Notes from the workshop on Doctoral education and e-Supervision, organized by the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP), the International Association of Universities (IAU), the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and the Kenyatta University (KU) within the project Personal Learning Environment (PLE)-PhD project financed through the IAU LEADHER programme, and held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 31, 2013. More notes on this event: plephd.
Questions/guidelines prepared by the session moderator, Ismael Peña-López
How did e-supervision tools/methodologies help in carrying out/supervising quality research?
Was this an exposed way of carrying out research? What was the experience like?
Does exposition increase the risks of plagiarism?
Can it jeopardize the originality of the research required for a thesis?
Can e-supervision contribute to
better theoretical frameworks? Why?
drafting better research questions and hypotheses? Why?
designing better methodologies? Why?
fieldwork? Why?
better assessment? Why?
better conclusions? Why?
Can e-supervision be seen as an added burden – in terms of workload – to the process of doing/supervising a thesis?
Can e-supervision be seen as an added burden – in matters of new skills – to the process of doing/supervising a thesis?
What strategies could be put in place to avoid this extra burden and, instead, leverage the (supposed) potential of e-supervision?
Can e-supervision become collective supervision?
Can e-supervision become P2P supervision?
Round Table: From theory to practice: models, experiences, opportunities and challenges of e-supervision
Miquel Duran, Universitat de Girona (UdG), Spain
Open knowledge as a must for e-supervision.
Future is mobile, future is video.
Virtualization of supervision is real supervision.
Subject-dependent.
PhD MOOCization.
e-[something else][empathic]-supervision.
Technology should be transparent.
PhD students has to understand their new role as researchers in formation.
PhD students must contribute to local environment: dissemination, public engagement in science, etc.
There should be a contract/commitment between both parties. Likely a reward system.
Good referencing and curation.
e-Supervision, research 2.0, etc. is about attitudes. And attitude is a choice.
And supervision is about EMPATHY (e-supervision: empathy-supervision).
Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach, Mark Prensky.
A triple interaction approach: supervisor – student – technology.
It is not about 1-to-1 relationships (student-to-supervisor) but about many-to-many, about collaboration, regardless of time and space.
In this change of paradigm, technology is not a tool, but an enabler.
The emergence of web sciences: technology has become a must to understand certain aspects of the world and, more important, to be able to do research about them.
But the change of paradigm may have a trade-off between quality and burden. We have to ensure that this is not an actual trade-off, and that we can go for quality without increasing the burden.
Challenges:
Final product vs. co-creation.
Individualism vs. collaboration.
One-way assessment vs. P2P assessment.
Should we have only one or two tutors as usual?
Are supervisors ready to work as a network?
How can we collaborate with other students/supervisors.
We need new models and strategies to go for this new paradigm.
Ricardo Torres Kompen, PLE- consultant, Spain
PELICANS project: Personal and e-Learning in Communities and Networking Spaces.
It is more important the process than the tool.
e-Supervision and PLE are very related.
Strategies for e-supervision
Explore: what tools, what sources/resources, how you discover new sources. Strategies for finding information, applications, etc. It’s about the PERSONAL in PLEs.
Ccommunity: PLEs do not stand alone. It is about the PLN: personal learning network.
Share: once networks are established, encourage to share, as it creates new channels of communication.
Create: fix what is being learned.
Flexibility: let the students have their own tools. What is important is not the tool, but the usage.
Training is crucial, but also circumstances and constrains: innovation is born from constrains.
What is important is the process: technology should not interfere in the process, technology should facilitate the process.
Ricard Espelt, PhD student, Universitat Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
There are benefits of publishing the research process, and not the only goal being publishing in journals.
The importance to share your discoveries while they happen, and not only at the end.
Blog one’s research:
Accountability, especially before the taxpayer.
The importance to keep track of one’s own research.
Technology enables browsing one’s own production in many ways, with different approaches.
Research has to be a forest, not a farm.
Discussion
Oskar Caquero: will the academia ever acknowledge or provide credit for the work done in blogs, wikis, etc. and not only journals? Ricard Espelt: it may be that the focus of this kind of tools is not to address the academia, but to address another community. Miquel Duran: it is very important to impact. And impacting can happen through journals, but also outside of them. On the other hand, it is likely that in a near future we will be able to set up new ways to assess impact, to assess how value is created for society, etc. Francesc Balagué: new ways of scientific production should definitely be recognized.
Xavier Gabarell: how do one manages so much time in doing “traditional” research and blogging and all other stuff? Miquel Duran: one needs a time management time. But it is not easy. Working as a team, though, helps a lot: thus, there is a distribution of tasks and while some do quantitative analysis others blog it.
Stephen Nyaga: maybe there should be a formal training on e-supervision, with both the student and the supervisor at the same time and sharing the tools and thr strategies. And to have a good strategy to set up new policies that deal with these issues, to convince people to share good practices. Miquel Duran: surely the rewards are not (only) on money, but in many other forms. But some rewards should be put in practice, whatever their kind, and definitely recognized. Ricardo Torres: this is going to take time, but it will pay back in the future… but maybe not in the near future… like learning itself.
Miquel Duran: what about flipped supervision?
Ismael Peña-López: Devil’s advocate: can a non-scholar, a non-supervisor, a non-doctor supervise, help, assess a PhD supervision? Is that “qualitatively” possible?
Ismael Peña-López: How distracting can be “fancy” technology? Is that part of the process?
Sioux McKenna: e-supervision cannot be made compulsory. It is about showing the academic benefits of doing e-supervision.
Olive Mugenda: is everything shareable? can everything be open? Ricardo Torres: the problem with some research is that it is too recent or new that there is nothing published… but there actually is lots of stuff in other platforms. This is definitely a reason for opening up not final research but the whole process.
Roger Palà. Media. Mediacat and the Yearbook of the media silences.
Media are suffering a crisis of legitimacy as important as parties’. Indeed, media are reproducing all the bad practices that other powers are. How can we re-legitimze media? How can we return media to their role as watchdogs and not as part of the power? This crisis of legitimacy has been running for at least 15 years. If they have emerged now is due to two main reasons: (1) the financial and economic crisis that have deepened the crisis of journalism, as they lack more now resources and (2) the emergence of social networking sites.
There has been an important devaluation of contents due to lack of resources but also due to accommodation of the professional. This has ended up with bad practices like do not checking the sources, lack of self-criticism, etc. But changing the system from within (i.e. Association of Journalists) is very difficult, so the Grup Barnils opted for initiating some activities “in the margins”. With Media.cat a project was created to point at bad practices in journalism, creating reports on the state of the question of media, etc. The flagship project is the Yearbook of the media silences.
But the point (of the yearbook and in general) is not a general criticism against media, but raising awareness on the crisis of the sector, the reasons for the crisis and the ways to try to fix it. The approach, in fact, is rather constructive and awards the good practitioners more than condemning the bad practitioners.
The Yearbook has had increasing success and one of the reasons is twofold. On the one hand, because it has raised a lot of awareness on the issue and, on the other hand, because it has relied on the citizens to back the project, through crowdfunding initiatives but not only, as citizens have spread the word about the whole process and not only about the final outcome.
The con side of the initiative is that it is a one-time-a-year thing, not very fairly paid and with difficulties of sustainability.
The good thing is that despite being a very small collective, an impact has been made, especially in the field of media.
Discussion
Q: is it true that social networking sites make it more difficult to hide things? Roger Palà: absolutely. A good thing of social networking sites is that they break the monopoly of the agenda-setting.
Arnau Monterde: what is the future of media? is it possible a network-based model? will we see for long the traditional model of mass-media? linking the economic crisis with the crisis of media, is it legitimate? Roger Palà: it is absolutely true that money enables professionalism and professionalism usually enables quality content. This does not mean that media have to be big: we are witnessing the emergence of small initiatives that, despite being small, they are 100% professional and are looking for new niches and new ways of working. We will surely see a new cosmos of few big media and a constellation of small media living together.
Q: isn’t there room for citizen journalism? Roger Palà: yes, sure, but the problem is sustainability in the long run. Is it possible to sustain quality and engagement and professionalism without a comfortable economic position? Maybe, but stability helps a lot in sustainability.
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Institutions of the Post-democracy: globalization, empowerment and governance (2013)
Political participation and Social Networking Sites Chaired by Ana Sofía Cardenal
Marta Cantijoch, Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, PolNet research group.
The distinction amongst citizens is not only between people that participate and that do not participate, but also in how they participate when they do, distinguishing between conventional or unconventional political participation (Political Action Study, 1979), or representational and extra-representational participation (Teorell, Torcal and Montero, 2007): e.g. go to demonstrations, follow calls to boycott products or actions, etc. The latter group is acting outside institutions, thus his political action is not only about a specific position but forms also matter and are plenty of meaning.
In general, we’re seeing a change of attitude where conventional engagement is decreasing (i.e. less people being partisans in a political party) while unconventional politics are increasing. One of the reasons being dissatisfaction towards performance of representative democracy.
Combination of attitudes:
Disaffected citizens: dissatisfaction + low involvement = apathy, non, participation
Social networking sites provide both a qualitative and a quantitative change: higher amount of available information combined with a higher diversity of discourses; contacts and exchanges in horizontals processes (citizen to citizen) made possible while the control of communication stays in the users’ hands; interactivity.
Social networking sites also represent an open gate towards unsolicited, though relevant, information that affects your peers, or your weak ties, but that (positively) reshapes one’s own context.
Consequences:
Tools for citizen empowerment: processes of communication are citizen-initiated (vs. elite directed)
Reinforcement / promotion of attitudinal change: non-hierarchical communication processes
Impact on critical citizens but also on institutionalized profiles
Internet use fosters unconventional forms of participation, a hypothesis verified for the Spanish case.
New opportunity for formal institutions to reconnect to the public, to try and bring them back to the representative democracy arena. This will of course require an adaptation to web 2.0 technologies in the exchanges with the citizens: abandoning the top-down logic, certain degree of decentralization, and higher granularity of participation.
Nobody knows more than everyone together José Antonio Donaire, Member of the Catalan Parliament, Catalan Socialist Party.
Politics 2.0 is not ICT-enhanced politics, or e-Politics. It’s a change of paradigm enabled by a technological change.
Change of paradigm:
The crisis of the autoritas, in the case of representative democracy, the crisis of parties, where a minority sets the general agenda in contradiction with a supposed representative democracy. The change should be towards deliberative democracy, the collective intelligence, collaborative work. The more people debate on a subject, the lower the margin of error. But not only to decrease errors: the deliberative process is a goal in itself. Deliberative democracy negates the autoritas and brings the wisdom back to the collective.
Adaptation from politics to policies, from the big politics to the policies of shades and the small details.
The appearance of complexity, where the same person can have different opinions that not necessarily match the traditional division of left-wing, right-wing or a specific ideology. Multiple identities have to be acknowledged and hence spaces for contact need to be enabled.
How to put this into practice? Different models that can be understood as progressive stages:
Politicians 2.0: the members of the Parliament, etc. have twitter or Facebook accounts, write on their blogs, etc. This provides transparency, interaction, a first person communication (despite the vertical discourse of the party), proximity. Politicians 2.0 are, nevertheless, a necessary but not sufficient step towards Politics 2.0
Political means 2.0, that enable participation, the collective intelligence, managing the complex, rewarding or recognising meritocracy. A wiki, for instance, can allow most of these aspects. The network also generates autoritas, but it is a well deserved autoritas. The Catalan Parlament 2.0 could be an example of this.
Politicized means 2.0, that enable the exchange of ideas, community building and creation of communities, cyberactivism, against particracy. The pros is that people debate seriously, the cons is that they might lead to quasi-parties.
Political spaces 2.0: gathering spaces, dialogue and exchange, complex identities, against particracy.
A distinction between direct democracy and deliberative democracy. The Net to directly decide can lead to dangerous outcomes or problems as the NIMBY, lobbying or even taking the whole system as a joke (e.g. the Spanish “efecto Chikilicuatre”, where Spaniards chose a stand-up comedy actor to represent Spain at Eurovision).
But politics will be 2.0 or won’t be.
Ricard Espelt, Copons Town Councillor, in charge of Economic Promotion, New Technologies and Communication.
In a small town like Copons, problems are small but real ones, and the traditional solution would be that the citizen would shift the problem towards the city council, which might or might not solve the problem, given their limited resources.
Copons 2.0 aims at bringing the citizen back in the equation.
Problems should be able to be rephrased as alternatives, opportunities, requirements… In any case, a problem should be an excuse for a debate, for an encounter within the town and within citizens themselves.
The Administration is seen as a resource, but its limits are properly framed and known by everyone.
And the citizen is, again, no more a “whiner” but someone who can also contribute with solutions, or contributing to “the” solution.
Social networking sites put all these things together, making possible sharing, deliberation, participation, etc.
Far from corporativism, Copons opted for universal and socialized tools, in the cloud, for free: WordPress, Facebook, Flickr, etc. and everything licensed with Creative Commons. Notwithstanding, opinions were only accepted if backed with a real digital profile, even if they were popular or widely accepted.
Surprisingly, online administrative processes have been the less popular, being participative tools the most used. The major: There’s no opposition: it is the citizens who are watching us. Working on the net and in such a framework, the administration has to be transparent and the citizens ask for highest degrees of accountability, responsibility, etc.
What happens with the digital divide? Wifi areas and digital literacy workshops were created to help the laggards catch up with the rest. Training is made on a peer-to-peer basis, where initiated volunteers help their neighbours. Now, more people have digital profiles, there’s more broadband penetration, offline debate has been enriched and enhanced by online debate, people self-organize. A good pro: everybody knows who their representatives are and viceversa.
The Copons 2.0 project has been able to deal with quite complex problems, problems that came from a long tail of approaches, that gathered all the relevant agents (known and unknown) affected by the problem, etc. And sometimes, the identified solutions belonged not to the Government sphere, but to a shared set of responsibilities/responsibles. But, as monitoring is constant, solutions are temporal and they quickly enter a process of constant improvement… as in a permanent beta.
Q&A
Franck Dumortier: Where are the limits of conventional and unconventional? How is your digital identity affected by you participation conventionally or unconventionally? (e.g. a demonstration that ends up with you on jail because of some uncontrolled riots)
Ismael Peña-López: the impact of SNS on critical and institutionalized citizens, is it the same one? Is it more “2.0” in the case of critical/grassroots and more “1.0” in the case of institutionalized/top-down? José Antonio Donaire: we’ll most probably be seeing Politics 2.0 made up of the 4 stages mentioned below. On the other hand, it not about web 2.0 tools, or web 2.0 tools used the 1.0 or the 2.0 way, but whether there is a deliberative process, however it takes place. Marta Cantijoch: Agreed, it’s not about technology but processes and philosophy, a participatory one, despite whether it is made with web 1.0 or 2.0 applications.
Ismael Peña-López: does Politics 2.0 require a lot more effort/work or can it be mainstreamed in every day’s politics? Ricard Espelt: more than a matter of workload, is a matter of attitude, whether one wants to engage with the citizenry or wants to be pro-active in politics, or just sit on the City Council.
Q: How does participatory politics fit with a party system, closed, not really representative, power centred, top-down managed, etc.? Why should I speak with a politician, interact with them, if they are wired to/by the party? José Antonio Donaire: I’m absolutely for open lists in elections. But, but this radically change the scenario? It might make the individual politician more responsible, but the change of paradigm goes way beyond that. A representative system is efficient, but it does not necessarily require that it is the party/government who decides both the agenda and the results of the agenda setting. There is an urgent need to recover the debate, the collective finding of the truth, the enlightenment.
Albert Batlle: What happens with the profile of satisfied citizen but not active/engaged? Marta Cantijoch: this profile perfectly fits within the Institutionalized group.
Albert Batlle: How do we scale up the Copons 2.0 model? For instance, from the local to the national or the international level. How do we reach consensus there? Ricard Espelt: We have a low sense of the common good and of the community. The problem of scalability is most probably not a matter of size, but of consensus. Big participatory projects do not work not because they are big, but because they are top-down. José Antonio Donaire: Maybe what works is common interest. If Copons 2.0 works it might be because the small town is thematically coherent. We thus can build bigger communities that, notwithstanding, have a common thematic core. And the politician should have channels so that they can practice an active hearing, a way to gather knowledge in which to base their decisions.
Q: (to José Antonio Donaire) Why should a politician want to end up politics? What does it mean ending up conventional politics? How would you then become a Member of Parliament? A: I am aware that representative politics works, but it is a fragile one, and there’s evidence of disaffection and of loss of sense of community. When talking about politics outside politics, this means not without politics, but outside of (or without) conventional politics. The idea is not throwing politicians away, but working with the citizens to set up the agenda, to decide what’s to be decided, etc.
Mònica Vilasau: How do we connect engagement and a call for participation with results? How not to deceive people? Is it easier in smaller places? Are outcomes easier to achieve at smaller scales? José Antonio Donaire: It’s better a citizen association building up a website and imagining what they’d like, than the City Council asking for ideas. A good example could be Las 1001 Ideas.
Ana Sofía Cardenal: For a deliberative democracy, we need a genuine motivation. But there are demagogues that want to manipulate the public arena. What to do with them? José Antonio Donaire: On the Net, reputation is very transparent. In a network of people it is more difficult to be cynical.
