Baby Steps on the Road to PhD

The biggest hurdle in starting a PhD is finding the topic. This has to keep you interested, motivated and also be something that is worth pursuing and needs to be researched. Remember that the research has to make contribution to many areas such as knowledge, practice and research methodology if possible. So just having a topic is mind was only the first part to getting myself registered on a PhD.

Then started the delicate and difficult part of working through what exactly I wished to research within the topic. I am interested in so many things and there is a limit to what can be achieved within a PhD. This is where I needed the support of my supervisors. Rupert Wegerif was my first supervisor and Patrick Dillon was the second supervisor. This initial period is important also in developing a relationship with your supervisor. You need to be able to understand each other and appreciate the each other and so know give and get support that is beneficial. It was interesting to meet and talk about what I wanted to do, write up drafts of proposal and keep reworking the research questions to get a better focus. I was able to get across to my supervisor that I was not a scatterbrain but just interested in too many things. I needed the discussions with him to work out the specifics. The writing also had to be discussed as my style is totally different from my supervisors. At one point it was an eureka moment when we understood that I was very much grounded in praxis while he was very much theory oriented.

Also a new thing for both of us was that I would do a collaborative PhD. There was a research project being carried out in the School of Education. This was the Argunaut Project an European collaborative research project set up to develop software that would support facilitator in moderating synchronous online tool called Digalo. I was to work with the research team and participate in the development of the experiments, data gathering as well as analysis and report writing. The data that was relevant to my research questions could be collected at the same time as some of the data gathered for the project was also necessary for my research. Then there were some aspects of research questions which had to be specifically incorporated into the data gathering.

This was a very challenging and exciting new experience for me. Working at a completely different level from what I was generally used to. It suddenly made me realise that I had not been intellectually stimulated in the last few years. I had got into a rut intellectually and academically. The first stirring of interest was when I started teaching myself the concept and principles of using technology in learning and teaching. I was invited to submit a proposal for an international conference. Presenting at that conference seemed to click on a switch and I knew what I needed to do to improve myself and challenge me.

The first thing I had to do as the research team member is develop an online workshop with two different tools to carry out the real time discussions. At this point my second supervisor was changed to Maarten De Laat as he was the research project leader in the department and was better placed to support me. This started my exciting journey into the world of research. Strange how I always thought research to be boring…… I think I was naive. The developing of the workshop as a pilot study was not very difficult as I have developed similar modules in my work. The refining of research questions and beginning of literature review was what had me tearing my hair out… There was so much to read and so much to include in the literature review – pedagogies of online learning and teaching, facilitating learning online and the tools available both linear text display tools and graphically and spatially displayed text tools. I actually learned so many tools during this period and realised it was fun to learn about these different software which I could use in my work.

Writing the literature review was the next important hurdle. It is easy to be descriptive and just identify what different theories explain. Having to be clear about what the theory says and what are the strengths and limitations of each one is where the critical thinking needs to be applied. You need to bring together all the literature and arrive at your own theoretical conceptual framework to show your understanding of the theories. This part has always been hard for me as I need to spend a lot of time thinking before I can develop a conceptual framework. This writing had to be refined and revisited and reedited many times….. Rupert says rewriting is the secret to good writing!