When is a Hashtag a Journal Article? by Charlotte Frost

hashtag in a square

Right that’s it, I’ve done it, I’ve gone and put…

How to be a Hackademic #35 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel

How to be a hackademic picture

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic…

Write-A-Thon

Random Post: #acwri Twitter chat. Writing with others. Thursday 6th September 2012

twitterwritte

This week the #Acwri live chat was all about Writing…


14Mar13 On Independent Arts Scholarship – by Hasan Niyazi
Posted by Charlotte Frost

DURERSPThis blog post by Hasan Niyazi (independent art history blogger/originator of the ‘3 Pipe Problem’ blog) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects to share what their intentions were when they established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

In the year 1500, the German artist Albrecht Dürer inscribed the following on a self-portrait:

“I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in everlasting colours aged twenty-eight years.”

Writers of art history view this work as a significant turning point, or “moment” in Western civilisation.[1] The wildly gifted artist portrayed himself in not only a manner resembling traditional depictions of Christ, but added the force of his own presence to the work with the inscription, including his own “AD” monogram, which to many reading (to this day) recalled “Anno Domini” – the Year of Our Lord. From a perspective perhaps best granted by hindsight, Dürer’s inscribed portrait heralded the age of the individual. Dürer may have been the possessor of a large ego, yet he was also a capable disseminator of his work. His engravings and etchings, mechanically reproduced as prints on paper traveled across Europe, spreading the fame of his skill, and often encouraging copyists.[2]

Dürer not only embraced technology to aid in the distribution of his work, he was also an able networker. Eager to reach out to others, Dürer traveled to meet and learn from other artists. He sought Martin Schongauer and Andrea Mantegna, missing both shortly after their death, but did meet an aged Giovanni Bellini in Venice. By 1515, Dürer sought to exchange gifts with the most celebrated Italian artist of the age, Raphael of Urbino, then at the height of his powers in Rome, his career overshadowing both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.[3]

In whatever context one seeks to frame Dürer’s life and career, it is evident that he was successful at spreading an awareness of himself and his work across Europe. I wished to introduce Dürer’s use of technology to spread his work, and seeking personal connections to improve his knowledge as a precursor to a discussion about blogging. At the very least, Dürer’s example provides some interesting and relevant historical parallels.

I have been asked by Charlotte Frost to provide an account of my experiences in the blogosphere, exploring Renaissance art history in a level of detail than was not occurring in an open forum on the web. I presently spend my days working as a clinician and most nights reading and writing about art history. In late 2009, after having spent over a decade online, on message boards and advice forums dedicated to technology, I found my mind always wandering back to art history, a topic I had studied at a younger age. Hence, with little more than a vague notion of wanting to write about “cool art stuff” I began “art history blogging.” I created a free blog using Google’s “Blogger” platform, which I found favourable compared to WordPress as it allowed users full access to the blog’s underlying html code, allowing me to learn about this along the way.  Three years on, I find myself pleasantly occupied. My clinical work continues, yet my reading and writing in art history has wrought great changes to me and my writing. I maintain regular contact with important Renaissance scholars, and am working on an ambitious project dedicated to the artist Raphael.

My blog, 3 Pipe Problem (3PP), became a platform to disseminate the idea that a more detailed appreciation of Renaissance art history is not restricted to those who can access universities, expensive books and journals, or belong to a particular community. Many bloggers have a personal motivation. For some, this motivation comes foremost as an intellectual pursuit that captivates the mind. Applying it to art history, I sought to understand its narrative of the past, and the evidence that had formed the common perception of this period in history.

Raphael Uffizi in Frame

Raphael’s famous self-portrait at the Uffizi has a complex attribution history, with a number of scholars disagreeing on it author, and likely date of creation.

This search for understanding – to my mind at least – arrived in its purest form when examining the attribution of a Renaissance artwork. It is a magical experience to walk into a gallery and stand before a work on panel or canvas labelled to be by the great Raphael, Leonardo, Titian or Giorgione (etc). Purchasing the catalogues offered by museums and galleries for these works often brushes past attribution issues entirely. It is only when one is brave enough to wade into the scholarly literature that we find an almost endless procession of heated debate about the authorship of a work. In Raphael studies in particular, this discussion is protracted across many works attributed to an artist whose style dramatically changed across the short span of his professional life.

Because Raphael had acquired great fame during his own lifetime, we are blessed with a greater number of surviving sources on his movements and actions than can be found for other artists of the period. It is the evaluation of these sources, and the physical characteristics of the works themselves that enable us to describe a painting “by Raphael” in full. Indeed in the scope of Renaissance workshop, Raphael’s involvement in a particular work needs to measured against visual evidence gleaned from observation of the work itself, and related technical images and preparatory works  – a mode of analysis traditionally known as connoisseurship.

It is the distillation of these complex quantities of information that I attempt to bring to my posts at 3PP, and inform my work on the Open Raphael Online project. In doing this work online, I found I gained the most when openly sharing my learning experiences as they happened. The most efficient way to do this was via the social media platform twitter, where I encountered a range of individuals with similar interests, including professionals and students engaged in the study of art and history. This resulted in an ongoing exchange of information and resources, and a pleasing type of social interaction that occurs when one encounters kindred spirits.

In November 2012, I was pleased to be awarded the honour of representing “art history bloggers” at the Florens cultural heritage event in Florence. Traveling back to the heart of the Renaissance is a perennially emotional experience, and in my mind the city of innovation and endeavor that Florence once was seeks to regain its place again, with an increasing number of progressive online voices discussing the art and culture of the city.

Florens Reserved Teampic

Being part of the team of bloggers covering the Florens2012 event was a rewarding experience, providing insights into the great potential for new media to inform and promote a deeper experience of Italian culture than is presently being achieved.

What is blogging and where is it headed?

It is at times daunting finding oneself working in a space populated by very few others, and without a real sense of the activity being viable as anything other than an intellectual exercise. The blogs I admire the most are mostly written by academics as an independent exercise that fed off their experiences in teaching and research. Although I had started blogging “for fun” I quickly found myself wanting to occupy a similar space as far as the quality of detail and critical analysis being offered at blogs such as Thony Christie’s The Renaissance Mathematicus and Monica Bowen’s Alberti’s Window. Hence, each post became a research project in its own right. I would often start at scratch, or from an idea sparked by another blog post or discussion on twitter and develop a post from there. This process allowed me to further develop my own style, and improved my research skills – which of course are still evolving.

There is an increasing amount of discussion about the roles bloggers have in the space traditionally occupied by specialists and journalists. A recent post at the London School of Economics (LSE) Impact Blog specified “academic blogging” as defining a new space between academic writing and journalism.[4]

With specific reference to art history, the 2012 Kress Foundation report into digital art history and its research centers also identified the role of an “instigator”:

“A more radical suggestion is to bring in “instigators” or individuals from outside the research center who possess a unique set of technology, humanities, and people skills. Their role would be to push against institutional barriers without being intimidating to others nor easily thwarted themselves.”[5]

These descriptions seemed to describe blogging being recognised as a new space, and sought to address why blogging exists and whether it is important. It also became apparent that communicating ideas within the context of a blog also demanded a new mode of language, where the individual acting as “instigator” must be able to address both specialists and the interested public alike. This form of writing has no real precedent in art history, the closest analogues being reviews of exhibitions or publications penned by art critics/historians in newspapers and magazines.

Anthropological excursus

Of the various academic disciplines that are bravely experimenting with or observing blogging, that which tended to more completely grasp the “what and why” or meta of blogging was the field of media anthropology, and the related area of cyber-anthropology.[6] This relatively new branch of study, which seems to have forged its presence somewhere between media studies and the social sciences has burgeoned into a thriving discipline, with a proliferation of case studies demonstrating use of blogging and social media being used in social activism. The events around the Arab Spring and Occupy movements seem to be of most enduring interest to the media anthropologists I have encountered, with those tracing the impact of blogging in a broader, cultural sense quite rare.[7]

While many studies/books (of varying quality) can be found on the impact of blogging in a political sense, primarily in the American context, there is at present no study that seeks to track the impact of blogging on elements of cultural discourse, which is arguably the most globally inclusive human activity.[8] From art and archaeology, to regional variances in customs and language, the definition of “culture” is now so broad and complex, that such a study would be daunting to any investigator considering tackling its interaction with the forms of new media represented by blogging and social media. Until such studies are completed, this small excursus, embedded within this account of my role as an art history blogger, will hopefully be a marker for the consideration of new media’s impact on cultural discourse in an anthropological sense.

Conclusion – evolving beyond the primordial ooze

We are still in the primordial ooze of blogging and social media acting to serve a mired field of study, which art history can unfortunately be described in certain contexts. In some cases, quality blogs are helping to demystify aspects of cultural discourse to a global audience.

It is always pleasant to hear from readers who have been to museums and have questioned the assigned label of a work, and have been unsatisfied with the explanations offered in their catalogues. This desire to seek more detail in an independent sense is the true blessing of the information age. This gift of access to knowledge the web can provide recalls the famous, if not grandiose point made by Timothy Leary in Pataphysics in 1990,

“Today the role of the philosopher [and the artist, we might add] is to personalize, popularize, and humanize computer ideas so that people can feel comfortable with them…In every generation I’ve been part of a group of people who, like Prometheus, have wrestled with the power in order to hand it back to the individual.”[9]

Comparisons to mythological titans aside, what can be taken from Leary’s statement is that those with experience navigating the seemingly disparate fields of technology and cultural historiography are ideally suited to analyse and interpret the seemingly rapid changes being experienced by all disciplines defined by large slabs of text and images, traditionally locked within the confines of books. Blogging is just one of many available means of re-purposing and amplifying these images and texts to a more global, and potentially dynamic audience.

I would like to emphasise that my example represents a combination of circumstances that has occurred naturally, and is only a snapshot taken at this point in time. At present, art history blogging exists because it does, and discussing it from the perspective of becoming a viable business model seems a point no one is yet prepared to deliberate on. For academics and students trying to figure out how a blog may fit into their workflow, there is no easy answer other than trying it and finding what works for you, and ruling out what does not.

Ultimately, blogging does not need to supplement anything else. It is its own form of expression,  requiring a mixture of skills. Blogging is a mode of communication where any individual with a passion to work hard and have their voice heard can participate in a global dialogue that attracts scholars and laypersons alike. Art, culture and knowledge transcends boundaries, and so does the web. As such, they are a perfect match.

References

1. Koerner, JL. The Moment of Self-Potraiture in German Renaissance Art. University of Chicago Press. 1997. pp.40-46 preview available at Google Books link ; the author is aware of the antecedent self portrait by van Eyck and its comparatively boastful frame inscription. Less is known about Jan van Eyck’s travels and how widely his work was disseminated.

2. Pon, L. Raphael, Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi – Copying in the Italian Renaissance. Yale University Press. 2004. pp.62-68.

3. Nesselrath, A. Raphael’s Gift to Dürer. Master Drawings. Vol. 31. No. 4. Essays in Memory of Jacob Bean (1923-1992). Winter, 1993. pp. 376-389 JSTOR link

4. Carrigan, M. By opening up a distinctive space between academic research and journalism, a thriving academic blogosphere mediates between them. London School of Economics Impact Blog. February 4 2013. Accessed March 6 2013. link

5. Zorich, D. Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, Its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship. Kress Foundation website June 1. 2012. Accessed March 6 2013. link

6. Rothenbuhler, E. Media Anthropology as a Field of Interdisciplinary Contact. E-Seminar October 22 – November 05 2008, European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Media Anthropology Network. http://www.media-anthropology.net nb. An excellent overview of media anthropology and its history as a field of study. (pdf link) ; another recommended overview paper is presented by Mihai Coman (pdf link) ; A foundational article introducing the concept of “cyber-anthropology” was published in 2005 by Libin and Libin: Cyber anthropology: a new study on human and technological co-evolution. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. 2005. 118. pp. 146-55. (link)

7. There are a number of well known blogs dedicated to anthropology – Savage Minds, and its blogroll is a great starting point (link). Less prevalent are blogs dedicated to media anthropology, with the site maintained by Dr. John Postill a notable source of information and resources (link). Blogs exploring specific examples of culture and their impact in a new media and anthropological context are more rare at this stage. Some quality examples include:

  • University College London has an project index(link) and blog(link) exploring the anthropology of social media.
  • Cyber Anthropology – a blog maintained by Diana Harrelson, exploring the anthropology of social media, gaming and online communities (link) ;
  • The Cultural Magazine (link), primarily in Italian, with articles in French and English, maintained by Melissa Pignatelli. Explores cultural anthropology and social media’s impact on contemporary society.

8. Baldwin, J. (ed.) Redefining Culture: Perspectives Across The Disciplines. Routledge. 2006. This landmark publication identified over 300 prevailing definitions of “culture”, highlighting the challenges in demarcating the parameters of culture as a field of study.  For more on this in a new media and reporting context see Niyazi, H. The convergence of culture and new media – Florens 2012. Posted at 3 Pipe Problem. November 22 2012. (link)

9. Leary, T. Pataphysics quote is included in premable of Chaos and Cyberculture. 1994 edition online at archive.org  (link)

 

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11Mar13 How to be a Hackademic #25 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by Charlotte Frost

How to be a hackademic pictureHybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

WRITE SOME MORE. Write regularly to improve your communication skills in all areas of your work and ward off that dreaded writer’s block. Try to allot a bit of quiet time – even half an hour is enough – to get some thoughts onto paper/screen every single day. At first it will seem like a chore, but all too quickly you’ll notice how productive you can be. Some of the material you produce might well make it into your book or article, or perhaps it will become a blog post, or some other way of publicly discussing your work. In fact, blogging regularly can really help. It adds an important level of accountability if you imagine you have to blog once a week or you’ll lose face. Reporting on the ideas you’re processing in this lighter more chatty style will be easier and it will help you get to the crux of the matter – don’t underestimate how important it is to be able to communicate widely. Try to keep this daily writing routine no matter what else is going on. So, even if you’re traveling, consider setting aside just a small amount of time to do some writing, even if you’re just pecking letters into the notes app on your smart phone. It doesn’t have to be academic writing; every bit of writing we do ultimately helps hone our craft.

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7Mar13 A Scholarship of Generosity: New-form Publishing and Hybrid Pedagogy by Jesse Stommel
Posted by Charlotte Frost
Image from Mochimochiland.com

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Jesse Stommel (Co-founder and Director of Hybrid Pedagogy) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects to share what their intentions were when they established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

The idea for the name of Hybrid Pedagogy came from a job talk I gave in October 2011. The thesis of that talk now sits on the journal’s homepage: “All learning is necessarily hybrid.” The line is inspired by a blog post from February 2010, in which I write: “The teacher 2.0 must shift the focus from individual learners to the community of learners, drawing new boundaries that reflect a much larger hybrid classroom.” This sentence also describes the work of new-form academic publishing, which draws new boundaries by upsetting the distinction between scholarship and teaching — between the work we do in journals and the work we do in classrooms.

When Pete Rorabaugh and I began discussing what would become Hybrid Pedagogy in early 2011, we wondered if what we were describing was a “journal” or something else entirely. At various points, we flirted with calling the project a “symposium,” “colloquium,” “collective,” or “school.” It was clear to us, from the start, that what we were creating was not a traditional academic publication. What we wanted to build was a network, a community for engaging a discussion of digital pedagogy, critical pedagogy, open education, and online learning. At the same time, we wanted to build a collection of resources to help facilitate conversations within that community.

We worked from the start to develop the journal openly, gathering together an advisory board that had virtual “meetings” on the web via the discussion forum on the site. The goal was to interrogate academic publishing practices by making them transparent — to lay bare our process while it was in formation. We published articles about peer-review before we had established our own peer-review process, inviting feedback and commentary. We crowd-sourced the majority of our initial decisions, down to the layout and design of the site.

Hybrid Pedagogy has become a publication that combines the best aspects of an open-access journal with the best aspects of a group blog (timeliness, a nimble publishing schedule, and direct engagement with readers). Through the articles we’ve published and events we’ve hosted (like MOOC MOOC and regular #digped chats), we’ve brought together higher education teachers, K-12 teachers, the open education community, students, and lifelong learners. We’ve worked to disrupt the conventions of academic publishing, while still maintaining a careful attention to detail, context, and critical engagement.

Based on input from our initial advisory board, we’ve developed what we call “collaborative peer review,” in which editors engage directly with authors to revise and develop articles, followed by post-publication peer review. Once an article is accepted for review, we partner a new author with an editorial board member (myself, Pete, Sean Michael Morris, and Robin Wharton) and a guest editor (usually someone that has already published an article in the journal). Editorial work is done both asynchronously and synchronously in a Google Doc that evolves through an open dialogue between author and editors.

We fully expect our process will continue to evolve. Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, “Peer review is extremely important — I want to acknowledge that right up front — but it threatens to become the axle around which all conversations about the future of publishing get wrapped.” Going forward, I think it’s vital that every academic publication continuously (and even publicly) interrogates its own practices. Given how rapidly education is changing, we need to keep pushing ourselves to innovate — to learn from our mistakes — and to stay nimble in our approaches. We need to actively overturn the existing hierarchies and power dynamics that fuel unethical practices like blind peer-review, the proliferation of overpriced and barely read monographs, closed-access publishing, and business models that rely insidiously on the free labor of contingent faculty.

I’m glad Pete and I ultimately decided to describe Hybrid Pedagogy as a “journal,” exactly because this designation allows us to push on the boundaries of what, when, and how academic work gets published. The notion of an “academic journal” needs dismantling and reimagining. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t continue to have traditional academic journals, but that we need to considerably broaden the landscape to make way for dynamic collaboration, new media, and participatory culture.

Since launching Hybrid Pedagogy in January 2012, we’ve published 94 articles by 17 authors. The majority of these have been peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers (all but the earliest articles and #digped announcements). We’ve worked especially hard to encourage collaboration; 21 of the 94 articles we’ve published was written by two or more authors, including one article by five authors, one article by twelve authors, and one article by hundreds of authors. Articles have covered a wide range of topics, from MOOCs to digital writing — from intellectual property to personal learning networks.

Shortly after we launched Hybrid Pedagogy, Pete and I wrote an article about the changing nature of citation in the digital age — an article in which we made nods to the various sources for our work on the journal. In that article, we write, “In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our teaching practices and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration.” I believe generosity is what will drive the future of digital publishing.

Check out the most recent articles on Hybrid Pedagogy: Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 1 and pt. 2 and follow @hybridped on Twitter.

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3Mar13 How to be a Hackademic #24 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by Charlotte Frost
How to be a hackademic pictureHybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.
ER…WRITE. With all the different tasks that go into being an academic and a human being, our impulse is often to try and lump writing onto the end of the day, week or semester. We juggle all the other parts of our career and put writing off because it is difficult and requires focus. Turn the tables on this method and work out a schedule from the outset that at least features dedicated writing times, if not gives them top billing. A huge amount of what we do as academics requires writing, so you’ll always fill these times and – heaven forbid – you might even use them to get a bit ahead of yourself. If you know you have set writing times you’ll find it easier to filter out distractions during this period.
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28Feb13 Questioning the legitimacy of new-form digital projects: An autoethnography of #AcWri and PhD2Published by Anna Tarrant
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Anna Tarrant (aka PhD2Published’s Managing Editor and co-instigator of #AcWri) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

When I first contacted Charlotte just over a year ago asking if I could become the Managing Editor of PhD2Published, I never suspected what kind of new doors it would, and could, open for me. In this blog piece I reflect on the role PhD2Published has played for me in the early development of my academic career and muse about how online spaces such as this are integral to an emerging movement that is transforming academic knowledge production and empowering contemporary academics. While my personal experiences are fairly unique, one of the ways in which I think we can learn about and understand the position, increased uptake and legitimacy of online academic spaces is by adopting autoethnographic methodologies; reflecting on our own positions in these new online participatory cultures.

I found PhD2Published while looking for some guidance and support for my newly forming publishing plans. I was on a short, fixed term contract as a Senior Teaching Associate at the time, which meant that the majority of my thinking and time was dedicated to teaching plans, maintaining relationships with my students and marking. While I maintained a fantastic mentor in my PhD supervisor, I felt adrift. It wasn’t part of my paid role to publish at this point, but I was conscious of the need to develop personally in order to competitively pursue the career I so long for (something permanent that combines both teaching and research – note I am currently in my third short-term academic contract since Oct 2010). At this time, I knew that I had to have a publishing strategy and some personal goals to become established in my field. Feeling lost in my institution and disconnected in terms of my research aims and development, I went in search of something else; support, community, the ‘how to’ of academic publishing. In the end, I turned to the Internet for this support and PhD2Published couldn’t have provided a better opportunity.

In the past year or so, since being involved with the site as a Managing Editor, I have learnt so much. In brief, I have learnt how, and where to publish to maximize my impact. I have had two traditional style journal papers accepted, I have contributed to various blogs, including the Guardian Higher Education blog, I have learnt how to use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to enhance my professional profile and have set up my own professional blog, which has even attracted attention from people outside of academia. I have also up-skilled; not only have I learnt how to run and manage an academic blog, I have networked much more widely on a variety of social media platforms to the point where I am recognized for my work at conferences. I have learnt a great deal from others – having also collaborated on #Acwri, the monthly live chats Dr Jeremy Segrott and I run on Twitter. And I have continued to publicly share my experiences in order to support others.

The #AcWri live chats in particular were established by myself and Jeremy after PhD2Published’s writing initiative, AcBoWriMo (now AcWriMo), when Jeremy was publicly searching for a community for academic writing discussion. It was quickly recognized that a much larger community of academics (of different disciplines, career stages and nationalities) wanted support with the emotional, as well as practical elements of one of their main crafts. Jeremy and I decided to collaborate and run fortnightly live chats on Twitter focused on different aspects of academic writing under the hashtag #AcWri. The intention of this was to establish an on-going, online participatory community, an open platform for sharing knowledge about academic writing (empowering each member as experts in their right) and to generate useful resources in the form of sumWwri has been successful in these goals so far, but what does this mean for academic knowledge production and has this changed our ways of working?

The establishment of the #AcWri community has emerged from, and aligns with PhD2Published’s (and other sites’) ethos of open, participatory learning but it has also contributed to changing the ways we work/research, publish/share and network/support each other. It allows a diverse group of researchers to connect and share their knowledge beyond the physical boundaries of institutions and to publish in new ways that are available to others beyond academia. It has allowed for a more engaged and open conversation about the ‘hidden injuries’ (Gill 2009) of neo-liberal academia (in this case through frank discussions about writing, a key part of the publishing we need to do, or risk ‘perishing’). It also allows us to share our successes and failures, to support and to network with one another in ways that have been less available to us before. The need for these spaces is evident in that the community, in size and quality of contribution, has flourished and is also self-perpetuating without the need for Jeremy and I to intervene beyond the live chats.

Importantly, the increased use and uptake of these online academic sites indicates broader changes, both within, and outside academic institutions that cannot be ignored. What is (not) happening within institutions that is encouraging more scholars to go online? Is this indicative of an absence of support in contemporary academia for its staff, particularly those who are Early Career? All of these questions are beginning to be raised and I am really excited to be part of a group of scholars (who have also written for this series of blogs) who are reflecting on, and even theorising about the increased uptake of online academic spaces where academic knowledge production is taking place. Through my involvement with PhD2Published and #AcWri I have personally developed essential and empowering skills that are required by the contemporary Early Career academic and yet for some reason these spaces still lack legitimacy

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26Feb13 From Panel to Publication: Putting together a special issue for a journal by Adia Benton
Posted by atarrant

writingToday’s post by Adia Benton provides some useful advice about preparing a special issue for a journal. Adia is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University. Her research focuses on humanitarianism, development, and technology and their interface with issues of race, gender and sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa. She can be found regularly tweeting @ethnography911 and blogging on Ethnographic Emergencies about engaged anthropology, ethnographic research and teaching. 

A few years ago, after organizing a well-attended conference panel, we – the panel co-organizers and panelists — decided to put together a special journal issue based upon our panel. The only problem was that none of us had ever done it before. So we each reached out to our mentors and advisors for help, compared notes and put together a proposal. Last year, some two years after putting the proposal together, that issue was published. In this post, I outline the steps we took to go from panel to publication.

1. Draft your proposal for the special issue.

a) Provide a brief overview of the special issue. Ours was about a paragraph. As is often the case, our original conference proposal, although narrow enough to have the panel accepted (ahem), was still fairly broad and did not specifically address the papers’ common themes and what specific new conceptual, theoretical and methodological insights they provide. Therefore, we circulated the abstract to all panelists and modified the proposal to ensure that we narrowed our topic appropriately and described the gaps in the literature that the papers address collectively.

b) Abstracts for each paper – maybe 250-300 words—that are also modified to better fit the overview of contents.

c) Timeline: Without a timeline, you will have difficulty convincing anyone (including yourselves) that you have what it takes to pull together a special issue. Here are some milestones that you can include (with suggested time allotment):

  • Agreement with journal editor (within 8 weeks of submission of the proposal);
  • Article submission (3-6 months after agreement);
  • Article review (8-12 weeks);
  • Revisions (6-8 weeks);
  • Proofing, typesetting, articles in press and online (8-12 weeks)

Note: These are rough estimates and depend on the journal’s existing publication schedule. The editor who accepted our special issue told us that our dates were all wrong because there was a backlog of articles, slow turnaround on peer review, and two special issues already forthcoming. Although this was longer than we would normally expect for a single paper, it seemed to be normal for a special issue. On the bright side, this backlog meant that we had more time to write, edit and circulate our papers within the group of authors.

2. Circulate the proposal among the special issue participants, and perhaps, to colleagues who have editorial and/or topic area expertise. Edit using their suggestions.

3. Make a list of all relevant journals. I used a spreadsheet that included:

  • contact information for the editor;
  • general submission requirements;
  • any special requirements for special issues so that you can modify your proposal accordingly;
  • length of the average journal (number of articles and number of pages). This is important because you want to ensure that your final product falls within the range of what they are capable of printing in a single issue. Some editors have a bit more leeway when it comes to the length of issue, but it seems that most of them have an issue/page limit for each year.
  • If you have mentors, advisors, and friends who are on editorial boards, they might be looking to bring in new stuff. Ask. They might be able to push a proposal through too.

4. Submit the proposal to all journals on your list. I used a free email merge program back in 2010, but Outlook and Mac Mail allow you to perform an email merge.

5. Await a response. Within a couple of weeks, we received responses to most of our inquiries. A few well-respected journals responded positively but did not provide any firm commitments. One journal immediately accepted our proposal, which ‘fast-tracked’ our timeline a bit… But she also suggested that we prepare a backup plan in case all of our articles were not accepted. We had a colleague ‘on call’ in case we needed his contribution, but because we planned to devote a lot of time to editing amongst ourselves, we felt fairly confident that our papers would make it through.

6. Submit the papers according to the agreed-upon timeline. After circulating and editing papers over a summer and part of the fall, we all submitted our papers for peer review.

7. Await peer review comments and… darn we should have done that call for papers. One of our papers was rejected, and another that was on the cusp (ultimately, a revise and resubmit that was later accepted). The editor had also received two articles that fit our theme, so we would have had a full issue — even if it did not include all our original gang. Had we been less self-assured regarding our editing abilities, we probably would have posted a call for papers on our sub-discipline’s listservs and the journal’s website.  And we would have posted it immediately after we had our initial proposal accepted.

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25Feb13 How to be a Hackademic #23 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by atarrant

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

GET A LIFE. Remember to have a life too; sometimes it’s the time spent away from your work that is the most beneficial. This is easier said than done when you have a deadline looming or you’ve got limited time to work but here’s the thing, the work will take twice as long if you don’t have a clear head. Ever noticed how you can sit down to work one week and it takes most of the day to get a paltry amount on a page but after a weekend away you can fit a week’s work into one day? Remember that. Take adequate amounts of time off from what you’re doing to enjoy everything that isn’t academia.

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21Feb13 “You make me want to throw up”: why do some academics hate blogging? by Inger Mewburn
Posted by thesiswhisperer

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

Recently I changed jobs, moving on from RMIT University to The Australian National University (ANU). For those who are unfamiliar with the pecking order of Australian Universities, this is like moving from an obscure Polytechnic in a regional town to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge.

It’s hardly suprising then, that my move sparked a lot of, what one colleague called, ‘corridor talk’. I had many curious emails and phone calls from my RMIT colleagues along the lines of “Did ANU employ you because of the Thesis Whisperer blog?”

Well, yes.

And no.

If the only thing I was capable of was blogging I’m sure ANU wouldn’t have been interested in me – certainly not interested enough to fly me in and out for a year until my son finishes primary school. The blogging merely made my many years of experience in research education visible.

The Thesis Whisperer blog enabled the right people at ANU to notice my expertise at the right time. The fact of the matter is, had I continued to plod away, teaching and publishing in respectable journals (ie: the conventional career strategy advocated in many a workshop), ANU management would never have known I existed.

The move has caused me to reflect on the passive – and occassionally active – resistance I have encountered from other academics about blogging. “A waste of time,” some said “not scholarly” others opined. I’ve noticed that blogging is often framed in this everyday talk as mere self promotion and not the serious, scholarly work I believe it is.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for admitting to feeling a little bit smug about how it all turned out.

Those years of invisible – and unpaid – work have finally paid off, and in the most delightful way. I now have a new job, one which has more scope for me to do the work I love – helping research students finish their PhDs.

When the benefits of blogging to the individual are so clear, why don’t more academics do it?

Many academics tell me they just don’t have time. As Pat Thomson wrote on the LSE impact blog said recently, the question “how do you find the time to blog?” is often a way non-bloggers can indulge a bit of stealthy criticism on the bloggers amongst us. Which is why, perhaps, bloggers like me feel they need to write pieces like this. We feel moveed to defend ourselves about a practice that is seen as a little… unsavoury.

I agree that institutional paperwork can be onerous, research is time consuming and students are demanding, but this has been the case since I started as an academic in 1995. Today we have advantages that were still the stuff of science fiction in 1995: extremely light-weight computers, ubiquitous wifi, tablets and smart phones, google scholar, cloud computing.

While I can understand not writing a blog (sort of) I really can’t understand people who don’t read blogs, take part in Twitter or otherwise take part in the scholarly dialogue which is happening online.

I notice that those who complain about time are usually those who haven’t even tried to integrate this technology in their daily routine. In vain I try to point out that we all have odd bits of time in our day which can be put to use: at the bus stop, on a train, waiting an appointment, a solitary lunch time here and there. All of these moments are an opportunity to fire up an RSS reader on our phone or laptop and learn something new online.

No doubt you, as a blog reader, know this already. I don’t have to point out the benefits to the converted. The question I have for you is, how many of your colleagues are doing the same? And more importantly – why don’t they? It’s a question that is beginning to fascinate me and one which I don’t have a ready answer for.

When Charlotte asked me to write a post about how we can legitimise and encourage this new kind of scholarly practice she gave me a couple of words: hybrid, ‘outstitutional’, feral. I like these words because they make me feel a bit edgy and special. At the same time I think it’s a bit worrying that words like this are used to describe my Thesis Whisperer work. Interesting or not, such words tend to situate blogging as ‘other’ to mainstream academic practice. It’s not the way I want my work to be viewed.

As Martin Weller pointed out in a recent paper about digital scholarship and tenure (and on his blog) blogging is unlikely to become a mainstream academic practice if there are no insitutional incentives to blog. Weller highlights that academics don’t just blog (or research for that matter) to gain monetary reward, but that institutional attitudes to rewarding blogging (or not) have the capacity to influence behaviour.

In a recent article on the Guardian Education network Claire Warwick put forward one of the best explanations I have heard to date. She talked about her friends who don’t tweet and pointed out: “They know Twitter exists, but they are either too busy; can’t be bothered; prefer traditional forms of academic interaction – face to face or via conventional publication; or think that Twitter is too ephemeral a medium for considered scholarly debate: ‘The talk-radio of academia” She goes on to comment: “I think academics, perhaps even more than most people, are driven by the herd mentality, especially when it comes to questions of prestige.”

This is quite true, but I still think the incentive structure is only part of the answer. Reluctance and determined avoidance may have multiple causes. The emotions that surround scholarly work are rarely attended to, but they are complex; ranging from curiosity and excitement to fear and envy and every stop in between. This volatile mix extends into online spaces.

We need to listen carefully to the way people express their reluctance to social media in order to understand what is going on. Recently my friend Joyce Seitzinger, better known as @catspajamasnz, told me about something that happened to her when she was helping to run a seminar on social media. One of the academics seemed very upset, even angry, so Joyce took her aside to ask what was wrong.

“You people make me want to throw up,” the academic said.

I was struck by the violence of this reaction. It is so other to my own attitude to social media, which has always been dominated by emotions of excitement and curiosity. Why would one want to throw up – anxiety? Anger? Or both?

I remember feeling similar, complex emotions at high school towards the cool kids. I was a nerd and I liked being a nerd, but they made fun of me for being who I was. Getting visibly upset or angry only made me more of a target, so I tried treating the cool kids with derision or ignoring them. Inside however, I felt angry and inadequate. I hated that I cared what they thought of me. I didn’t want to be them – not really – but they certainly made me want to throw up.

I wonder: have I become the cool kid? Am I witnessing a similar set of complex emotions, but from the other side?

It is not really up to those who do use social media to try to therapise others. If others don’t want to partake, whether from fear, or disinterest, there’s not much we can do to convince them otherwise. We can only model other ways of being an academic and hope others may follow our lead. So I have changed my standard line on blogging and tried to be less defensive.

When people tell me they don’t have time to blog I point out the time they can save because of the good work being done on so many blogs, Patter, Explorations in Style, The Research Whisperer and LitreviewHQ just to name a few. I highlight how much free labour goes on to produce these blogs. Then I ask: “what do you have to give? How can you make a difference?” Because making a difference, surely, is what being an academic and a teacher is all about.

So I’d be interested to hear what you think. Why do you think academics are reluctant to blog? Are any of the explanations and suggestions here useful? Do you have more ideas?

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18Feb13 How to be a Hackademic #22 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by atarrant

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

DRINK LESS ALCOHOL. Or maybe this should be: ‘don’t drink and write!’ Having too much alcohol while working will make you think you’re invincible – at least in academic terms. It really isn’t worth all the editing you’ll have to do to the sentences you write under the influence. Similarly, drinking heavily between writing sessions will only make them harder to endure – you’re not in college now kid! So where has being abstemious got you exactly? How about taking this option, oh, and bottoms up.

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14Feb13 What Does Writing a Writing Lab Look Like? by Charlotte Frost
Posted by Charlotte Frost

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Charlotte Frost (aka PhD2Published’s founder/director) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

People tend to think that PhD2Published is simply a blog about academic publishing. Well, that’s true, but there might be some in which it helps promote an understanding of publishing that you hadn’t realised about.

PhD2Published was set up as a research tool. What I mean is that I started the blog as a way to get myself published. I thought that by running a resource on publishing I would learn a lot about academic publishing that I could pass on. I could build a career platform for myself that would allow me to directly network with academic publishers. It functioned in a way that was like simultaneously writing and testing a ‘how to’ guide.

In addition to this, in order to run the site, I was having to learn about other publishing platforms as I went along. These were the publishing platforms of social media including WordPress and other blogging platforms, Facebook Pages, Twitter, YouTube, Google + (I still haven’t nailed Google + by the way) etc etc. Although not yet legitimate modes of publishing academic work, they are an increasingly important way in which we can do research and share our ideas. Jesse Stommel and I have referred to this open way of working as ‘public scholarship’ and even if the REF doesn’t officially recognise it, many of us recognise the strength it gives our work.

PhD2Published was designed as a public way of learning and sharing ways of being public with our work. However, knowing the framework I had built for going on this public learning journey, I wanted the site to be used by others in the same way. It might share all of its articles and advice for free, but my feeling was that it should also be free for people to use the same way I had. This is where the role of Managing Editor comes in.

Managing Editors are people who get to come on board and use the site to learn the same things I have – more, hopefully. They can publicly investigate the parts of academic publishing most relevant for their own career paths. For example, I was told I needed to get a book published but in many other areas of academia the journal article reins supreme. So a PhD2Published Managing Editor can use the project to compensate for what they didn’t learn at grad school and, like me, they can do this in a way that shares this knowledge and allows others to make use of it. They can also network directly with – say – the journal editors most likely to publish their work and find out well in advance of submitting, what the editors are looking for and what mistakes they must avoid making.

Likewise, they get to learn about how to use and write for all of the public ‘publishing’ platforms that the site functions on and that interest them. Twitter is increasingly used at conferences but if you’re someone used to having a Facebook account just for keeping in contact with close friends, it is a confusing realm to make sense of. Having to use all of these social media on behalf of PhD2Published and with all the archives of how they’ve been used in the past for the project as well as my advice and support, Managing Editors can quickly make appropriate use of social media.

In addition to all this, from the start, I have kept files on how PhD2Published operates which I give Managing Editors complete access to. This means that not only does a Managing Editor come on board and learn how to get published by expanding their knowledge of publishing and networking with prospective publishers. Not only do they learn how to use and write for a range of social media. But they also learn how to set up and run a resource dedicated to public scholarship. In a sense then, PhD2Published is like its own own little publishing laboratory.

I cannot emphasise the importance of this last aspect. It is more and more the case these days that an academic is required to handle certain public-facing aspects of their research. For many, this will mean having a web presence. It is all very well learning how to write a research paper, and it’s great to compare this with blogging and nail the art of writing a good blog post too, but what about building a community around your work? How much do you really know about doing that? And how much do you know about setting up an online project not just to showcase your work but to actually do quality academic research?

There may well come a point at which in addition or perhaps even instead of writing journal articles or a book, a researcher will be required to demonstrate their research-community-building credentials. Right now, institutions in the UK want to see cold hard REF-ables, but I believe it is only a matter of time before a successfully run knowledge-engagement-community itself becomes a REF-able output. What resources like PhD2Published do, therefore, is not just help early career academics consider what is required of them now, but it allows them to explore the future of academic research and publishing models and develop valuable transferable skills.

PhD2Published is a resource on and model for contemporary modes of knowledge generation and transfer. And yet I don’t know how to describe it. Recently I’ve taken to calling it ‘new-form scholarship’. If I had the time to write up all the things I learn from running it, I could argue that it forms part of a practice-based research model but in truth its just one part of my on-going research into publishing in the arts. I also lack the time and sometimes also the vocabulary to describe the benefits of being involved. Apart from anything else, it’s deeply empowering to set up your own project outside of an institution and build not just a knowledge resource but a dedicated community of participants. And it’s extremely rewarding to make a quite mystifying part of academia more transparent. It also takes a lot of work. Even when I’m not editing the site myself I’m working on it and last year’s AcWriMo (our off-shoot writing project) cost me (wait for it) over 100 hours of unpaid work to keep the information and motivation flowing.

So now what? How can we continue to harness the benefits and skills of these open and collaborative ways of working? How can we consolidate what is being learned this way and prove its academic credentials? Can we and should we fight for this work to be more legitimate or do we risk pinning the proverbial butterfly to the board and stilling the dynamism that makes it what it is?

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11Feb13 How to be a Hackademic #21 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by atarrant

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

EAT GOOD FOOD. Don’t eat junk food, especially when writing. Well, at least don’t eat junk food all the time. If you’re working to a deadline then it’s a good idea not to over-think these things and just grab what’s easy and handy and get the work done. However, where possible, it’s a better idea to get into a habit of eating (and writing) healthily. Aside from the fact that if you eat junk and sit at your desk all day all those sugars and fats will make you fat and unhealthy (and the last thing you need is to struggle with health issues on top of having to cope with the usual level of work an academic lifestyle involves) it might also make you a bad writer. Junk food will likely give you bursts of unsustainable energy, meaning you write in fits and starts and easily lose the thread of the argument. Too much sugar also makes you crash pretty badly, meaning your productivity will sink to a soul-crushing low and you might resort to too much caffeine, creating a perpetual cycle of peaks and troughs. Pay attention to what works for you. As a general rule, too much carbohydrate at lunch can make you sleepy in the afternoon. Instead try vegetables and protein at lunch time and save the carbs for dinner. You might also find that eating little and often keeps you charged up and that lots of green tea rather than one giant coffee keeps you energized in a more balanced way. And if you get coffee jitters, make sure you eat something while you drink your coffee.

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6Feb13 Guess What?! NOBODY failed AcWriMo!
Posted by Charlotte Frost

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4Feb13 How to be a Hackademic #20 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by atarrant

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

DRINK MORE ALCOHOL. If you’re stuck at your desk writing the same paragraph over and over again, lost in a recursive loop of editing that takes your work neither forwards nor back, take a break, call a friend, grab a beer. If you find yourself having to stay in on a Saturday night to finish that book chapter or journal article, there’s really no need to feel like you’re in prison. Why not pour yourself a lovely glass of wine and actually enjoy your writing. Yes, we did just say ‘enjoy’ because oddly enough, writing can be enjoyable and if you allow yourself a few treats along the way, the journey to submission can really be rather jolly. Some very famous writers were also raging alcoholics, although we’re certainly not advocating that.

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30Jan13 PhD to Publishing: It’s all just a game really! by Ellen Spaeth
Posted by atarrant

* Acknowledgements at bottom of blog

Today’s post is by Ellen Spaeth, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology and Music. Her research concerns how listening to music could help people with anxiety disorders. She has an excellent blog about academic writing, productivity, technology, and music psychology and Tweets about those things, and her ukulele as @ellenspaeth. In today’s post she creatively uses a video gaming metaphor to consider ways of developing motivation for writing a PhD; an approach also relevant to the academic publishing journey post-PhD. 

When I was 13, I spent hours playing Super Mario on my Nintendo 64. I would try again and again to get something right. My dad asked me why I was happy to work so hard to make Mario wall-kick off ice cliffs, but had no patience when it came to practising the clarinet.

Last year, the answer just popped into my head: motivation. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about video games that motivates me to play them, and how I can use those things to make my PhD more fun and productive. What did I find? Here are 4 things…

1. Big goals are divided into manageable chunks

If you divide a big goal up enough times, the goal becomes tasks, and tasks become instructions.

Can you imagine a 3-or-4-year video game where your only instruction was “Complete the game”? Make sure you don’t view “Complete the PhD” as your only goal. For more advice on this, see my posts on identifying, scheduling, and reviewing tasks.

2. Cost/benefit analyses are easier

In a video game, you’ll usually be told what you need to do (cost), and what you’ll gain (benefit). A quest, or task might be necessary for the game to progress. Or it might get you a great, rare, item. It might get you something that you didn’t even want.

But if you know in advance what you stand to gain, you can make the decision of whether the amount of work involved is worth it. Is it worth doing the tedious, lengthy task for the unwanted item? Probably not. Is it worth it for the great item, or to continue the game? Almost certainly.

Try to think about your PhD that way. If you’re finding something really difficult and distressing, think about what you’ll gain. Is it worth it? If not, don’t do it. If it is, focus on the thing you’ll gain. It should motivate you more.

3. If you’re stuck, someone can help you

Video games are popular. That means there are a lot of people talking about them on the Internet. Some of those people have made “walkthroughs”, which are step-by-step instruction guides for video games. So if you have no idea where you’re going, and have run out of patience, you can look at the walkthrough.

After you’ve looked at the walkthrough, you can make an informed decision (as per step 2). If you decide you’re not getting anything out of the game, you can choose to stop playing. But at least you’re making an informed decision.

So if you’re stuck with your PhD, look for help. Go on a development course. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book or a blog post by someone else who’s experienced the same problem as you. If you still decide it’s not worth it, you won’t be making the decision blindly.

4. Achievement is built in

When you’ve completed a task, you are rewarded. Maybe you’ll get an item, or a new area will be unlocked, or you’ll be given a star for completing the level. The game is teaching you to value small achievements. If you were never rewarded for any of your actions in a game, how long would you play for?

Do you value small achievements in your PhD? It’s something that I find difficult. On completing a task, my brain is less likely to say “Fantastic! Good job!” and more likely to say “Oh. Well. That wasn’t much of an achievement. I’d better do some more work.”

To me, completing a task for my PhD feels a bit like putting money into an overdrawn bank account – the money just disappears into a hole, leaving you feeling even more panicked to make up the difference. I think this happens because we don’t stop to notice when we achieve things. So stop, and take notice!

And finally…

In an attempt to apply some of these ideas, I’ve written a short series of blog posts on trying to create frequent bursts of achievement within my PhD. The first post looks at using free writing and doing lists (with Scrivener, a pad of paper, or another word processing tool) to identify specific and achievable tasks. The second discusses how to schedule those tasks using a diary or task management app (such as Producteev). The third post shows how reviewing your progress each week can improve your feeling of achievement and your ability to judge how long a task will take. If you have any experiences, suggestions, or tips to share (or nice things to say), I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

* The following tutorials aided in the drawing of the blog image. (C) Ellen Spaeth

How to Draw Mario and How to Draw Tutorials

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28Jan13 How to be a Hackademic #19 by Charlotte Frost & Jesse Stommel
Posted by atarrant

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.

HACK YOUR TIME. Some weirder tricks here: 1) If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, rather than tossing and turning in bed, get up and write. 2) Give yourself bizarre and unrealistic deadlines, and make yourself stick to them. 3) Ask friends to join with you on bizarre and unrealistically-deadlined projects for moral support. 4) Never stand in a line without a mobile device and work you can do on it. 5) Get hands-free bluetooth in your car, so you can make phone calls while driving. 6) Get a dictation app for your smart phone, so you can write while driving. 7) Do work for friends (preferably work they loathe doing) and then ask them to do work for you (work you loathe doing). 8) Use the dead time in between other things to do work – take shower, work while hair dries, call taxi, work while waiting for it to arrive, etc. 9) Keep written summaries or mind maps of major projects handy at all times and review them often. Newer and better ideas will occur to you at the strangest moments and you’ll find it easy to share these ideas and get useful feedback in chance encounters. 10) When you have no work implements at hand, work in your brain (train rides are good places for this).

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