PhD Supervision by Instagram

I’ve blogged quite a bit on here about using social media in my teaching – YikYak for anonymous questions when it was still a thing; and making a complete balls-up shaming my class on Twitter. But I don’t actually use social media much in my teaching. My Facebook profile is a very private place, so it’s quite locked down (I generally avoid being Facebook friends with colleagues). I use Twitter to get stuff out to students, but I don’t expect them to rely on it. It is completely unethical to expect students to use a commercial service external to the University for their learning.

One social media I’ve only got into using over the past year is Instagram. My use of it changed quite a lot when they started Instagram stories. I don’t use them very much, but on most days I’ll post something banal to my story. I quite like catching up with the stories of the people I follow too. It’s fun watching what people are up to and I occasionally chat to them. And as the everyday functions of Instagram have grown I find I use the messaging function quite a bit. I can have simultaneous conversations with the same person on Instagram, WhatsApp and email about different topics.

One of the people I follow on Instagram is one of my PhD students. I started following her after she suggested she might use Instagram to collect data for her fieldwork. I’ve followed PhD students on Twitter before, but most of the interactions there had been quite banal and work-like – just congratulating them on achievements and that sort of stuff. Like most doctoral supervisors I talk to, I find it is the most rewarding part of my job – I learn so much from my students and watching them flourish as scholars and rounded-individuals just gives me the greatest pleasure. Part of this is building up a trusting relationship, but I’m always wary to keep it professional. I don’t feel I should be the researcher’s friend, particularly when I’m in that supervisory relationship. We never know how a PhD is going to go, and I don’t want to be the friend who has to have an awkward conversation with a researcher telling them exactly what they’re doing wrong and that they have to buck-up their ideas and work harder if they’re going to finish this PhD.

Pretty early when Instagram stories started, I realised that following my PhD student was going to blur this line between a professional and a personal relationship. I was seeing everything that my student was up to across their life in a way I had not done before. It did dawn on me to stop following them, or just skip through their story. But I did them interesting – she’s a fun person with a rich life, and also seeing how she fitted the PhD into her life was interesting. I would respond to her stories and we’d message each other in the way friends day (we’re both gay, so this was common ground). However, that I was blurring the professional and personal did dwell in my mind and a few months ago I did say that their might be a point in future where I might politely end the supervisory relationship if mixing the personal and professional was getting difficult. I’d become friends, in a way, over Instagram stories.

But recently things have changed again with our supervisory relationship and Instagram. It all began when the student had a block on submitting a journal article that was just about written. I’m currently doing a coaching course, so I suggested we have a coaching conversation to work out what was going on and get her in a place to submit the article to her chosen journal. The conversation worked a treat and we set some pretty tight deadlines. And then it appeared on her Instagram story! I felt so pleased that she had got there that I had to engage with it positively – it’s what I would do as a coach and a friend. She didn’t quite make the deadline, but the paper was submitted and we celebrated through her Instagram story together.

She then went for a period of travel away through her research. And our Instagram story engagement, to me, took another little turn into a deeper relationship. Being away from our home and comforts pushes us into uncomfortable areas and we end up doing a lot of things that are socially brave, but doing so also brings out all the anxieties that hold us all back. I knew this as I’d done it a year before. So just occasionally I’d check in with her through the Instagram story, showing empathy, but also celebrating the many successes that have happened during this trip.

And I realised I’m sort of supervising by Instagram. What makes me a good supervisor, I think, is that I build a good, trusting relationship with my students. I support them to achieve what they want to achieve. And I’ve now just moved this onto Instagram stories. Hopefully it won’t all go horribly wrong…

YikYak

I first heard of YikYak earlier in the year when a doctoral researcher I was doing a project on social media use mentioned it as the “thing the kool kidz are using now”. At the end of the summer Dr Nick Pearce at Durham blogged about “YikYak Lecturer” or YYL at Durham who had been using it to provide assistance to students during the exam resit season.

So, I installed the app on my phone being fairly clueless about it, I didn’t even realise it was anonymous. And my first thought when I saw that it was, was “oh God this is going to be an utter car crash”. For the first couple of weeks I was dipping into it, it was a bit of a messy look into the world of the undergraduate (this was a week before semester started, and a week after it started). There were some lovely messages about how excited people were to be coming back to uni and their mates. An awful lot of young men were discussing their onanist habits in graphic detail; an awful lot of young women were moaning that they couldn’t get a boyfriend. When I described this latter situation to friends whose only experience of university was as a student, they pointed out that the two groups could solve their mutual problems with the liberal application of alcohol.

I just dip into YikYak when I’m waiting for my train home. But as semester has rumbled on it’s actually generally impressed me as a self-policing community. The horror stories from the US don’t seem to be happen. Unpleasant Yaks get downvoted (and then disappear) or have rather wonderfully barbed comments on them fairly swiftly. I’ve definitely not seen anything that would overly concern me given some of the issues on campus. I’ve posted some anonymous comments as well – such as suggesting students should see their personal tutors about problems. I’ve also picked up an inconsistency in the University in the way different schools interpret a particular attendance regulation which we would’ve remained blissfully unaware of.

I also posted some Yaks directed at my students asking if they wanted specific help. To varying degrees of success. I managed this short exchange based on one:

And my second attempt got ten votes and ended up with a score of -4. I think the anonymity of YikYak does actually help here, and as Pat Lockley suggested in a comment on a draft of this post, something we should explore doing more using ed-tech. Students will always think their question is a “stupid question” no matter how much we tell them it isn’t. Anonymity allows that hurdle to be jumped.

My most interesting foray was when I’d delivered a brand new lecture on my module this semester. I ran out of time, and the content and delivery seemed to fall flat. I don’t even think I managed to deliver the learning outcomes I was attempting to. Suffice it to say, I left the lecture theatre feeling a bit shit. So I Yakked about it. And the response was quite staggering really. I ended up “famous”:

It really was the peer-support of a student community at its best. It cheered me up no end at the end of the day.

However, I had a couple of trickier moments. As I mentioned before on here, I shouldn’t have looked at YikYak after sending that announcement to my students. One thing I definitely should not have done is check YikYak on the day of my own module exam. I tried reassuring a few students who were clearly getting anxious, but in the end it just made me incredibly nervous that my whole exam was going to go wrong with students leaving the exam hall in floods of tears. Although, again, the anonymity shone through, with a number of students apologising in advance that they might let me down, which was very sweet, and something they were very unlikely to do to my face. I really hope they feel that they haven’t when the marks are released in January.

A more tricky moment came with Yaks regarding a colleague’s classes. The students named the colleague in their Yaks and it always seemed to happen when I had the app open. Basically, as a group of 18-19-year-olds would do, they had realised how to get a rise out of the colleague and were organising on YikYak to do things in classes. It was nothing really severe, and in my judgement (a point I return to below) it definitely did not amount of bullying or harassment. However, given knowledge of YikYak among everyone apart from students seems to be zero, I thought I should probably do something. In the end I emailed the colleague’s Director of Teaching and Learning describing what was happening and left it at that.

So, I don’t think YikYak is going to revolutionise either the world, or the delivery of higher education, but it is definitely an interesting world into which to dip your toe. My main reflection is, with the anonymity, I found myself thinking this is the students’ space, I do not belong here and should not be here (how I feel when I find myself in the Students’ Union) and also thinking about my online identity a lot – how much do I reveal. Could I give myself away in the way I interact? Should I give myself away? You can see that in my discussion with paw in the exchange above.

Yet, YikYak mainly garners negative press, along with similar apps like Yeti. It probably is time to “check my privilege” here as a young, white man, as advised here. The “joking” about the lecturer I mention above wasn’t about me. I might have been able to laugh it off. I might have been able to reflect and think “well, maybe I shouldn’t have done X as I probably would have done the same in the same circumstances.” But the typical Yak where I featured was this:

(and I had to upvote that one. It would have been rude not to). The worst I ever got was in one of the exam day exchanges a student said “your module was shite anyway mate” which I could just shrug off as disgruntlement.

But I have the cultural capital to manage such online spaces well and also the privilege to, largely, be afforded respect in such online spaces. I’m not entirely sure banning such apps and social media is the answer to the problems they have amplified. We need to tackle many of the problems – misogyny, racism, homophobia etc. – at source not necessarily attack the software. We also need to continue to develop our new ethics of online behaviour.

I did a social media bad

Today was my essay deadline day for my large undergraduate module – 296 essays flowing into Turnitin. In the run-up I was getting the usual emails that can drive you up the wall – this PhD comics. This year, for the first time, I received three emails asking “was there a minimum word limit?”; the final one also stated that “people were asking about it on Facebook”. This frustrated and angered me and I did my first stupid thing which was to send a very angry Announcement to all the students on the VLE. My second stupid thing was to tweet a screenshot of the announcement.

It quickly garnered favorites and retweets and clearly resonated with a number of academics who follow me who want to do the best for their students but get frustrated when it appears students are not applying themselves. At the time of writing it got 13 retweets and 26 favorites. I also foolishly checked YikYak on campus; more of that later. And, I’ll be honest, as with all social media, the social confirmation of those RTs and favs felt good.

However, I awoke to an email from one of the students complaining that the announcement had led them to be publicly embarrassed on the Facebook page. They then emailed in reply to my apology pointing out I had also mocked them by tweeting about it. In both respects, they were largely right. What is frustrating, is from my own research, I should have known they were right before I did all this.

Nancy Baym and danah boyd talk about the idea of socially mediated publicness – that is that new technologies have given us myriad new ways to be “public” and in doing so we have to actually socially mediate this. While you might post something publicly on Twitter, you may not actually consider it to be “public” as you doubt it will go further than your immediate smaller number of followers. If you are more public, this mediation gets trickier.

I should have been aware of this in two ways. Firstly, I should have considered that the original Facebook comment from the student was public and I had not seen it – therefore they could be publicly identified. Secondly, I should have considered the wider public audience of my tweet and how individual students concerned would link this public shaming to their own behaviour. I agree with those who consider tweeting the “hilarious” mistakes students make in their essays as inappropriate and unethical. In this case I was unprofessional in my actions.

There’s a broader point here as well, that I think we need to reflect on as a profession – I know the tweets linking to the blog-post will get far less attention than the tweet that is the subject of this post. Why is this? Why do we always think it’s good to be frustrated and angry with students? Why can’t we focus more on the good and the positive about teaching students – I had some amazing discussions with students this semester about their attainment. I should have publicly shared this, not one minor, negative moment.

So, if you’ve got this far, please go and read my other, more positive, posts on teaching.

Facebook don't get social

I was a fairly early adopter to Facebook. As a Cambridge graduate I was one of the earliest group of people who was allowed to join in the UK and it helped me keep in contact with all my friends who had gone to live in That London. Over the years I've had a love-hate relationship with it, but my main social media is now Twitter. I'm still a Facebook customer, but you might include my story in the apocalyptic stories of Facebook's impending demise (more of that in a bit).

Fairly early on in my Facebook use, people who I really did not want to be "friends" with, particularly former bullies from school and university, were sending me friends requests. Also, still, I don't want everyone knowing that I'm gay before they even meet me. As a result, very early in my Facebook career I completely locked down my page and adjusted my privacy settings accordingly. You could not find me by searching Facebook.

The other day I received an email from Facebook (an actual one, not a phishing attempt) and now when I log in I get this warning:

This makes me very angry indeed and I am contemplating leaving. The reason given is that I am now find-able through tagged posts etc. And I have found I get some odd people commenting on posts on my timeline because friends with no/few privacy settings have put them there. But I've gone back to my privacy setting and locked them down yet further.

To go back to impending demise of Facebook (the more interesting story is this one) one thing in these stories I find very interesting is the assertion that teenagers stop using Facebook when their parents befriend them and then head off to use more anonymous social media like Twitter, Whatsapp and showing off their rude bits on Snapchat.

Now, to link all this to my anger and the subject line of the blog, for me this is because Facebook just do not get being social and this seems hard-wired into their business. It does not take advanced sociological knowledge to understand we generally do not just have one social identity. As Goffman explored, we have social roles, and we adjust how we present ourselves in those social roles based on the expectations of the context we are in. Facebook, it seems, presumes all social contexts are the same and therefore everyone will want everything known about them. At its most basic this presumes everyone lives a very pure and worthy existence at all times and never engages in perfectly normal social behaviours such as bitching or gossiping.

And this is essentially how I use Facebook - because it's not as public as Twitter I am very careful as to who I befriend and I use it vent in a way that would be wholly inappropriate in a group of people who were not my friends. One way I have increased my use of Facebook is as a member of a group linked to my sports coaching - there we mainly share facile comments about how much we are exhausted/aching after a training session. Slowly I'm letting this people into the rest of my Facebook universe where I moan and make very sarcastic comments which I'd otherwise keep quiet about.

Facebook, at its root, seems to fail to understand how people manage their sociability and social roles in this way. For me this has to be linked to its business model. It is trying to monetise social connections between people and therefore has to make them as transparent as possible. So, to give one fictitious example, a company will want to know that my friend has mentioned them in a Facebook post as a potential employer. They might start targeting advertising at you. But then your present employer might search for your timeline and quickly get you into a lot of trouble.

Compare this to Google's business model. I have an Android phone (in fact a brand new Fairphone, but that's another story) and a Nexus tablet and I use Chrome. Google could not know more about me if they sat me down and interviewed me for hours. In fact the only thing they seem to get wrong, is they pick up on my friends' posts about their babies on Facebook and occasionally targets adverts for baby products at me. I'm oddly comfortable about this. I find the alert on my phone to set off for a meeting quite useful (if not disconcerting at first). Everyone knows Google's attempts at social media have not been a resounding success - every time I log into Google+ my thought process is "wow, this is amazing. But there's no one here". But unlike Facebook they want to know you as an individual because that's what they can monetise. They don't want to force you to be sociable to monetise that. You can't keep a secret from Google, but Google isn't going to tell your friends.

Reflections on teaching practice - intercultural learning

So, over the summer, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I pulled myself together and completed my next assignment for my Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice. This had to be a research project. A key issue I was interested in, and is of interest to many academics in the UK, is the increasingly diverse student cohort, especially international sojourning students at postgraduate level. The appalling experience of students at London Metropolitan University at the start of this academic year shows what a political hot potato this is. It cannot be ignored that by mecause these students pay the full fee for their course we do need to attract more overseas students to balance the books. And this puts pressure on staff. Occassionaly the response to this is almost racist. So, these were the sort of issues I thought I'd deal with in my assignment.

So you can read the marker's comments I've converted it into a PDF you can download from my Google Drive here. The other part of the assignment I had to do was an annotated bibliography. I'd never done one before and actually found it really useful. I'm now recommending my dissertation students do it as a step on the way to having a literature review. In the spirit of sharing, you can all have a look at this as well, here.

Social media and social research: My first foray

At the moment I have some time to spend on the fascinating AHRC Connected Communities project Ladders to the Cloud, helping to better understand the Facebook page From There to Here… and help the community organisations involved in it turn it into something, well, more. For such a social media addict (my Twitter follower count is now up to giddy heights of four figures) this is my first foray into social media research.

Back in July I was given the login details for the Facebook page and so, for the first time in my life, I got to see the back-end of a Facebook page (rather than a user profile). Because these are essentially the money-making end of Facebook they provide you with “Facebook Insights” which give you age, gender and location information for people who look at your page, comment on your page and the “viral reach” – that is the number of friend’s feeds your posts appear on after someone has commented on them. It’s great for a project like this; with the handy knowledge that the research suggests very few people lie about biographic details on Facebook profiles, the site is essentially doing half of the social science work for you. Which reminds me, this book, which I'm told makes a similar point about the Tesco clubcard data, is on my to-read list for the nearly ending summer.

So, what did I learn from all this data? Firstly, it’s a bit difficult to download what you want. I ended up having to do lots of screen grabs, print out the images, and the then input the data back into an Excel spreadsheet. This done I learnt something very interesting. In March this year a big shift occurred, which is continuing, which has meant the biggest group of people heavily engaging with the site (essentially commenting on the images) is women between the ages of 25 and 44. Before then, the gender split was even and quite a few younger and older people were also commenting.

The next question is, well, there might just be a lot more Facebook users of that demographic in Edinburgh and the UK. Here my next trick came in handy. If you have a Facebook page you can pay to advertise it. If you click on the buy an advert section you have a form where you can target who you want to see your advert. As you close in on your ideal target market a counter on the right hand side changes to tell you how many people that is. So, there are around 38,000,000 Facebook subscribers in the UK and about 8,000,000 of them (21 per cent) are aged 25-34. Of this 359,000 of them live in Edinburgh (about two thirds of the city’s population) and 100,700 of them are aged 25-34 (around 28 per cent).  From all this, I know that Edinburgh has an oddly young profile of Facebook users, with these 25-34 year olds being the biggest group, whereas across the UK it’s 35-44 year olds who are the biggest group.

As a result I would expect more users at this age, but we’re getting a lot more – we’re getting 10 per cent more of these age groups then we’d expect if they were representative of the population of UK Facebook users. And 60 per cent of them are women. Why? I suspect this is just being driven by the content – these are photos of Wester Hailes in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s and the memories being discussed, such as this fantastic exchange of people working out who lived where, are of people of my age remembering growing up in the neighbourhood.

The trouble with all this, is that when I put out a (very successful) call on Twitter for info on social media use, the journals I was pointed too, like the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, predominantly report on studies done on college attending young people. This is partly because Facebook was at first limited to this group; partly because they are early adopters to new social media; partly due to a social-psychology research interest in this period as one of emerging adulthood; and finally just due to the publication lag - most of these studies were done in 2006-7 (and thus I've learnt about a lot of long lost social media sites! Bebo anyone?). So it’s difficult to find studies that might help explain these trends and put them into some sort of broader context. Although, I imagine if I can get a paper off swiftly I can hit a zeitgeist wave of research on other users of Facebook.

Finally, one last little thing, which I need to be very careful about how I write because I might end up getting sued by Facebook. When I was first getting the advertising data on the number of people in each age group I did not check a little box saying “exact age matches only” (or similar). So, I got the numbers for each of the pre-defined age groups and then as a double check got Excel to work out the total population to compare with Facebook’s total number of UK users. Miraculously the number of Facebook users in the UK had almost doubled, and a vast number of these people turned up in the 25-44 age group that marketers most want to target.

And in actual fact, to be precise, at the moment I am stuffing my face with sea salt and balsamic vinegar Kettle Chips dipped in humous. You should try it, it’s very tasty.