For the fourth time, the Wissensmanagement Forum Graz hosted the PhD Cooperation Event at the i-KNOW conference, 14th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business. This year, the conference was held together with EC-TEL, the 9th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. The event brought a truely international community together, with about twenty PhD students from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Germany, Portugal, Croatia and Austria. The session’s aim was to provide a complementary offer to the doctoral consortium of the EC-TEL with providing an informal get together of PhD students in an friendly atmosphere to discuss PhD related issues (you, maybe, would not dare to ask your supervisor) and to exchange experiences.
From start to end, the PhD Cooperation Event was again very successful! All the participants actively contributed for this success, raising questions and looking for solutions together. The session was kicked off by a motivating keynote by Peter Kraker, PhD, a former core team member of the Wissensmanagement Forum, who finished his PhD recently. He introduced the session with a short, but very entertaining presentation about the struggles to find a topic for one’s PhD. This keynote gave a nice introduction into further discussions and triggered further topics. Besides, Peter shared a lot of his own experiences whenever he was able to assist, and added a lot of value for all the participants.
In an open discussion following a Barcamp-style introduction round, the following questions were tackled:
- how to manage the writing process?
- how to find a research community?
- how to find a co-supervisor?
- how to acquire study participants?
- how to not get distracted and focus on a main branch?
- how to coordinate different opinions about the further progress of your PhD with your supervisor?
- how to manage time efficiently?
At the end of our session, a lot of know-how about how to manage the process of a PhD was informally shared between the colleagues.
This event took place as part of the workshops schedule, before the actual start of the two joint conferences, which also worked out well since almost all the PhD students of the conference had the chance to meet community members from the very beginning. This supported opportunities for exchanging further ideas on the following two days, and the participants could discuss about more specific questions and also future collaborations. In the same lines, we decided to continue the PhD Cooperation Event Community in the Etherpad, hwihc was started the last year. The idea was that all interested participants of the event can add there name into the Etherpad and afterwards, everyone can conteact the group to ask questions that pop up during the year. Interesting book suggestions, tools or recommendations for the process of a PhD are gathered ther in addition.
PhD Cooperation Event 2014
Etherpad with contacts, results & community :
https://pad.okfn.org/p/phd-coop-2013
Conference websites:
http://i-know.tugraz.at/ and
http://www.ec-tel.eu
General information:
http://i-know.tugraz.at/phd-event
Link to Peter Kraker’s keynote Prezi slides:
http://prezi.com/kgcx-iinptzb/how-i-chose-the-title-of-my-dissertation/
Photos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/49520289@N04/sets/72157646473868794/ 