Questioning and Answering?

Welcome (back?) to my blog!  Now I have blogged in the past but have decided to start a new, research-orientated one in place of the older, personal one. 

So, why have I restarted? Well, I have been doing a PhD for a little over 12 months now and have been told that I need to keep a diary. And I’m not very good at it. I tried keeping a diary as a child and I got bored. Later, I tried keeping a blog and I became too busy. The thing which is different now is that my current research changes daily and I have notes with reflections on them everywhere and regularly lose them. So it would be good to put them all into one place so that they are not lost. I sort of regret not doing this sooner but can email in my thoughts to this blog using my mobile as the ideas come to me. Now Twitter is still a bit too fast for me right now but may be used in due course.

What can you expect? I plan to hand out this address at conferences and other such events so it is going to be semi-formal blog but a little more personal than some of the more formal academic blogs out there. So you’ll learn about how about the PhD is going (though I can't promise to be as funny as Piled Higher and Deeper) and about me but the focus will be on the research in the broadest sense. Now that could mean discussing the Parties' statements on higher education in the General Election, research methods, some of my latest findings or simply something I want to be feedback on.

What am I researching? Well, the official title of the PhD is “European Masters: The Student Experience, A Case Study of Erasmus Mundus."   It's a bit of a mouthful but as with all PhDs it has the necessary colon in it.  Let's go backwards a bit and explain how I got here: I used to work on a cross-European Masters degree in Special Education Needs (EM SEN) run jointly by Roehampton University (London, UK), Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Fontys University of Applied Sciences (Tilburg, The Netherlands).  This was funded by the Erasmus Mundus Programme (EM) from the European Commission and thus offered large scholarships to students from outside the European Union.  Therefore, I welcomed some 110 students from 39 countries.  What I am looking to find out is the relationship between the aims of the European Commission for Erasmus Mundus and the aims of the students.  This boils down to half a dozen questions:

I aim to answer these through documentary analysis (looking at European Legislation is more interesting than you would expect!), questionnaires (would a PhD in the social sciences be complete without them?!) and interviews (with students, alumni and the EU). 

So this research looks at how European Policy is implemented, how Europe and its universities interact with the wider world, how students' views of the globe change through such a course and what they actually learn - as well as how they use the skills/knowledge imparted by EM SEN. 

So what next?  Well, I'm hoping to blog regularly and at least once a week.  Entries will be shorter than this and may just be passing thoughts or one-liners.  Now the title of the blog comes from the fact that a lot of my work comes from the fact there are often more questions and any answers I have are only provisional and I expect people to disagree.  Come back and discuss with me how you see Higher Education, internationalisation or anything else mentioned.  Now just to be clear, this research is independent of the European Union, my employers and the participating institutions so opinions on this blog are my own and no-one else's! 

Until the next time!