Graduate students/teaching

Lonely [Australian] PhD Students Use Social Media to Connect with other PhD students.

I can see this being a useful phenomena, especially when you think that all these folks (or half of them) will be in academics when they finish.

Getting into a social connection while students are in school might be a way to increase their circle of influence, especially if those people are in their field.

I also think that reading what recent graduates have to say might be useful. From Tweet to Thesis, for instance, talks about how folks came up with or found their dissertation topics. Sometimes it is when they discovered them.

Should You Go to Graduate School? from a blog at Swarthmore. (This is a very different graduate experience than my MA university. It’s even different than my PhD experience. Does that mean it is only a Swarthmore experience? I don’t know.)

Thinking about Grad School in English? is an excellent discussion put together online by an academic.

I recommend reading all the links. They’re a good way to get a feel for what is going on and what people are thinking on the topic.

Formatting the dissertation:
Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick talks in a CHE article about taking risks with the format of scholarship. I think she makes some good points, but it is also easy for her to say that. She is already done and has a ft position.

Despite that, I think the advice she gave is reasonable/important. If we always keep doing the same things we have always done, we will continue to get the results we’ve been getting.

Profs Use Smart Phones to Advantage

LectureTools [4], developed at the Ann Arbor campus’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching [5], lets students instantly relay questions to their professors and instructors during a lecture, cluing in educators as to which topics need more explanation.

“The key is to engage students through their laptops or cell phones, so they don’t drift off onto social networking sites,” said Perry Samson [6], a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences at UM and the developer of LectureTools. “We’ve shown we can do that.”

LectureTools became commercially available in August after being created in 2009.

Using LectureTools, a student can jot electronic notes synchronized to a professor’s lecture slides and respond to questions posed by the professor, who can display student answers to the entire class.

Instructors can upload video and other content from online repositories as Quicktime or Flash files and can include the material in a lecture accessible for students through the web-based LectureTools system.

Mika Lavaque-Manty, associate professor of political science at UM, said using LectureTools to interact with students helps professors involve students who might otherwise sit near the back of a cavernous lecture hall and check for tweets and Facebook notifications throughout class.

“It really does make large classes seem small. It increases interaction in old-fashioned ways, too,” Lavaque-Manty said. “More students raise their hands. It’s very cool.”

My SLAC has very few large lecture classes; however, it is possible that something like this would allow students to ask questions without feeling put on the spot. I will have to check into it.

Academics Blogging
Academics and universities should embrace blogging as a vital tool of academic communication and impact.

Academics wondering whether they should venture into cyberspace should consider its reach, says Adrian Miles, a senior lecturer in media and communications at RMIT. Miles has 1,000 readers a week for his VLOG 4.0 blog and although he describes it as “a very small blog”, he contrasts it with being published in a major international journal where he says “maybe 100 people would read my article”.

I don’t know that this blog, with all its readers, is really an example of my scholarship. I would say instead that it is an example of my teaching. Every month over 5,000 students access my post on writing a character analysis.

Academic Editing Canada talks about jobs and skills beyond “research and writing.”

I was thinking of this in terms of graduate students particularly, but if you are looking for a job, you may need to do this too. Or if you are one of those people who dithers around thinking of all you could work on but never working on anything, you could use this too.

From Robert’s Rules of Writing by Robert Masello, rule number 96:

[O]nce you do make a decision, and pick one project and stick to it, you’ll notice something strange happens.
…
You become a virtual magnet for related information and ideas. Suddenly, you will start discovering, all around you, all sorts of juicy tidbits–observations, quotes, statistics, stories–that directly relate to, and nicely amplify, the project you are working on. You’ll stop at a yard sale and find an old book, for fifty cents, which provides great background research…. You’ll open the morning paper and come across a piece in the science section that neatly explains a rather arcane bit of business….

The more you focus in on one piece of work, the more attuned you are to everything around you that might help. And there’s a lot.

While I found this more true about my novel than my research, which would match up with his “nonfiction tome,” it is something that students need to be told so that they will
1. choose a topic and
2. start seeing what floats to the top around them.

The best line, and its explanation, comes immediately following the quote above.

Writers are scavengers–we find all kinds of odds and ends and either paste them into what we’re working on, or into notebooks for later use.

This is something I am working on presenting as a workshop for our graduate students.

This post talks primarily about teaching and research blogging.

Inside Higher Ed has Karen Kelsky’s article Dissertation Limits, which is an excellent work for graduate students to read.

Here are some points that I felt especially poignant/relevant/fascinating.

The heart of her argument:

What young scholars don’t realize is that the more they talk about the dissertation, the worse they do on the job market. …

The fact is, nobody wants to hear about your dissertation.

Yes, they want to know that you wrote one. …

Beyond that, they don’t want to hear about it.

So what do they mean when they say, tell us about your dissertation?

What a dissertation does is bring about tangible and visible results in the world. What are these results, you ask? Here is a partial list:

It intervenes in major debates in the field.
It generates important peer-reviewed publications
It qualifies for large and prestigious grants and awards.
It provokes dynamic discussion at symposiums and conferences.
It transforms efficiently into a book, preferably at an influential press.
It inspires interesting and unconventional classroom teaching.
It catalyzes an original second major project.
The dissertation does the very things that faculty like to talk about — publications, grants, contracts, teaching, and new research.

Until you transform your dissertation bladdedy-blah into short, pithy, punchy statements about refereed journal articles, book plans, conference papers, prestigious grants and fellowships, innovative teaching and new research, and learn how to express all of these in a dynamic (not static), dialogic (not monologic), symmetrical (not hierarchical) manner to your would-be future colleagues, you are dooming yourself to fail, forever, on the academic job market.

Fascinating idea.

And, I think, very true. Especially in its reference to the guilt graduate advisors feel while dealing with the stress of the 500 applicants for their single position.

I don’t think I ever talked about my dissertation until after I’d been hired. The reason for that is that it is done, was done, has been done and I’m on to the things that make a colleague. So the dissertation talk isn’t why it took me three years to get a full-time job. But I can see that it might be a problem for newly minted PhDs who have just spent two to six years of their lives on it.

If you are going to a conference for the first time and you are presenting at that conference, it can be nerve wracking or embarrassing because you don’t know what you are doing. Here are some posts which can help make sure you are prepared:

Update: Tufts has a fun and funny post on conferences for graduate students.

An earlier post that includes links to sites describing types of conference presentations, abstracts, what to do once you are at a conference, how to present, and how to keep up with the tons of conferences (and CFPs [Calls for Papers]) out there.

Conference Prep Suggestions

Conference Preparation

Two Points for Presenters, written in frustration while at a conference

How To for Conferences, the guide from TEMA

Good Information on Conferences for Newbies

Reading a Paper

What to Wear, or Why Not Tennis Shoes

Make Sure You Joined YOUR Conference Organization

Conference Attendance for Introverts

Planning Conference Attendance

Reading a Paper
Should You READ a Paper?

A List of Writing Conferences

Do you need business cards?

Thoughts on MLA

If you have submitted to CCTE:
Why You Should Attend CCTE
CCTE Prize-Winning Panels, which will show you the notes of sessions I attended that won prizes. You can also Search TCE for “CCTE” and find the notes from other panels I attended.
Notes from other conferences (MLA, SWCCL, K’zoo, ALA, C&W or Computers & Writing, Hemingway Conference) can be found by searching for those.

Examples of abstracts:
MLA 2012
MLA 2011
Entire panel proposal for MLA

“One of my old profs once told me that a PhD program isn’t about who is the smartest; it’s about who is determined to succeed.” –@trentmkays (Twitter)

I, as much as anyone, struggle with writing well and on a schedule. So, when I saw a post from In the Medieval Middle entitled Habit, Routine, Writing and Creating, despite the lack of a good Oxford comma, I had to read it.

I was intrigued by the discussion of how the author sustained writing while writing almost all day:

Each morning I would hop on my bike and trace a wide circuit through Cambridge, along the Charles River via the Esplanade, and over to Newbury Street. There I’d lock my bike to a parking meter and sit with my books at a local coffee shop. I’d order a refillable mug and marble pound cake. As I ate breakfast I would pour over whatever writing I’d accomplished the previous day, filling the printout with marginalia (this was long before laptops were affordable). I’d then add as much writing as possible to what I had, attempting to extend the project as far as I could. When fatigue eventually set in, I’d then turn to a book or essay I’d brought with me and read that. Back on my bike around lunch time, home to eat quickly, and then at my computer, typing in whatever changes I’d made to earlier writing and adding to it whatever else I’d penned out afterwards.

This daily routine of bike rides and writing in two locations (coffee shop in the morning, home in the afternoon) sustained me through the most intense period of composing my thesis.

I found my own motivation expressed incredibly succinctly:

Conference papers (and other public talks) are great motivators because, well, who wants to commit an Epic Fail for an audience?

This is something I want to share with graduate students.

Speaking of which:
I had my graduate mentor over for lunch today and, in an amazing match-up, it turns out we have many health-related life experiences that overlap and she wants to write her thesis on science fiction (one of my writing areas). I am so thrilled to feel like we can connect.