  I wondered whether that was because people thought they had it covered, or whether it was something which wasn’t really on the radar for ECRs.  Or, at least, whether it was something people hadn’t thought about in a structured way.  I started the chat by asking everyone which of these was the case, and the resounding response was the latter.  The point was also raised about whether ‘work/life balance’ is an appropriate term; the suggestion that work and life are so clearly separable.

An issue which clearly arose was a need to separate workspace from relaxation space.  Several people noted the problem of being in between jobs, or studying part-time, and having to work at home.  This often means that work feels omnipresent, or that academic work is in effect a leisure activity in itself, becoming a consuming effort on top of paid work.  Those who were able to separate physically or geographically from work seemed to have a better handle on it.  This sometimes meant working longer hours to keep work at work, but a higher quality of time once it was left behind.

The importance of making sure to take time off was stressed in the face of comments about feelings of guilt when not working– perhaps paradoxically, taking more breaks can increase the quality of academic work by maintaining freshness and focus.  A number of chatters noted that doing exercise or manual tasks was a good way to relax.  Suggestions ranged from various types of physical exercise, to yoga, gardening, baking, and many more besides.

Another issue was social circles, and relationships both with partners and friends.  Some respondents felt that it was hard for non-academics to understand the academic environment, workload, and ways of working; others have found that the regular reminder that academia is not everything was helpful.  Even in the first case, it was agreed that having non-academic friends was an important factor in keeping sight of external priorities.

A difficulty in relaxing for many was a lack of funds, and we finished by talking about what things can be done cheaply or for free.  There were fans of camping, walking, and a range of mind-numbing television programmes the like of which I couldn’t possibly recommend – watch at your own risk.  Museums and galleries are often free, but for arts and humanities PhDs and researchers something of a busman’s holiday.

What clearly transpired was that people are doing a range of things to relax, and that many of us need to think more carefully about how we relax and the amount of time we allocate to doing so.  As ECRs become ever-more pressured in terms of the output and achievement requirements to attain a permanent post, so it becomes proportionally more important to look at our working and relaxation practices in order not to burn out.

I’ve organised the Storify into groups about particular topics, rather than chronologically.  I hope it’s a useful resource for everyone – look after yourselves!

Andrew

You can also download the archive of tweets from the chat, here #ECRchat_tweets_2012_08_16.pdf

#ECRchat will be back at the same time next week with your host Katie Wheat. Topic poll coming to the blog soon. That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST), on Thursday 23rd August.

Recap: #ECRChat on Finding and Managing Collaborations

This week’s #ECRChat was hosted by Prof. Pat Thomson. Pat is a Professor of Education at The University of Nottingham and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies. Here are her reflections on collaborations, re-posted, with permission, from Pat’s blog, PATTER.

Some thoughts on working collaboratively

I recently led a discussion on #ECRchat about working collaboratively. A lot of the discussion was about how you find people to work with and what you need to do to set it up. Of course not everyone wants to work collaboratively and it seems less expected in some disciplines than others. However, certainly in the UK, it is increasingly the way to actually realize research projects, to get funding, to generate publications and to manage public engagement.

In our new book, Writing for peer reviewed journals: strategies for getting published, Barbara Kamler and I write about long term writing and research partnerships like ours.

We interviewed a number of our colleagues about their collaborations.  There was not one that did not extend well beyond the professional. Long-term writing and research partners talked about each other as family, as life long friends, as being more and different together than separate.

Some of the things that the interviewees said were important in these relationships were:
•       a shared world-view
•       deep respect for each other’s knowledge and skills
•       the same basic commitment to an axiological and epistemological position
•       mutual enthusiasm for a broad intellectual agenda
•       they had invented a process for developing a similar writing ‘voice’ (and we detail these in our chapter 8)
•       a great deal of humour
•       tolerance of each other’s idiosyncrasies and preparedness to give and take
•       the capacity to have time apart and to pick things up again as if there had been no break

We were interested to see how often these professional relationships were almost instantaneous. People read each other’s work, or had an initial conversation, did a presentation or one paper together and knew that the relationship would work.

Barbara and I got together in just this way. I gave a talk at a conference about writing my thesis, we had a chat afterwards and then decided to do a joint conference paper. We had such a good time together – we found we not only had a shared view of writing, despite our disciplinary differences, but also thought the same things were funny, were both closet foodies and frequented the same kinds of shops. We just wanted to keep going and so we invented a work programme that would allow this to happen.

Not all collaborations are like this of course, and there are no rules about how to form deep and ongoing collaboration. But there are obvious things to do at the outset of any joint work – frank and open discussions of work habits and practices, discussion of particular responses that could get in the way of work proceeding, agreement about who will do what when, developing a protocol on authorship.

However there was a something involved in these long-term writing and research partnerships, some kind of je ne sais quoi, which was really hard for us to pin down. We were struck by how people spoke of each other with genuine affection and when they talked together, we witnessed the level of intimacy they had developed. Indeed, many of them did finish each other’s sentences! This was more than simply liking people, but a kind of ‘best friend’ relationship which operated across blurred professional and personal boundaries.

I am lucky to have more than one of these kinds of long term collaborations and I can really recommend them as a way to make the production of academic work  a pleasure, as well as work. It seems though that these long term working relationships are things that you stumble over rather than necessarily find if you go looking. You just have to be prepared and open to them when the opportunity presents and take things further if they look promising.

Pat

You can also catch up with the chat via this Storify or view the full archive of tweets here, #ECRchat_tweets_2012_08_09.pdf.

#ECRchat will be back at the same time next week with your host Andrew Frayn, discussing work-life balance. That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST), on Thursday 16th August.