From Student to Researcher’ in the Digital Age: Exploring the Affordances of Emerging Learning Ecologies of Phd E-Researchers
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UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA (UOC) The transition ‘from student to researcher’ in the digital age: Exploring the affordances of emerging learning ecologies of PhD e-researchers. Doctoral Dissertation PhD candidate: Antonella Esposito PhD advisors: Prof. Albert Sangrà, P.hd, Prof. Marcelo Maina, P.hd Submitted in partial fulfillement of the requirements for the PhD programme Education and ICT (E-learning) Elearn Center, UOC Barcelona, November 2014 Ai miei genitori, che hanno sempre creduto in me. “The first draft is fraught with difficulty. It’s like giving birth, very painful, but after that taking care of and playing with the baby is full of joy.” (Interview to Julian Barnes, Paris Review, 18th October 2011). 2 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Antonella Esposito has a background in Philosophy and Media Studies. She has been an e-learning practitioner for more than fifteen years, in the capacity of course designer and online tutor, mainly in the higher education sector in Italy. She has been working at the University of Milan, where she was director of the local e-learning center for seven years. In 2011 she was awarded the MRes in Educational and Social Research, Institute of Education, University of London. An extensive excerpt of her MRes dissertation was published on First Monday (Esposito, 2013). In 2009 she also earned the certificates in Open and Distance Education from the Open University, UK and in E- learning Course Design and Teaching from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Spain. Her current research interests are concerned with learning ecologies of doctoral researchers, digital scholars and open scholarship practices, social media and teacher/student engagement in higher education and research ethics in online settings. Works published or submitted for publication during the PhD research Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (in press). Learning ecologies as new challenge and essence of e-learning. The case of PhD e-researchers. In M. Ally & B. Khan (Eds.). International Handbook of E-learning. London: Routledge. Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2013). Chronotopes in learner-generated contexts. A reflection about the interconnectedness of spatial and temporal dimensions to frame the explorations of hybrid learning ecologies of doctoral e-researchers. eLc Research Paper Series Journal. PhD research papers dealing with time issues, 6 (June 2013). Retrieved from http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/elcrps/search/authors/view?firstName=Antonella&middleName= &lastName=Esposito&affiliation=&country= Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2013). How Italian PhD students reap the benefits of institutional resources and digital services in the open Web. INTED 2013 Proceedings of the 6th International Technology, Education and Development Conference, March 2013. IATED. pp. 6490-6500. ISBN: 978-84-616-2661-8. Presentations at conferences Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2013). The transition from student to researcher in the digital age. Poster presented at the First Research UOC Symposium, Barcelona, 18th December 2013. Retrieved from 3 https://www.academia.edu/5457659/Poster_The_transition_from_from_student_to_researcher_in_t he_digital_age._Probing_the_affordances_of_emerging_learning_ecologies_of_PhD_e-researchers. Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2013). How Italian PhD students reap the benefits of institutional resources and digital services in the open Web”, Presentation at the INTED 2013 Conference, Valencia, 4-6th March 2013. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/aesposito/inted2013-a-esposito Esposito, A., Sangrà, A. & Maina, M. (2012). How new doctoral students reap the benefits of emerging Web 2.0 learning ecologies. Paper presented at the Doctoral Consortium of the ECTEL 2012, Saarbrucken, Germany, 19th September 2012. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/1932374/How_New_Doctoral_Students_Reap_The_Benefits_Of_The_ Emerging_Web_2.0_Learning_Ecologies. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 6 Abstract This doctoral dissertation reports an exploratory study on how emerging learning ecologies enabled by Web 2.0 and social web are affecting the self-organized practices and dispositions in the digital of individual PhD students. The PhD candidates are increasingly expected to be ‘doctoral researchers’ rather than ‘doctoral students’ and to demonstrate a greater autonomy in crafting their future position and their becoming ‘knowledge worker’ in a network of research bonds and digital resources. On the other hand, they are provided with unprecedented opportunities to draw advantages from their ‘personal ecologies’ (Andrews & Haythornthwaithe, 2011) in their research training and to shape their ‘being researchers’ in a functional or divergent manner with respect to the self-entrepreneurial role they are called to perform as newer researchers. I have contended in this PhD study the relevance of gaining empirical evidence of the current higher education student experience in the digital, in particular at the intersection of being a learner in higher education and becoming a digital scholar in academia. In this perspective, I set out to gain further understandings on students’ experience of e-learning in higher education (Ellis & Goodyear, 2009), as an informed basis for universities to design new social web aware spaces for research training. Likewise, I aimed to gain insights of the extent to which the PhD students are influenced in their doctoral journey by the ‘networked scholarship practices’ (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012a) and in which ways they mould social media affordances for their doctoral needs. Thus, this research has explored the emerging learning ecologies of a sample of research students dealing with the Web 2.0 opportunities that are likely to be combined or to compete with the established practices of the local research training and with the scholarly conventions grounded in specific subject areas. The research topic has resulted underexplored, especially in the Italian higher education sector. This lack of empirical research fits the choice of a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006), where the concepts of ‘learning ecologies’ (Barron, 2006; Jackson, 2013) and ‘chronotope’ (Bakhtin, 1981) have played a role as ‘sensitizing concepts’ in guiding research questions and data collection. These theoretical assumptions have been discussed and integrated in a non-prescriptive theoretical framework. The interplay of spatial and temporal affordances of ‘learning ecologies’ as shaped by PhD e-researchers are here considered relevant to highlight the inherent features of learning ecologies as complex and evolving systems and to reveal characteristics of student agency on the part of individual learners. The theoretical framework has helped to refine the analytical focus of the following research questions: 1) to what extent do the PhD students learn to become researchers using digital tools and environments of Web 2.0; 2) how the trajectories carried out by 7 the PhD e-researchers in emerging learning ecologies can be conceptualized; 3) what the qualitative findings tell us about the chronotopes activated in the emerging learning ecologies of PhD e- researchers; 4) what are the tensions arising between institution-led activities and emerging self- organized learning opportunities of new PhD ‘e-researchers’. An extensive data gathering process has been undertaken across three Italian and one UK universities and has included a sequence of online questionnaires, individual interviews and focus groups. Among the findings, I have firstly drawn a repertoire of digitally-mediated practices self-organized by individual PhD students mostly in an ephemeral and often unplanned manner, but aiming to creatively support or enhance their scholarly practices. Secondly, the analysis of the trajectories in the digital has led to the development of the Digital Engagement Variation framework, where digital engagement is mapped out considering the variation patterns framed by the dimensions of Space, Time, Socialization, Digital Identity, Stance and Tensions. These are intended to be broad categories guiding the theoretical consideration of the socially and historically situated digital behaviours the research participants may display as individuals and as a collective set of people. Thus, some meanings attributed to the Bakhtinian chronotope have been adopted to metaphorically enlight the core value of digital engagement in terms of resilience, that is as the capacity of the PhD e-researchers to act upon or being acted upon the opportunities of the open Web. Diverse forms of resilience have been identified in PhD researchers, as characterized by peculiar individual dispositions, time and space perspectives: Staying afloat, Pursuing convenience, Embedding the digital and Playing as a bricoleur. To sum up, we have achieved the theoretical understanding of the affordances of PhD e- researchers’ emerging ecologies as multi-dimensional and transitional trajectories intentionally undertaken by the individual and generating different reactions toward the opportunities provided by the open Web. These empirical and theoretical achievements have coalesced into implications for practice, where the analysis of the tensions underlying the PhD students’ digital engagement has helped to better understand the need for grounding any institutional initiative on social media training for research in the preliminary exploration of student experience and in the negotiation of a ‘partnership’ between dotcoral education’s stakeholders and