Settling into PhD life

Is this really week 7 of the first module of my structured Phd programme? I hadn’t been counting, instead focusing on the readings and online discussions over six whole weeks. I even managed a first draft of the research proposal for the assignment due at the end of the module (although not a very good draft!). All this in six weeks, it certainly has been busy. Last weekend I was tweeting with Clare, a fellow graduate of Digital Education at Edinburgh, who asked me a very simple question ‘hope you are settling into PhD life?‘.

Of course my response was short and sweet, and was a reminder that I had committed myself to a monthly blog post for my PathwaytoPhD journey so here goes…

Just as I was getting used to Mahara and the tagline ‘Create. Share. Engage‘ for social interaction and informal knowledge sharing, one of our peers set up a group for us in Microsoft Teams as a less formal space for social interactions and the like. It was my first experience of Teams and I have to admit that I found it a bit clunky and not the easiest to navigate, but in the interests of developing my social presence amongst the cohort I persevered. Once I figured out how to reply within conversations rather than start a new conversation I was all set. A few weeks later, a bunch of London-based peers were arranging to meet for coffee and cake this coming weekend and set up a WhatsApp group. At times like this it would be nice to meet in person, but I’ll have to make do with virtual ‘coffee & cake’ knowing that we will all be meeting at our residential on campus the first week in April. Getting back to WhatsApp, I have it installed on both my iPhone and MacBook Air. Notifications are turned off on the iPhone except for a badge count and banners when I’m working on my laptop, so distractions are minimised. So far, so good. Lots of interaction with the ‘coffee & cake’ gang over the past couple of weeks and more of our cohort are joining all the time. Little did I realise until this week that I was doing exactly the same thing as in Teams and starting a new discussion rather than responding within a discussion. I don’t think it works on the iPhone but now that I know how, my responses and comments will be more appropriate. As one of the group commented yesterday – enough said!

At the start of the semester I was struggling with how best to use Evernote and OneNote for notetaking purposes. I’ve managed to get OneNote working well on my web browser and am happily storing my reading notes there. I shared a note from a live video session we had with our tutor last week with the WhatsApp group but it turns out I shared my whole OneNote section of reading notes. Ah well – inadvertently supporting openness and transparency so can’t be a bad thing?

Regarding Evernote, one of our classmates advised that an app called Scribzee integrates handwritten notes from Oxford notebooks to Evernote so I checked it out. It does, great, but my handwriting is appalling so I have an electronic record of notes that I can’t read either!  I see a new app advertised that can turn handwriting into text, I wonder if it would work for me? If anyone has any experience of such an app please do share.

Another decision that had to be made quickly was an alternative to Dropbox since I ran out of Dropbox space! It took me several hours to move all my teaching content to my UL OneDrive and my learning content to the my LU OneDrive. There are probably other options out there but these two are probably the most reliable and seem to be stable enough for my purposes.

For every post I will try to observe my recently adopted motto: “be regular, be useful, be short” so given that this post is just at the upper point of the 500-700 word count guideline, I’ll leave it here for now.

Until next time,
Sandra

Featured image courtesy of  OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay