The logistical pressures of moving countries and cities – from London to Calcutta – and a nasty bout of flu meant that it was sensible to stay offline for a while.

Over the next few blogs I will seek to provide an overview of the educational climate in India, and the extent to which international alliances are changing or are likely to change the university experience .

Why are British universities seeking to find a presence in India?

The Indian government has plans to increase the number of university goers from a current 12 per cent of the population to 30 per cent. In plain terms this works out to a present university student population of 12 million, and a projected increase to 30 million. This is clearly a very ambitious plan and opinions are mixed as to whether it can or should be achieved.

In this first piece though I want to present a side to the global impact of the ongoing changes in the Indian university system that is seldom seen in the media.

That is, what is the university experience in India from the point of view of the student and the lecturer?

I went to school in Calcutta and also did my first undergraduate degree in the city. When I went to the UK to do my second undergraduate degree it wasn’t the differences in the educational culture that I noticed but rather the continuities. This was probably because both the school and university I attended were established in the nineteenth century when Calcutta was the capital of British India, and at the heart of a close engagement between the cultures of India and of Britain.

What I experienced in India was a meticulousness of detail and depth of approach which I am truly grateful for. Somewhere along the way I also became firmly imbued with the idea that the big picture matters. So valuing the humanities was important because it helped one to link the puzzle pieces of the world together.

A common expectation and hope amongst the educational community in India is, I think, that alliances with British or other overseas universities will mean more flexibility for students and teaching staff. By which I mean exposure to the arts, sciences and perhaps even technical knowledges together. It seems rather harsh to expect an eighteen year old to choose a “stream” and stand by it life-long.

A simple scan-through of the weekly educational supplement to the Kolkata edition of The Times of India gives a thumbnail picture of the kinds of degrees and career pathways being offered to current undergraduates. Management and science degrees predominate but there’s a wide range of IT -related and engineering courses, along with intriguingly specialist courses in things like wine-making, chocolate making and magicianship (though not at Hogwarts).

What I wonder as a global citizen and a teacher is this – how are we going to help students join the dots? Will the view that learning has value in and of itself because it nurtures creative and critical thinking hold in the new university environment being fashioned?

This wider view of the meaning and value of education already has a space both in India and in the UK. But I have also experienced the piece meal view – in both countries – that being educated in order to find and keep a job is all that’s needed.

It’s an interesting time to be in education – and I hope in succeeding pieces to chronicle more of the changes taking place. The future – not just for the UK and India but for the world – looks an utterly different place than most would have imagined it a mere ten years ago.

Also – a very happy women’s day to everybody from both Ritu and I.

Priyali: I know you’ve been travelling internationally to complete work contracts. How do you go about finding openings? Do you use an agency or is it down to your own research, and how do you decide who is a good employer?

Ritu: I maintain an extensive professional network through writing, reading and research. I make prospective employers aware of my work and establish a continuing dialogue to contribute significantly towards health, social research and policy. This also helps me to find and select the kinds of projects I am keen to work on.

Priyali: You are someone who grew up in India but now lives in the UK, and has spent some of her most formative years within it. Do you feel you have access to more than one culture, and does this make you attractive to prospective employers?

Ritu: When people ask I often say I was brought up in England. I have certainly established “belongingness” here in Britain. I feel very much part of its society and environment. I think the experience of working in two different nations and understanding how things get done, certainly benefits in maintaining contacts and sustaining networks. I have access to wide networks here and in India. We live in a globalized world and also an extremely competitive one. With people now having access to specific geographical locations they didn’t have before, they are presented with new challenges and dynamics. These present difficulties but can be dealt with successfully.

Priyali: This is your free space – go ahead and send a message out to other researchers, practitioners and readers of this blog as to what most engages you at this point in your life and career.

Ritu: I feel that universities should prepare PhD students, who often live an isolated life, for the outside world. They should encourage them to publish and provide continued support even after they graduate. Most PhD students feel misplaced and choose different career paths, due to little or no guidance or support from their universities. It’s even more difficult for migrants who would like to establish their careers outside their home country.

Also, I would like to add that Britain needs to rethink its position on international development. I feel that Britain’s capacity to make a difference in the developing world is huge. This needs to be planned carefully by considering intersections of race, gender and social inclusion.

People belonging to diverse backgrounds should be given opportunities to contribute to the international development sector through an equitable manner and process. This will help deal with issues of social exclusion within the UK that give rise to inequalities in the work environment.

She is an academic, researcher and activist with substantial experience in gender and human rights issues. She has country knowledge and experience of working in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Serbia, Denmark, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Ritu is a founder and moderator of the South Asian Sexual Health (SASH) Forum and an Editor of the AIDS-ASIA eForum.

She is also the Director of Spatial and Social Development Perspectives – UK.

http://ritumahendru.wordpress.com/about/

http://mishtimli.blogspot.com/

Priyali: Hi Ritu, welcome to the “Let’s Talk” blog which is a platform for people within higher education and those simply interested in it, to talk about the things that concern us.

First off, many congratulations on completing your doctorate in Sociology. Would you like to comment on your early career experiences now that you’ve got it under your belt? What are your career plans, and what do you think of the present job market in the UK and outside it?

Ritu: Thanks Priyali. As you are aware, opportunities for PhD graduates are sporadic. I have not had much success in securing a full time academic position in the UK, something that I was looking forward to after finishing my PhD. However, I have specific engagements with various UK universities. Elsewhere, I am in negotiation with universities to establish international programmes – this is a lengthy and time consuming process.

Preferably, I would like to teach Gender and Public Health from sociological perspectives, and engage myself in social research simultaneously. I do have a company and would like to keep that as a tool to continue my engagement with countries like India, Afghanistan, South Africa etc. It may appear that I am adhering to the doctrine of utilitarianism. However, the job market in the UK is bleak so I have created a job for myself and carved my own path. I am hoping that one day the situation within UK universities will change, and I will have a full-time position at a University here.

Priyali: What or whom do you hope to influence with your work as a social science researcher?

Ritu: I wouldn’t necessarily like to influence anyone. Instead, I would like to facilitate and/or provide space for discussions on the issues of migration, gender and health. This would create knowledge of social marginalization through theoretical and methodological understanding. I am interested in the conceptualisation of diasporas and health and how the two are deeply interlinked. I made initiatives to enable this dialogue and founded SASH – an online forum that attempts to address the sexual health needs of migrants  and diasporic communities in the UK.

Next post: 7 March. Dr. Mahendru comments on being able to work across cultures, and on career planning for doctoral researchers.

Vitae have posted this (2min) video about social media usage. The statistics are nuts — 50% of UK web traffic is for Facebook, for example. 93% of people trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust adverts, and this is key — social media is about people and connections, and the quality of connections is undeniably important for any researcher.

I like social media and the web, but am I really using them as well as I can to further my research?

Vitae’s Digital Researcher conference deals with just this. It’s at the British Library (Monday 20th Feb), and they’re opening it up online as well:

‘Digital Researcher Online will explore how new technologies and tools (microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social citation sharing) can be used to enhance your research and raise your professional profile.’

You don’t have to be a geek and you don’t have to spend loads of time on Facebook, Twitter or any other service, but with a bit of tweaking you can have relevant and timely information at your fingertips, and you can connect with others who are passionate about your field, and boy, can you market yourself.

I think it’s kind of like exercise — if you’re a gym hater, there’s no point making it a resolution to go three times a week. If you prefer running, do that instead. So if you love LinkedIn but aren’t keen on Twitter (assuming you have actually tried them and aren’t doing a Daily Mail hate-hate-hate-based-on-not-much) then fine, just use the tools that suit you.

I’m posting this because I’ve heard a few people say, almost proudly, that they ‘don’t really get this social media stuff,’ ‘don’t use the internet that much’ or ‘hate Facebook’. I’m think that’s a shame (although yeah, Facebook can be awful), and a bit short-sighted, because they may be failing to present themselves as well-developed professionals in touch with what’s going on outside of their specialism. So, have you checked recently what people see when they Google you?

For me, the web is exciting because I’m a writer, and there are so many new markets and chances for me with everything going on online, from micro-blogging fun to serious revenue-earning opportunities. I really believe that applies to everyone, and that social media doesn’t have to be complicated or time-wasting, just well-managed and thoughtfully applied. If anyone can help with that, it’s Vitae. (If you’re not signed up for their Researcher Bulletin, do it, great resources.)

Here’s the programme for the day (I think it’ll all be available afterwards too):

10:00 – Introduction
A short interview with Dr Tristram Hooley on Digital Researcher 2012 and the current digital landscape.

10:30 – 11:15 – Morning plenary
Join us online and tune-in to the opening plenary of Digital Researcher. During this session we’ll be covering academic practice, the role of social media and intellectual property.

15:45 – 16:30 – Keynote speaker Martin Weller (Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University and author of the ‘Digital Scholar’ book talking about ‘Digital Scholarship’.

John Igoe, Vitae’s Web Development Manager will be an online facilitator throughout the day. Join discussions on Twitter using the #dr12vitae hashtag.

However, citation software is far from perfect, and I’ve ended up with information all over the place because there’s no one tool that can pull everything together for me.

Here’s what I want to be able to do:
— input data via my smartphone, the web and offline on my laptop
— use sources ranging from Amazon and Primo (my institution’s library catalogue) to scanning the barcode of a book/inputting the ISBN
— organise references in the usual folder structure (again on web, app and desktop)
— search, tag, flag and annotate
— export, email, share
— at the click of a button, output an comprehensive and perfectly formatted bibliography which adheres to my department’s specified style (which may need tweaking from the standard)
— be free, or really worth the money!

Actually…that is quite a lot to ask, isn’t it! This kind of software purports to make it easy, but I’ve found it far from.

The main academic tools with both web and desktop facilities are EndNote and Mendeley. There are loads of other options, including LaTex which is for scientific researchers. After some testing — and frustration — I’m using Mendeley as my main tool.

Below, I describe my workflow. I hope it helps someone else who is looking at the jumble of offerings and wondering where to start.

From the library catalogue I save things into my eShelf and export to EndNote Web. I don’t have EndNote desktop, because I object to having to pay for software that they give on-campus students for nothing (I can’t afford to live on campus!), there is no ‘App for that’ and I just don’t like the user experience.

The Amazon iPhone app will scan barcodes and bring up the item; I then put that into a WishList and use Primo to quickly find the bibliographic data that I need, export it to EndNote web, export from there and import to Mendeley. Yeah, a massive pain!

I can also scan barcodes on MyBib (a $2.99 app) then send via email for import to Mendeley — but I can’t get that to work at present.

From the web, there is a bookmarklet I use to send things straight to Mendeley, and the list of possibilities there is impressive, including just clipping web pages. EndNote has a Firefox toolbar, a whole toolbar stuck onto Firefox for just three buttons — online help, an EndNote Web bookmark and a Capture bookmarklet. Clumsy, ugly and disabled.

Within Mendeley I can do everything I want — reading, annotating, grouping etc. The EndNote experience just wasn’t as seamless, although I think it does do all or most of the above.

The only thing I can’t do easily is the barcode scanning, so I will have to use Primo ISBN searches instead, via Safari on the iPhone (ugh, maybe it’s time for Dolphin).

Another thing I like is the sharing and collaboration possibilities of Mendeley’s social media link-in, although currently there’s not much in my field. With things like academia.edu and LinkedIn’s great groups out there as well, I have to see how things go there, but Mendeley seems pretty innovative.

This is a very personal ramble about bibliographic and citation software. I am rather disappointed that there isn’t a tool that will combine what I see as all the essential and fairly basic requirements for academics.

For something less personal, have a look at this extremely comprehensive comparison of free bibliographic managers.

For now, I will continue with my rather convoluted scheme of record-keeping! How does everyone else cope with the endless referencing and record-keeping nightmare?

It may seem strange to link the two things but I hope it will become clear why I am.

As reported in The Guardian last Saturday Mr. Schmidt said, “Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together.”

My deepest sense of where we are – as a scholar and a human being – is that we need to renew our ability to make connections.

I write this blog to make connections with people I would never have the chance to communicate with otherwise.

Maybe the riots would not have happened if we had been better at talking to each other.

Maybe this is our chance to stop them from happening again.

Art and science. The working and the not working. The very educated and the less educated.

I don’t know when the idea that life and the world can best be described in binaries took such strong hold of us.

Can we soften and expand and shape our categories – instead of allowing them to control us?

How else can we make our work – and play – relevant and enduring?

What are the binary ideas you would like to change? Are you going to let your inner polymath out?

In this post I want to talk about the relationship between your research and your teaching.

Researchers may feel that they walk a lonely path – and they do. Research by its nature is an individual and personal activity. It is probably one of few professional career paths in which you are positively encouraged to act on the world around you according to highly personal ideas.

And yet – speaking anecdotally even and only from my own experience of the research world as I know it through departments I have taught at, conferences and impromptu debates around coffee machines (!) – most researchers aren’t by nature disengaged from other people. On the contrary, we seem to be insatiably curious about and interested in other people, or we would not spend large chunks of our lives seeking to add a tiny, original drop to the vast ocean of knowledges man and woman have created together over the centuries.

The good news is that our chosen line of work offers its own way out of the loneliness I think many of us have felt, in our hours and years spent following a research trail.

As teachers, we automatically find a social dimension to our work.

In our classrooms we come up against fresh faces and minds to whom we seek to make our ideas both clear and relevant.

We also find a whole new social dynamic in bringing our research selves into the light of day and into the classroom.

I am presently working on a university language and study skill teaching assignment where it is the meta-skills – to use a word any self respecting dictionary would probably reject on sight – of being a learner (and a teacher) which count. Life in the classroom isn’t about ideas right now – its about ideas about ideas. How to frame, present and deal with an argument. What to do when the Harvard style guide won’t tell you how to cite a completely new kind of source which wasn’t around when it was last revised.

I hope I’ll also have a chance to teach the literary periods I specialized in – but stretching to teach language and study skills is gifting me an important kind of knowledge. The knowledge of social contact – where the work I produced over years spent largely in the company of my own mind is being translated into something immediately and socially valuable.

Be flexible and be open to the opportunities around you – don’t shy away because you think it’s not what you trained to do. Let your research self breathe and your teaching self too – they need to not be frozen into one place and one time in an infinite universe.

Being a bit of a writer, and therefore a lot of a reader, I naturally turned to books to help me, and I found that there weren’t a lot around. There are plenty of books on how to get your PhD, but not so many on how to get onto one in the first place!

So here’s a recommendation for anyone preparing to unleash their brilliant research proposal on unsuspecting profs: The PhD Application Handbook by UK researcher Peter J Bentley, which has nearly 200 pages of invaluable advice.

This book is useful for prospective researchers in all disciplines, with a wide range of examples given. It’s really easy to read, and absolutely fascinating. Suddenly I knew the answers to some of the questions I dared not ask — how not to annoy the departmental secretaries or any of my prospective supervisors, who to approach first, how long to wait before enquiring about my application and so on.

I would recommend starting at the beginning and working through. You may want to skip the ‘Why do you want to do a PhD?’ part, but these are the questions the uni will ask, so be sure you really do know! There is tons of funding information, which will be invaluable for most students.

Personally, I found the chapter on preparing my application the most helpful, but the book is full of insights which will ensure that you present yourself as well as you possibly can. It also goes further than the application, holding your hand all the way through securing the offer, finding accommodation and some solid advice on beginning your PhD.

If you are wondering what it’s all about, you’ll feel much more confident with this book (and the Jobs.ac.uk PhD blogs!) to help you.

I have taken advantage of the unique nature of the internet to look for a collegial space we can all come to in our own time. My memory of the final stage of my doctoral research is a blur of classes, supervisions, library visits and – yes : ) – grocery shopping. From what I could see of more senior academics around me, life only gets busier after this. But yet to listen, to find a voice with which to contribute: these surely are the quiet staples of the path we have chosen to follow. Without them our work risks becoming a round of task completion alone, I think?

In practical terms the need to publish seems to me the most pressing issue for scholars who, like me, have recently completed their doctoral work. In both the United Kingdom where I lived and worked for more than a decade and in India where I presently live, an academic gains in credibility through getting their work published. Putting together at least a basic publishing plan and considering relevant points such as: identifying scholarly journals and possible monograph publishers, ways of approaching them and factoring in the time it will take from the acceptance of a proposal to the final publication (fingers crossed : )) is practical research activity that is just as important as the work it takes to develop and write your doctoral thesis.  

Of course it’s not just how to publish that’s a practical issue. The “why” is just as important.  My own answer to this is a simple one: to be engaged and to engage.  Dialogue and human contact are what make being a learner and a teacher worthwhile. How else can we make sure that the humanities remain fresh, alive and …well, human?