Whisper became a shout

The Thesis Whisperer is now a year old, has 14 contributors and has racked up just over 100,000 hits. Nowhere is the diversity of the higher education world more evident than on the internet. From vice-chancellors to first-year undergraduates, there is a blog for everyone, and Campus Review will highlight the best of them. Bloggers are just one element in the speedily changing world of media and they have been playing their role in journalism for more than a decade. Higher education sector, not unlike the mainstream media, has been and still is cautious about what bloggers have to offer. The unfettered flow of information using technologies that are still evolving is frightening for many. Yet they see what is happening on campuses today - dwindling attendance at lectures and tutorials and a growing demand for online access to learning and teaching resources. Bloggers can provide valuable insights into the main currents and undercurrents of what is happening in third level education today. Enjoy our series. This week we start with The Thesis Whisperer, friend to anxious PhD students around the world, and run by RMIT University research educator Dr Inger Mewburn. The Thesis Whisperer provides help and suggestions on writing long-term projects, and is run in a “newspaper” style, with multiple contributors. Topics have included ‘How to Avoid Going off on Tangents’, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go Now: aka, Divorce My Supervisor or Learn to Live with It?’, ‘How to Write a 1000 Words a Day’, and posts on organisation, emotions and stress. “The blog kind of had these vague aims, but I’ve been surprised at how well it’s unfolded,” said Mewburn. “I could never explain what I did to anyone. A lot of people work in academic development and teaching writing, but… I study the history of research degrees and look at things like attention and attrition, but I also teach. Then one day this student rang me up and said, ‘I hear you’re the thesis whisperer’, and I said ‘yes, I am’.” Mewburn had been thinking about starting a blog for some time, and the name The Thesis Whisperer seemed perfect to her. She knew she would not be able to keep up on her own, so she started enlisting other researchers and students to write for her. “People need to be able to rely on you, that’s how you build readership,” she said. “I started by translating what I spoke about when I teach, I’d just sort of pick off bite-sized chunks, but I haven’t really dipped much into what I do in my teaching because a lot of people have started writing for me. I know PhD students really love to read what other PhD students have to say because it’s authentic, it’s lived, and it gives them the opportunity to write in a different register and share that tacit knowledge.” The Thesis Whisperer is now a year old, has 14 contributors and has racked up just over 100,000 hits, averaging about 1000 a day. Many posts create active discussions in the comments, and she seems to have a higher profile outside of Australia than in. “It’s really helped me make a lot of connections and it’s raised my professional profile in a lovely way,” said Mewburn. “There are a lot of readers in the UK. I think they’re the closest equivalent group, and I’ve got a little following up there in Denmark and Norway, and then a few Americans. I think I went viral about four months after I started, I suddenly noticed a huge acceleration because key people like the Guardian Higher Education section and the Times Higher Education supplement wrote about me.” “There’s been two points where I really went viral, the bigger one was where I wrote about how to write 1000 words in a day, the other was the about the top five PhD emotions,” she said. “Those ones that are really hitting on the major issues and difficulties are the most popular. Once I get the readers I tend to keep them. It sort of snowballs, I’ve got a very consistent readership.” The blog has also increased her profile at RMIT, as students and other staff members realise her area of expertise. “I study research students, so I’m speaking to them all the time and they’re very responsive to what I have to say – they’re a very critical, receptive bunch of people and if they don’t agree, they’ll tell you,” she said. “I get called in on the hard cases and the broken birds. I sort of feel like I’m supervising without boundaries. The best part about doing the blog is just the connectivity on multiple levels with your peers and the students and people on the outside doing public policy. If you give you get back more than you give in my experience. So far I haven’t run against any brick walls.” Mewburn said she encourages all academics to blog. “I think they should try and think about it collaboratively if they don’t have time to be regular with their posts. They just need to have a strong idea of what they’re about, what they’re aiming to do,” she said. If you know of a good higher education blog – maybe it has a big audience, or shines a light on a neglected area, provides great policy analysis or is simply extremely funny, let us know. http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com Mewburn’s favourite blogs Explorations of Style: A Blog About Academic Writing (“I read every post,” says Mewburn) http://explorationsofstyle.wordpress.com Study Hacks http://calnewport.com/blog Tenured Radical http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical.