Papers by Rebekah Smith McGloin
Theorising a connectivity mindset in doctoral candidates – using critical mobilities as a point of departure
Higher education research & development/Higher education research and development, Feb 15, 2024
This conceptual paper considers doctoral candidate mindset and effective doctoral supervision. I ... more This conceptual paper considers doctoral candidate mindset and effective doctoral supervision. I explore mindset through a Critical Mobilities lens to posit two mindsets that candidates inhabit on their doctoral journey: transit and connectivity (Kesselring, (2006). Pioneering mobilities: New patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. Environment & Planning A, 38(2), 269–279. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37279). I suggest management of doctoral research in the UK and internationally predisposes doctoral candidates and their supervisors to a ‘transit mindset’ which focuses on completion. On the other hand, a ‘connectivity mindset’ of exploration better enables critical and creative thinking. While both mindsets are necessary for the production of a high-quality thesis, a connectivity mindset can be more uncomfortable for both supervisors and doctoral candidates in the context of the neoliberal performance management culture. With the aim of supporting better doctoral research and doctoral experience, the paper theorises three manifestations of connectivity mindset that supervisors may encounter. These are: ‘rhizomic thinking’ which the supervisory team can identify and support in their supervisee; the ‘nomadic space’ which is created between supervisor and supervisee when they share a connectivity mindset; and a ‘third space’ that is entered into by supervisors and supervisees, when a shared connectivity mindset incorporates personal experiences, feelings and needs. The paper concludes with six areas of focus for development of supervisory practice.
Teaching in Higher Education
This paper explores doctoral candidates' experiences of making progress through the doctoral spac... more This paper explores doctoral candidates' experiences of making progress through the doctoral space. We engage concepts associated with the 'new mobilities' paradigm (Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press) to provide insight into the candidate experience of the doctoral journey; exploring specifically the interplay between the fixed structure provided by institutional-level progression frameworks that are commonly implemented by UK universities to measure 'timely progress' across disciplines and the borderlands space that enables and facilitates intellectual freedom, creativity, becoming and adventure. Drawing on notions of 'moorings', 'home on the move', 'connectivity and transit spaces' and 'rhizomic thinking' we analyse narrative data generated through the reflective diaries of doctoral candidates at a modern university in the English Midlands to offer new insight into how universities can provide better doctoral education, that supports: candidates to make a contribution to knowledge; protects well-being; and facilitates timely completion.
Recurrent Neural Networks are showing much promise in many sub-areas of natural language processi... more Recurrent Neural Networks are showing much promise in many sub-areas of natural language processing, ranging from document classification to machine translation to automatic question answering. Despite their promise, many recurrent models have to read the whole text word by word, making it slow to handle long documents. For example, it is difficult to use a recurrent network to read a book and answer questions about it. In this paper, we present an approach of reading text while skipping irrelevant information if needed. The underlying model is a recurrent network that learns how far to jump after reading a few words of the input text. We employ a standard policy gradient method to train the model to make discrete jumping decisions. In our benchmarks on four different tasks, including number prediction, sentiment analysis, news article classification and automatic Q&A, our proposed model, a modified LSTM with jumping, is up to 6 times faster than the standard sequential LSTM, while maintaining the same or even better accuracy.
Research Impact and the Early Career Researcher, 2019
What we can learn from 'Prof Docs' and why it matters for early career researchers This chapter g... more What we can learn from 'Prof Docs' and why it matters for early career researchers This chapter gives an overview of contemporary policy discourse around the doctorate, specifically looking at the question of impact in terms of the impact of education at a doctoral level on the knowledge economy. We start by providing an insight into policy drivers which have and continue to influence doctoral training programmes, models of doctorate, funder priorities and funding opportunities. We move on to explore the tension between policy and practice in doctoral education in the area of impact which stems from an aspiration in research and education policy to call for and evidence impact on the economy and a noticeable absence of data to prove it. We go on to summarise examples in the UK of initiatives that have been designed to enhance the impact of the 'traditional' PhD on business, industry and third sector and then focus on key developments in professional doctorates, exploring the lingering uncertainties and unresolved anxieties about definition, value and fit of the professional doctorate, and -by extension -the evolving PhD. The chapter aims to support ECRs to gain an understanding of policy and practice in doctoral education. This will help you to think about how you (co)-develop and (co)-design impactful doctoral projects which lead to high-quality research with impact for publication. It will give you the necessary context to shape enhanced funding applications for doctoral studentships which more easily fit funders' evolving agenda. It will also -hopefully -inspire you to challenge the current academic discourse which often struggles to define, locate and value newer evolutions of the traditional form of doctorates -such as the professional doctoratewhere knowledge is more explicitly generated in the context of its application and impact is central to the research for supervisor and doctoral candidate. As ECRs, you will, no doubt, be thinking about trying to secure early experience on supervisory teams, building up your numbers of timely submissions and completions, undertaking supervisor training on a range of issues, from administrative paper trails and research degree regulations to the pedagogy of supervision and how best to support doctoral researchers to undertake one of the single most demanding projects of their life. Ensuring that you are research active, and developing an excellent research track record, go without saying as effective ways to be invited onto supervisory teams and to have the opportunity to hone your supervisory skills and to learn from others with more experience. Depending upon your institution, there may be ringfenced funding for your own studentship, on a topic that is central to your research interests and expertise. You may also work in an area where you are able to attract high-quality self-funded doctoral candidates. However, despite these opportunities being available to some, for the majority of ECRs, securing a doctoral researcher (or more) is a necessary but challenging item on the to-do list. This is central to producing high-quality research outputs with impact for the Research Excellence Framework or the equivalent research audit exercise in your own national context. An understanding of the changing policy landscape around the impact of education to a doctoral level, evolving funder expectations, emerging doctoral funding models and the challenges and opportunities of working closely with business, industry or third sector is
Who Shares Wins: A new model in doctoral training
Doctorate in development: The Global Challenge for the UK doctorate
Structuring Doctoral Education
Volumetric media, popularly known as holograms, need to be delivered to users using both ondemand... more Volumetric media, popularly known as holograms, need to be delivered to users using both ondemand and live streaming, for new augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences. As in video streaming, hologram streaming must support network adaptivity and fast startup, but must also moderate large bandwidths, multiple simultaneously streaming objects, and frequent user interaction, which requires low delay. In this paper, we introduce the first system to our knowledge designed specifically for streaming volumetric media. The system reduces bandwidth by introducing 3D tiles, and culling them or reducing their level of detail depending on their relation to the user's view frustum and distance to the user. Our system reduces latency by introducing a window-based buffer, which in contrast to a queue-based buffer allows insertions near the head of the buffer rather than only at the tail of the buffer, to respond quickly to user interaction. To allocate bits between different tiles across multiple objects, we introduce a simple greedy yet provably optimal algorithm for rate-utility optimization. We introduce utility measures based not only on the underlying quality of the representation, but on the level of detail relative to the user's viewpoint and device resolution. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides superior quality compared to existing videostreaming approaches adapted to hologram streaming, in terms of utility and user experience over variable, throughput-constrained networks.
Recent changes in research council policy and postgraduate funding have seen the beginnings of a ... more Recent changes in research council policy and postgraduate funding have seen the beginnings of a fundamental reconfiguration in how some PhD students are recruited and trained. This report is a work-in-progress review of early student evaluation data from a single doctoral training partnership (DTP) within this new doctoral training landscape. It gives a broad overview of historical and contemporary challenges in researcher development before summarising the results of evaluation data from the first year of the BBSRC DTP. It goes on to discuss how these preliminary findings might be followed up and what they might hint at in terms of the model’s potential to influence researcher development in the future.
Where next for Researcher Development? A discussion of work‐based learning for postgraduate researchers
The Global Scholar, 2021
including indigenous knowledges in an "ecology of knowledges". Fundamental to this ecology of kno... more including indigenous knowledges in an "ecology of knowledges". Fundamental to this ecology of knowledges is the ability for researchers at all levels to exchange ideas and to find, share and grow new knowledges. A necessary means of doing this-and a third principle in the recommendations-is a worldwide circulation of scholars to ensure a more balanced distribution of talent around the globe. Particularly at doctoral and early career researcher level it is noted that this community needs to acquire not only traditional academic research competencies and the breadth of professional skills but also the ability (and the opportunity) to work and function in multinational teams and multinational settings. This reminds us of what Flores and Nerad (2012) refer to as a 'global village', which is needed to support the development of the next generation of researchers. Or, as the Hannover Recommendations put it, these skills and activities are necessary to develop the "original, responsible and ethical thinkers" (4) who can meet the complex challenges our world faces in the 21st century. Researcher mobility is a key activity in realising Flores and Nerad's vision at the start of the decade and the objectives for improved doctoral education and a more inclusive and respectful research environment worldwide that is set out by the Hannover experts at the end. We note that this particularly positive construct of the value to researchers and to research of a 'circulation of scholars' is distinct from other discourses that focus on the negative consequences of the unidirectional permanent flows of researchers from the Global South to the Global North, first explored as 'brain drain' in the seventies (Bhagwati & Hamada, 1974; McCullock & Yellen, 1977), following the Royal Society report that measured the exodus of British scientists to the USA and Canada (Royal Society, 1963). While the geopolitics of academic capitalism that privileges English and theoretical orientations from North America and Europe unquestionably persist, understandings of mobility have moved on to explore the complexity of types and timings of flow (Bekhradnia & Sastry, 2005; Meyer, 2001; Universities UK, 2007). The picture of academic mobility summarised in the next section describes complex temporary flows of researchers around the globe as they progress through their career and new poles for doctoral training emerging outside of the North Atlantic nexus that has historically trained and retained many researchers from around the world. Academic mobility in numbers The numbers of researchers at all career stages who are internationally mobile are well documented. For instance, the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) Survey that was first administered in the early nineties and was followed up in 2007/2008 provided benchmark data from 19 countries 3 around the world. The survey reported from a completed effective sample of 800 at both 'junior' and 'senior' 3 The countries participating in this research were Canada, the USA,
The Global Scholar
The Global Scholar, 2021
Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung (Journal for Higher Education Development), 2017
In the 2009 Survey, Institution 2 responded that the skills training programme was highly depende... more In the 2009 Survey, Institution 2 responded that the skills training programme was highly dependent on Roberts Funding. How, if at all, has this shortfall in funding been compensated for? Roberts Funding was not recurrent but the University has prioritised PGR for investment. The creation of a bespoke (socio-educational) space for PGR students has been a significant capital investment. This allows study across discipline areas and the aim is to foster both formal, and informal, interdisciplinary conversations. The space allows for communal areas and social interaction but also space for the delivery of bespoke delivery to PGR students which currently comprises offerings from Careers, Library and Doctoral Skills training. The PGR support team, based in the same space, also offer drop-in sessions and bespoke submission of thesis training to enhance our delivery to PGR students and make effective use of the PGR space. The University also invested over £5000 in DVD training materials produced by the UK Council for Graduate Education. These cover areas such as: An introduction to the UK doctorate, Managing your Supervisor, A guide to a good transfer/progression to PhD A guide to a good VIVA. CASE STUDY 3 Case Study of Institution 3: exploring further the issues emerging from Structural Changes in Doctoral Education Survey, Spring 2015 Thank you for agreeing to take part in a small case study to explore further the structural changes at Institution 3. The questions are specific to the University's responses to the 2015 survey and the responses given to a similar survey conducted by UKCGE in 2009. Both have been attached for your reference.
Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education, 2013
Recent changes in research council policy and postgraduate funding have seen the beginnings of a ... more Recent changes in research council policy and postgraduate funding have seen the beginnings of a fundamental reconfiguration in how some PhD students are recruited and trained. This report is a work-in-progress review of early student evaluation data from a single doctoral training partnership (DTP) within this new doctoral training landscape. It gives a broad overview of historical and contemporary challenges in researcher development before summarising the results of evaluation data from the first year of the BBSRC DTP. It goes on to discuss how these preliminary findings might be followed up and what they might hint at in terms of the model's potential to influence researcher development in the future.
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Papers by Rebekah Smith McGloin