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Teaching in Higher Education Critical Perspectives

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Digital and distributed: learning and teaching doctoral writing through social media

Cally Guerin, Claire Aitchison & Susan Carter

To cite this article: Cally Guerin, Claire Aitchison & Susan Carter (2020) Digital and distributed: learning and teaching doctoral writing through social media, Teaching in Higher Education, 25:2, 238-254, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1557138

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1557138

Published online: 04 Jan 2019.

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Digital and distributed: learning and teaching doctoral writing through social media Cally Guerin a, Claire Aitchison b and Susan Carter c

aFaculty of Arts, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia; bTeaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia; cCentre for Learning and Research in Higher Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACT Higher education learning is increasingly enacted in digital environments and doctoral education is no exception. Scholars – supervisors and PhD candidates – actively create their own digital profiles, and their research is often disseminated via social media in tandem with the traditional publication of journals and books. Online learning behaviours, social media and doctoral education are complex, and, when considered together, present distinct challenges. This paper explores the work and practices of digital academics using social media through a case study of an academic blog, DoctoralWriting. We use statistical data from the blog to map evolving pedagogic practices and forms of doctoral writing support and engagement. This analysis reveals horizontalised networks of co-creating consumers and producers who interact on social media platforms in ways that signal new transnational networks of learning and teaching. This paper contributes to our understanding of academic engagement with social media in contemporary doctoral education, particularly doctoral writing.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 18 May 2018 Accepted 5 December 2018

KEYWORDS Doctoral education; social media; doctoral writing

Introduction

Higher education learning is now increasingly enacted in digital environments and doc- toral education is no exception. Scholars – both supervisors and PhD candidates – actively create their own digital profiles, including disseminating their research via social media in tandem with the traditional publication processes of learned journals and academic book publishers. The assumption that it is millennials who are ‘digital natives’ (Wankel 2009) has been nudged aside as evidence of the ‘digital academic’ proliferates (Gruzd, Staves, and Wilk 2012; Moran, Seaman, and Tinti-Kane 2011). Yet there is still only limited scho- larly research into the digitisation of academic work (Lupton, Mewburn, and Thomson 2018).

Online learning behaviours, social media and doctoral education are complex, multi- layered and dynamic, and, when considered together, present distinct challenges. This paper grapples to make sense of the complexity that is emblematic of the work and prac- tices of the digital academic and social media in doctoral education through a case study of

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Cally Guerin [email protected]

TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 2020, VOL. 25, NO. 2, 238–254 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1557138

an academic blog, DoctoralWriting. As the name suggests, DoctoralWriting explores the intricacies of supporting and learning doctoral writing; its readership includes academic and researcher developers, writing teachers, supervisors and doctoral candidates. We argue that, unlike undergraduate learning and teaching practices, doctoral education is increasingly operating in unique, horizontalised networks of co-creating consumers and producers who use social media to build dynamic just-in-time learning communities.

This article establishes the context of academic engagement in social media, explains the case study blog and the methods used to analyse usage patterns. Our findings show what readers were looking for when they arrive at the site and their information- seeking behaviours once there. Data shows the network geography including where readers are located physically, referrer activity and connections to other social media sites. In doing so, it begins to address a gap in empirical data about recent reconfigurations in the social negotiations of doctoral teaching and learning.

Digital learning

Doctoral study occupies a unique position in relation to digital learning. Unlike the case in undergraduate degree courses, there is no clear curriculum for the research doctorate across disciplines (although we are starting to see attempts to define a ‘curriculum’ in this area – see, for example, Aitchison and Paré 2012; Barrie et al. 2018; Gilbert 2009; Green 2012); rather, each candidature and research project runs its own course, following different paths towards ‘doctorateness’ (Denicolo and Park 2013; Poole 2015). To some extent this makes doctoral education an ideal space in which to explore the learning net- works of the digital environment, where ‘groups of individuals that are self-directed, vital, self-managed and active in the generation of new ideas’ (McLoughlin and Lee 2007, 664) seek and share information.

The concepts of ‘authority’ and ‘expertise’ are troubled in the social media spaces of doctoral education, where content is authored by students, supervisors and writing tea- chers, all of whom might be operating under the auspices of their institutions and also (even simultaneously) outside the academy. Contributing to social media activity occurs through creating content, reading others’ content, and passing it on through the learning network, forming a vibrant rhizomatic growth of interconnectivity. This kind of doctoral learning activity undermines traditional concepts of the roles of learner, teacher and advisor; it also unsettles ideas about where learning happens. No longer confined to the classrooms of accredited institutions, learning can occur online at any time, through newly found or well-established networks.

Thus, digital teaching and learning changes traditional roles and understandings of pedagogy and curriculum. The learning and teaching practices of physical classrooms are familiar to both teachers/lecturers and students; we know much less about virtual learning spaces. Like others, we believe that the potential of digital communities for learn- ing is enormous, and that empirical investigation can broaden understanding of social media as a new space of learning in doctoral education. Borrowing the metaphor of an education ‘trading zone’ from Mills and Huber (2005), we can conceptualise a digital agora, an e-learning trading zone. This metaphor captures the way that traditional teach- ing and learning power hierarchies are destabilised within the digitalised academy as it evolves into something more like exchange. Brown and Adler (2008, 18) focus on social

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learning, pointing out that ‘mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field’. A longi- tudinal UK study confirms that so-called Generation Y doctoral students are ‘acutely aware of authority and authenticity issues in research’, while being ‘sophisticated infor- mation seekers and users of complex information sources’ (Carpenter 2012, 3). ‘Issues’ in that sense refers to a suspicion about what is to be found online when credentials can be fudged. Despite such cautions, the benefits have propelled a growth in social media engagement by academics (Stewart 2015; Sugimoto et al. 2017; Wankel 2009).

Digital academics and social media

Many academics now see the use of social media as an important and influential force in today’s scholarly communication, no longer to be treated as trivial or simply self-aggran- dising (Lupton, Mewburn, and Thomson 2018). Sugimoto et al. (2017) categorise ‘social media’ into: (1) social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, ResearchGate, Academia.edu); (2) social bookmarking and reference management (Mendeley, Zotero); (3) social data sharing (figshare, SlideShare); (4) video (YouTube); (5) wikis (Wikispaces); and (6) blog- ging (WordPress, Wix) and microblogging (Twitter). As it is this last category (blogging/ microblogging) that is of particular interest to this study, it is worth reiterating that blog- ging is regarded primarily as a content-delivery platform, while Twitter is a networking tool functioning as an accelerant to spread content through online networks.

The emerging literature on academics’ use of social media tells us how differently forms of social media are employed. A considerable proportion of Twitter and blogging activity, for example, mimics more traditional methods of ‘dissemination, consumption, com- munication and promotion’ of research (Sugimoto et al. 2017, 2039). Research into Twitter use reveals that many scholars use it to share news of their own and others’ pub- lished research outputs (Holmberg and Thelwall 2014; Stewart 2015), connecting net- works of scholars with common interests in specific fields (Gouseti 2017). Increasingly, Twitter citations of research publications are being taken into account in the measurement of research impact, as are other altmetrics from non-academic sources (Priem and Costello 2010; Stewart 2015). This trend is further legitimising social media in academe and no doubt driving its popularity.

Social media is also generative. Rather than simply operating as a source of infor- mation directing readers to research existing in the outside world, valuable research is enacted inside the space of social media as conversations develop, research data is generated and new material is created. Social media platforms like Twitter and blogging are frequently used by academics to participate in conversations on topical research issues (Holmberg and Thelwall 2014; Rainford 2016), providing a space for scholars to share opinions and comment on what they are observing, connecting with peers to advance the debates in their fields. Similarly, social media is used to develop shared understandings in political and social movements, activism and online communities. Social media is also significant for crowdsourcing for research projects, facilitating the gathering of information and research data, recruiting survey participants, tran- scribing and editing documents, entering data, and providing observations about poss- ible interpretations and hypotheses (Osimo, Priego, and Vuorikari 2017; Silberzahn and Uhlmann 2015).

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The generative aspects of blogging in particular allow scholars to air new ideas-in-pro- gress, sometimes engaging in extended debates in their fields. By operating outside the formal academic publishing world, they are able to get ideas into the public arena immedi- ately, rather than waiting for the lengthy peer review process (Henderson 2010; Newton 2010; Tattersall 2015); public comment and critique of the material can then help to further shape arguments and insights. For those committed to the principles of open access to research findings, blogging provides an equitable, free channel of communication with peers worldwide.

Research into social media also reveals activity aimed at connecting, networking and creating identity, rather than being focused only on academic research. For many, Twitter is an effective medium to share information about upcoming events, conferences and presentations. It is also regarded as a valuable conference back channel (Holmberg and Thelwall 2014; Li and Greenhow 2015), allowing comment and observations to be shared during such events in real time. Research into Twitter demonstrates its usefulness for informal professional development (Carpenter and Krutka 2015; Li and Greenhow 2015). Blogging can be used to build a professional profile as a public scholar, as well as to link academic research to political activism (Lupton, Mewburn, and Thomson 2018). In numerous ways, then, scholarly identities are built, sustained and recognised in social media (Gouseti 2017; Marshall, Barbour, and Moore 2018; Rainford 2016; Kimmons and Veletsianos 2016; Veletsianos and Kimmons 2016).

Despite debates about uneven access to digital technology (the ‘digital divide’) and cri- tique of the concept of the ‘digital native’ (Bennett and Maton 2010), the vast majority of researchers in universities are at least moderately competent users of digital technologies. Both supervisors and research degree candidates expect to search online for information about undertaking and supporting PhDs, just as they do for other aspects of their research lives (Carrigan 2016). The doctorate can often be a personally isolated space, despite the requirement that the project itself is necessarily entering into dialogue with the broader global scholarship around the topic – for many, the obvious place to find the relevant con- versations is online, just as they do in many other dimensions of their work and personal lives. The capacity to find information and communities of like-minded scholars in the digital world is an important skill for today’s researchers; indeed, such digital capabilities are an expected graduate attribute for many PhD graduates (Gouseti 2017). Yet it appears that doctoral candidates overall, until recently, tended to be passive users of social media rather than actively generating material themselves (Carrigan 2016; JISC 2012).

In keeping with the fluidity of doctoral learning and teaching, many social media sites for academics and researchers are frequented by doctoral students (for example, Pat Thomson’s blog Patter). There is also evidence of the rapidly growing uptake of social media by research students, some of which is short term and DIY, while other platforms have proven to be more sustainable and long-lived. Doctoral students are engaging in these opportunities in order to connect to community and counter isolation (see, for example, sites such as mumswhostudy, Phdlife) and to build skills and knowledge (for example, Explorations of Style, AcWriMo, PhD2Published). Although advice on the merits of blogging through the PhD varies, some doctoral candidates have also used this as a space for documenting their journey, writing and reflecting on aspects such as methodologies, progress and challenges (for examples, see the list of student blogs on the ThesisWhisperer at https://thesiswhisperer.com/read-some-phd-student-blogs/).

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There are also numerous Twitter feeds for doctoral students, including those created by doctoral students (for example, PhDParent), and a growing number by institutions and businesses (for example, PhDchat, PHD Comics, PhD Connect).

Self-evidently, this is a hybrid and fluid space of activity with numerous and intersect- ing online producers and consumers. We turn now to a case study of a particular social media outlet, a learning space for both doctoral students and those supporting them that has been in existence since 2012.

Case study: the DoctoralWriting blog

The DoctoralWriting blog offers a useful case study to investigate how a particular com- munity of academics, that is, doctoral educators (such as academic developers and writing teachers), supervisors and doctoral candidates become networked in their pursuit of knowledge creation and sharing via social media. The particular focus of their common endeavour is doctoral writing – an aspect of doctoral study that is itself undergoing significant pressure to change as technological change reshapes learning environments.

Anthony Paré (2017, 2) lays down the challenge that the altering environment poses for doctoral writing when he questions the thesis as monograph because of the digitalisation of doctoral learning and research dissemination:

More specifically and bluntly, in terms of doctoral writing, is the academy stuck on single- authored, print-based texts while the rest of the world has gone collaborative and digital? And while knowledge outside the academy is being developed, debated and disseminated by blog, tweet, wiki, web page, podcast and video, are we still demanding book-length mono- graphs that travel no farther than the library bookshelves?

DoctoralWriting posts material related to all aspects of writing relevant to doctoral can- didates, with a target audience of those who support doctoral candidates (supervisors/ advisors, researcher educators and writing teachers); and we have discovered that many readers are doctoral candidates themselves. Hence, this case study provides insights into the kinds of issues for which doctoral educators and doctoral students seek support online. This information about user needs reveals how such users supplement insti- tutional programmes, or how they discover material that may be completely missing from those programmes (or at least from the research environments in which these indi- viduals work).

As editors of the site who write many of the posts, solicit posts from colleagues and curate the material, we sought to understand more about the blog’s user demographics to understand this dynamic and complex environment and to inform our practice. Data analytics relating to social media uptake are usually employed to demonstrate impact and engagement, which are of concern to the academic community in an increasingly measured university. However blunt social media data might be in this context, it never- theless provides a proxy by which to understand patterns of user behaviour. We wanted to make evidence-based decisions about what we do and why, with the long-term sus- tainability of the site and its future direction in mind. The findings have some intrinsic interest because they illuminate doctoral educators’ and candidates’ needs around writing, and their habits in seeking social media resources. The findings also speak to

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bigger concerns, such as how academic activity and scholarship is understood in this space – and this is a particularly rich space because it brings together doctoral students and those who support them. That the site is a horizontalised, virtual learning space raises issues about digital learning, the fluidity of geographic borders, and about ‘exper- tise’ and ownership.

Our aim was to draw from the descriptive statistics that are freely available through WordPress to develop a picture of the blog’s readers and how they use the blog as a resource to support doctoral writing. To explore user behaviours, we were guided by the following research questions.

(1) Which category of posts to is most often accessed by the blog’s readers? (How well does the blog match the needs of the readers?)

(2) How do readers find the blog?What have they been looking for when they arrive at this site? (What kinds of information are doctoral educators and students seeking, and by what means?)

(3) Where are the blog’s readers located? (How widespread and common are user concerns?)

(4) Who are the referrers, and what networks do they suggest? (Can this data shed light on the nature and quality of user networks and the blog’s reputation?)

(5) How is the blog connected into other social media networks? (Can user networks indicate the reach and uptake of the blog?)

Method

In order to gather data that might give answers to these questions, five years of WordPress statistical data – from the blog’s first posting in September 2012 to September 2017 – was downloaded and analysed. The blog is a dynamic system that is regularly updating with new posts, comments and visitors and thus these 229 posts represent only a snapshot in time. While the exact raw numbers and percentages change over time, the overall picture gives a good indication of the ways in which readers interact with the blog.

The study was limited to analysing information which is supplied free to WordPress bloggers (https://wordpress.com/stats/day/doctoralwriting.wordpress.com). This data provides one way of observing how users interact online with the blog and associated Twitter account, at least hinting at behaviours in this digital space. Thus, our findings arose from analysing data available according to the following WordPress categories:

. ‘Views’ and ‘visitors’ displays the traffic on the website. Each visitor may view more than one blog post (available as daily, weekly, monthly and annual counts).

. ‘Posts and Pages’ displays the number of views each post and page has attracted (avail- able for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and all time counts).

. ‘Countries’ displays the location from which readers have accessed the blog (available for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and all time counts).

. ‘Search terms’ displays a list of the terms entered into search engines that lead readers to the site.

. ‘Referrers’ reveals the sources used by readers that have directed them to the site.

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For each of these we selected the ‘All time’ option and downloaded the data as CSV files which were then analysed using R software.

Data on the Twitter activity was downloaded from the Twitter Analytics page for the @DocwritingSIG account. This page provides information on the ‘Tweet Activity’ in relation to ‘Engagement’, which refers to the number of times a reader interacts with the tweet to retweet, reply, follow or like the tweet. Six months of Twitter activity data was obtained for analysis: from June to November, 2017.

Results

Statistical data for the blog and Twitter five years into theDoctoralWriting project revealed a snapshot of the behaviour trends in this dynamic space.

Which category of posts with is most often accessed by the blog’s readers?

We categorise posts into six broad topics as follows:

(1) The Thesis/Dissertation: overall structure; components of thesis (e.g. introductions, literature reviews, conclusions); types of dissertation (e.g. creative practice-led/ thesis by publication); examination

(2) Grammar/Voice/Style: punctuation, sentence level, pronoun use; argumentation, rhetoric, rhetorical moves; mechanics of writing

(3) Writing Practices: writing spaces, habits; writing groups and retreats, writing as social practice; writing technologies; supervision and feedback; plagiarism; writing support/ development; ESL/international students

(4) Publication: reviewing, peer review; traditional and alternative publication, open access; profile building; co-authoring; copyright

(5) Identity and Emotion: writer’s block; author positioning; doctoral candidature; critical thinking; writing motivation; writer identities (e.g. shifting sense of self, mothering, relationship with supervisor)

(6) Community Reports: conference reports, SIG meetings, book reviews, events

For this study, to identify themes in the posts, we counted the number of posts in each of the six categories they are assigned to on the website (as listed above). Figure 1 (left) presents a pie chart showing the percentages of each category in the overall output. Around one third of our posts are on Writing Practices; another quarter are on Identity and Emotion; 16% on the Thesis/Dissertation; and the remaining quarter are more or less evenly spread across Grammar/Voice/Style, Publication, and Community Reports.

The next step was to compare this with the percentage of views each category received; this was to find out if readers want to read what we write about. To ascertain the popularity of the post categories, we gathered percentages into a second pie chart for comparison (Figure 1, right). Initially there was a massive discrepancy between the two sets of data. While we post only 16% of blogs on the Thesis/Dissertation, 62% of views were in this category. Writing Practices had dropped to 15% of views; Identity and Emotion, Grammar/Voice/Style and Publication were fairly evenly spread across 22% of views; and a tiny 1% of views landed in Community Reports. We found that over half of the

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posts are on Writing Practices and Identity/Emotion (58%), but only around a quarter (24%) of views are in these categories.

However, there is one huge outlier in the posts viewed, and that is ‘Writing the acknowledgements: the etiquette of thanking’, which accounts for 43% of the views overall. Writing thesis acknowledgements is clearly a major issue for many doctoral writers, and is discussed in more detail at Guerin, Carter, and Aitchison (2015). When this large chunk of views is removed from the analysis, views of posts on Thesis/Disser- tation issues slips back to 19% of the total views (that is, 62% of all views minus 43% acknowledgements views), which is more consistent with the amount of work published on this aspect of doctoral writing (i.e. 16% of posts) (Figure 2).

Thus, if we exclude the acknowledgements post from the number of views in the Thesis category, there is a closer alignment between what is posted and what readers are viewing (Table 1).

Nevertheless, it appears that readers are more interested in gleaning information about Thesis/Dissertation writing than we had realised. Viewers have limited interest in the Community Reports published. These are mostly reports that summarise themes from rel- evant conferences (i.e. on postgraduate or doctoral education) and book reviews. It remains the case, too, that more is posted on Writing Practices and issues around Identity and Emotion in doctoral writing than readers seem to want. Perhaps they deal with issues of emotion and identity elsewhere, and come to the blog for practical advice rather than as a community that shares experiences.

How do readers find the blog? What have they been looking for when they arrive at this site?

Although the data on search terms is largely inaccessible owing to search engine privacy constraints and that freely supplied by WordPress, some limited information is available.

Figure 1. Percentage of posts in each category (left) compared to percentage of views in each category (right).

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In the first instance, approximately 150,000 search terms were categorised by WordPress as ‘unknown’. We assigned the remaining 5211 identifiable search terms into categories to group individual searches according to themes (see Figure 3). For example, the category ‘mother’ was assigned to all searches that included ‘mother’, ‘mom’, ‘motherhood’, ‘mum’, etc. This process revealed that the search terms leading readers to the site are vastly dominated by those related to ‘acknowledgements’ – over two thirds. This is to be expected, given the number of views of the posts on acknowledgements reported above. Indeed, variations on ‘acknowledgements’ account for 296 of the 497 terms avail- able to us, and each of those variations is repeated numerous times.

When this outlier is excluded, the most common search terms used are variants of ‘pla- giarism’ (46%, nearly half) and ‘doctoral writing’ (more than two thirds, 38%). It may be that concern about plagiarism is a vivid example of what prompts the ‘just in time’ or ‘need

Figure 2. Percentage of views in each category – minus views of ‘Acknowledgements’ post.

Table 1. Comparison of percentage of posts and views according to category. Category Posts Views

Writing practices 34% 26% Identity and emotion 24% 17% The thesis/dissertation 16% 33% Grammar/voice/style 10% 12% Publication 8% 10% Community reports 8% 2%

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to know’ searches. Although fewer, other regular search terms clustered around these topics: chapter; voice software; collaboration; and mother.

Where are the blog’s readers located?

The statistical data reveals that readers have accessed the blog from nearly every country in the world, with the exception of a few African countries and Greenland.

Figure 4 shows the percentage breakdown of views according to region. We assigned the country views to broad geographic blocks based on continent/region. China, India and Russia were treated separately: China and India because of their very large popu- lations; Russia because this vast landmass does not easily align with other HE systems in terms of language or education system. Scandinavian countries were included as part of Europe. The chart indicates that the highest percentage (around a quarter) of views come from North America, followed by the UK, then Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), and close behind is Europe. Together, these four regions account for approxi- mately three quarters of all viewers located in developed regions with well-established doc- toral education programmes (of course, these countries also have many students from developing nations studying for doctorates in their universities).

A disproportionately high number of views emanate from Australasia where there is a much smaller population of doctoral students and scholars than in the UK or North America. However, all three co-editors of the blog are located in this region, and hence we can assume that a considerable amount of the uptake is based on local knowledge and dissemination through formal and informal networks. For example, the blog’s April 2012 origins at a Special Interest Group at the Quality in Postgraduate Research

Figure 3. Percentage of search terms used by readers to locate the blog posts.

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Conference (held every two years in Adelaide, South Australia) created an initial interest base. Similarly, co-editors, guest authors and other doctoral support workers reference the blog at their own institutions, so that something like ‘snowballing’ (Noy 2008) further expands the blog’s reach.

Turning to the individual countries, it is obvious that most views are from those with high densities of Anglophone population (Figure 5). The top three are the US, UK and Australia. The percentages drop swiftly after these, but it is interesting to note that India appears fifth on the list (probably because it has a high number of English speakers in its huge population, which translates into a significant number of English-speaking PhD candidates at its universities). Germany, too, is high on the list, most likely because this comparatively smaller nation has a highly educated population with a large percentage of fluent English speakers. Next in line is South Africa: although this country has a con- siderably smaller number of doctoral candidates, many of them are also English speakers and the doctoral system in South Africa has many similarities with those in Australia and New Zealand. Numbers drop away quickly when looking at countries where the majority of doctoral candidates and supervisors probably do not use English in their everyday lives nor in their studies.

Who are the referrers, and what networks do they suggest?

The WordPress statistics also track the pathways into the blogsite through ‘Referrers’, that is, traffic coming from other blogs, websites and search engines where readers clicked on a

Figure 4. Percentage of blog views from geographic regions.

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link to the blog. The statistics reveal that there is little variation in referrer traffic to Doc- toralWriting: 83% of visitors arrive through a search engine, which turns out to be almost exclusively Google (99%). A few readers find the blog through Twitter (8%) and Facebook (7%), and a tiny percentage through Pinterest and Pocket (both sitting at around 1%).

On digging down into the specific referrers, it becomes clear that the vast majority of web- sites that link to DoctoralWriting are from individual or group blogs specifically focused on doctoral support or from official university websites (Figure 6). Together these referrers account for 83% of the sources linking to the blog. Another 9% are links from ‘consultancies’ that operate as external facilitators providing outsourced support for doctoral candidates.

How is the blog connected into other social media networks?

The focus of our analysis is on blog activity; however, there are other social media net- works that engage with the blog, the most significant of which is Twitter. It is worth noting that the DoctoralWriting blog has not activated an associated Facebook page, and uses Twitter primarily to inform readers of new posts. Nevertheless, the majority (approximately 85%) of the follower community links to the blog via Twitter; it is also via Twitter that followers circulate, forward, retweet and share responses to the posts.

The Twitter data reveals follower ‘engagement’ (according to the Twitter analytics definition, this is the reader interaction with the tweet to retweet, reply, follow or like the tweet) is most likely to be a click on a URL in the tweet, suggesting that our Twitter feed is used to find more substantial sources of information about the topics that fall under our purview (for example, blogs and articles on relevant topics). This is consistent

Figure 5. Percentage of views according to countries recording more than 3000 views each.

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with what we might reasonably expect from an academic audience seeking information relevant to their professional lives. Our policy has been to tweet only on topics directly related to doctoral writing, and it can be assumed that this is, in fact, why followers sub- scribe to the blog and Twitter feed.

Conclusions

As networks of learners grow in the online environment and academics become more actively involved as content writers and consumers, it is increasingly important to collect evi- dence of how such learning communities operate. This case study sought to contribute to this evolving knowledge by analysing the data from a particular academic blog in order to better understand the people, practices and patterns of behaviour of the community.

A steady growth of DoctoralWriting users as evidenced through searches and the ‘fol- lower’ base expansion, plus forward circulation of the blog and its posts, suggests the blog is valued. In addition, referrer patterns provide a proxy measure of credibility – approximately 44% of our referrers are accredited HE institutions; their approbation indi- cates not only a valuing of the work, but also that a measure of quality is bestowed. The other major group of referrers are other bloggers (39% of referrers) – again indicating reach and a valuing of the blog within this community of users. These influential referrers are indicators of both impact and engagement, although they are not rigorous evidence of learning.

While WordPress statistics provided raw numbers to demonstrate certain patterns, it is also necessary to recognise the limitations of data mining to address all our queries. Impact and engagement in social media is regularly measured by growth and reach (Mollett,

Figure 6. Percentage of referrers grouped according to type of originating website.

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Moran, and Dunleavy 2011); however, while these are valuable indicators, they cannot be regarded as reliable measures on their own. As educators we are not only interested in growth and reach; we create posts on the practice and theory of doctoral writing in the hope that readers will find them useful and informative for teaching and learning practice. WordPress statistics can only function as proxy indicators. Beyond the popularity of the one post on ‘Acknowledgements,’ these statistics reveal what categories of information are most widely accessed, suggesting something about anxiety hotspots in doctoral writing. Yet, without really knowing who is accessing posts (students or supervisors, for example), statistics remain a blunt indicator perhaps only of popularity, or novelty factor. A more targeted approach, for example, via reader surveys, could provide better feedback on our ‘curriculum’ – and on how to best categorise posts.

Based in Australasia, the co-editors are situated in the global south, but are not isolated when it comes to advancements in doctoral education. Insights that come from teaching within our own institutions can be shared across borders. The blog’s reach is considerable, although heavily weighted towards English-speaking countries (as Curry and Lillis (2018) remind us, English continues to be the dominant language of research publication). The breadth of uptake globally certainly reflects the unbounded, horizontal learning and the international nature of doctoral study. We are participants in an active world of online doctoral support through institutions, bloggers and some consultancies, and this study provides a glimpse into these networks and readers’ interactions moving through them. Our findings point to the advent of the digital researcher operating in the international context, not constrained by location as they might have been in the past, but spinning net- works that sustain doctoral learning.

The findings presented here from one case study begin to sketch out the changing prac- tice of doctoral support in the twenty-first century. This article adds to understanding of digital, distributed learning (e.g. Lupton, Mewburn, and Thomson 2018) – and it raises awareness of what we still do not know. Nevertheless, a better understanding of behaviours around this academic blog gives an inkling of practice more widely. The robust re-circu- lating of information from the blog via other social media such as friendly blogs and Twitter is a significant indicator of the satellite learning communities associated with blogs like this one. In this way, Twitter acts independently as an accelerant for blogs, linking to and firing up other conversations in other secondary networks. A more exten- sive study would better track this ripple effect.

It seems from the literature and this small case study that today’s digital researchers, and those who support their writing, are looking for informed academic information online. This paper gives intriguing evidence of the vagaries of activity beyond institutional walls. The international spread of readers demonstrates the international nature of doc- toral studies: research questions and advice are shared globally; theories are global even when topics are very local; and academics, doctoral candidates and their examiners can come from anywhere. Geography, we suggest, is less relevant than it once was, since scho- lars all over the globe are learning from each other.

As small scale researchers dependent on the analytics provided by blog host platforms we are left knowing more about engagement than impact. Statistics are unable to tell how information contained in posts is taken up and used subsequently outside the spheres of social media. How often do educators or doctoral students take up the ideas shared, or the lessons demonstrated, changing their practices? Are these posts and conversations taken

TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 251

into classrooms and/or shared with doctoral students? Not all users and uses are reflected in the statistics. Perhaps these kinds of measures may be strong indicators of credibility and quality, particularly in the dynamic, unbounded pedagogical space of doctoral edu- cation, but would we want to use them in self-reporting? How often is a blog post a trigger for further learning? Is perhaps digital and distributed learning reshaping the cur- riculum for doctoral writing?

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Fernando Marmolejo Ramos and Anna Morozov for their help in analysing data for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Adelaide [Faculty Research-Active Grant Scheme].

ORCID

Cally Guerin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0588-0804 Claire Aitchison http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7449-1178 Susan Carter http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2498-2814

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