The positive benefits of open sharing

By Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development

It’s 2 years since the Research Culture and Researcher Development Team launched the Auditorium blog, as a team we have collectively published 120 posts (around 132,000 words), which have been viewed over 32,800 times by a global audience.

This blog is a team effort, written by our team of specialists in research culture and people development, plus our invited guests. We cover a wide range of topics concerning research culture, communities and networks, postgraduate education, workplace learning, programmes and cohorts, and our considered thoughts on professional development in a higher education research-focused setting. We write for audiences of researchers, researcher developers, and for different key players such as research Supervisors and PIs.

We chose the name ‘The Auditorium’ as it relates to the teaching spaces we inhabit as developers. The lecture theatres, seminar rooms, and more unusual education spaces, the online platforms, and virtual classrooms we welcome researchers into, in order to help them learn the craft of research work. It can sometimes feel at odds to describe our work as ‘teaching’, when it’s fully situated within a research support service, and governed by the university’s research strategy, and that’s a borderline we inhabit. We want our professional expertise and training as educators to come through strongly in our blog articles. We use our blog as a platform to reveal the learning design choices we make, the rationale behind our delivery methods, the pedagogical framing for programmes. It can come as a surprise to some colleagues that we have this expertise, often holding academic and professional qualifications in education disciplines, on top of our PhDs. We want our blog to communicate our intentional choices for why and how we do things, and our practitioner values, and we know that seeing our credentials, and our critical approach to our work, helps to build trust in the quality of the provision we offer.

We also liked the idea of an Auditorium being a place that amplifies voices, not only ours, but voices from the full range of different kinds of colleagues who contribute to the working cultures that enable and constrain us, and who support the development of researchers and research professionals across the University of Glasgow. This links to the idea of a learning ecology – that professional learning is all around us, if we have our eyes open to it. We have hosted a good number of guest posts to date, and will be developing this throughout 2024.

And we also placed value on the ‘Audit’ part of the word Auditorium. Our ways of working with evaluation data, feedback and informal research stories, demonstrate that we are committed to self-auditing, to critical review, and hence enhancement of our work. To making sure we always offer contemporary programmes and initiatives and that we stay up to date with the needs of the people we develop, and the best ways to achieve impact. Through this blog space we open ourselves up to feedback… and clapback. Sharing our work transparently opens us up to being challenged, and to having our biases and blind spots pointed out to us. In the past year, there have been a few instances of this which have helped me as the both the blog’s Editor and as the leader of the RC&RD Team, to understand how our words land with different groups, and to consider issues of language, privilege, and how we demonstrate good practice by setting scope and boundaries for our work. It has helped us to communicate our ideas more clearly, and to be supported by critical friends in thinking through new concepts.

Given the above impacts of openly sharing our work have positive benefits on the quality of the work, and (I like to think) for the sector we openly give our ideas to, I think it’s worth dedicating some of the team’s collective time to writing our regular 1000-word articles. However, when I ask team members to join me in making time for this collaborative endeavour it’s important to show how this can also help them ‘get their work done’ at the practical level too. For example, some of the personal operational benefits we have experienced are:

• We are creating an Open Access searchable database of our practice, with stable urls that link to our ideas, methods, and achievements.
• This is a space we can communicate our rationale and design choices, underpinning philosophies. We can communicate our pedagogical personalities to those who need to know.
• We can show how our initiatives link to overarching university strategies, helping researchers to see that their development is all part of the ‘real work of research’, not a distraction from it.
• People can get to know us as relatable humans, real people with career histories, real lives, distinct specialisms, hopes and fears, and passions for our work. This helps avoid us being seen as dehumanised ‘Admin’, a long term inequity which needs urgent attention in HE.
• We can show the wider range of our workloads. Documenting the consultation, scholarship, design work, planning, and evaluation work, reveals how much more we do than you’d see from the ‘shop window’ view. It takes a lot to of behind-the-scenes graft to deliver the courses and events that are the obviously visible products of our work.
• Our regular reflections on practice constitute a ‘little and often’ reporting mechanism, that we can refer to as a ‘read more’ link nestled in more concise committee papers or external report formats.
• We are constantly creating examples of our writing that can be shared at the copy and paste of a link. We become known for our authorship, and we have found that opportunities to write for other outlets (other blogs, book chapters, academic articles) and speaker invitations, have been forthcoming.
• If we have to explain something in multiple emails to different people, there is an audience for a blog post on that topic. We create quick share resources that help us to communicate with our colleagues. We can socialise ideas we often need to refer back to, for example, our approach to inclusive practice.
• We can collate community expertise, toning and theming each of the articles to suit our own intended uses. An example is our Expert Voices career blog post series. This series was created just for us, and can be shared with different audiences, integrated into online learning modules, popped into induction packs, and mobilised to support a growing awareness of the scholarship in our discipline.
• It’s the same for collating personal insights and stories. Pathfinder Narratives is a collection of post-PhD career stories and is a growing weekly resource bank we can mine and share as needed. The diversity of career experiences and choices represented in the community is best told by those individuals themselves.
• We can use the blog to create flipped learning resources to support workshop learning. This is the approach we have taken to our Research Leaders’ workshop series. A blog article comprises a 5-min stimulus article for the participants, and the corresponding workshop helps participants to tailor that reading for their own practice. Through this we have a set of articles that can help us to support specific ad hoc queries. Plus, other universities can (and do) also use our materials as prompts for their own development discussions.
• We can test out our ideas for conference presentations, papers, and workshops. Articulating and linearising our thoughts into a short piece helps us to think through the topic and work though our central argument.
• We can use the blog for what I refer to as ‘push scholarship’, getting our academic work out into our wider networks, to promote it and to expand on the value and utility of our academic musings. This recent post for example uses a model proposed in this book.
• And we can use it for (again my term) ‘pull scholarship’ – using the blog to pull down the latest new insights in the discipline. We invite other scholars to translate their latest publication into a practical set of recommendations, or into tool that the intended audience can use. Here’s an example using UK post-PhD career destinations datasets.
• And finally (though you may be able to think of even more benefits) we can use our commitment to blogging, to create time and space for personal reflection on our roles, impact, careers, and professional goals. As one of our team wrote to me this year:

“I have found the opportunity of writing for The Auditorium extremely helpful for my own personal research and career journey too. I have really enjoyed being a part of the editorial process and have learned a lot from the feedback on my drafts. It has been an amazing space to reflect on how far I’ve actually come, and how the journey has positively impacted my professional practice.”

In terms of reaching the right audiences, the blog in and of itself, it’s just another website pushing out content. Its ‘subscribe’ function (in the right-hand side bar) has been used only 121 times. However, reaching the right audiences with our writing has become a complicated job. Social media has changed significantly. The demise of Twitter as an academic space, and many of our audience’s rejection of the shifting dynamics of what is largely perceived to be an unethical platform, has challenged us, and continues to challenge us greatly in terms of sharing our work with the right audiences. Our hard built collective global networks 15 years in the making, have fallen away due to this. A loss I personally feel very keenly. So, what is the best place to re-build our networks to make sure those who’d like to read this blog can do just that? Well, I don’t know. The two articles linked above are from several months ago now, and I don’t think we are any closer yet to a clear like-for-like replacement. As a Team, we’re making LinkedIn work for us for now, but I guess time will tell, let’s re-read this in another year and see where we are at. For now, we will carry on reaping the benefits of blogging as a task with its own intrinsic value to us as a team.