Re‐imagining doctoral education: Professional Doctorates and beyond

Portents of the demise of the Professional Doctorate have emerged in some recent policy and institutional circles in Australia, raising questions about the meaning and relevance of the Professional Doctorate in an era of ‘league tables’ and research assessment in Australia. This article argues that such portents, based largely on narrow market‐driven arguments, are premature, reactive and unhelpful, in that they foreclose on a set of critical questions concerning the future purpose, scope and practice of doctoral education. The article argues that the simple re‐assertion of the PhD as the default award represents a restoration of the logics and imperatives of disciplinarity and of older notions of so‐called ‘real’ research. Further, questions of the changing economies of knowledge and practice within, between and beyond the reach of the university, are subordinated and disavowed. The article presents a re‐reading of the emergence of Professional Doctorates, from the perspective of a decade‐and‐a‐half of development and change. It suggests the need to revisit that history critically in the light of the current developments in doctoral education, in knowledge production and in developing different relations around knowledge between universities and different social and professional domains. Such revisitings can bring out emerging issues for doctoral education at a time when anxieties may inhibit taking up opportunities for innovation and linking with new kinds of knowledge production that go beyond Euro‐centric and university‐centric traditions.     

Users can change their web search tactics: Design guidelines for categorized overviews

Categorized overviews of web search results are a promising way to support user exploration, understanding, and discovery. These search interfaces combine a metadata-based overview with the list of search results to enable a rich form of interaction. A study of 24 sophisticated users carrying out complex tasks suggests how searchers may adapt their search tactics when using categorized overviews. This mixed methods study evaluated categorized overviews of web search results organized into thematic, geographic, and government categories. Participants conducted four exploratory searches during a 2-hour session to generate ideas for newspaper articles about specified topics such as “human smuggling.” Results showed that subjects explored deeper while feeling more organized, and that the categorized overview helped subjects better assess their results, although no significant differences were detected in the quality of the article ideas. A qualitative analysis of searcher comments identified seven tactics that participants reported adopting when using categorized overviews. This paper concludes by proposing a set of guidelines for the design of exploratory search interfaces. An understanding of the impact of categorized overviews on search tactics will be useful to web search researchers, search interface designers, information architects and web developers.     

The XML revolution

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is key to the current revolution in publishing technology. Liberating content from proprietary systems and presentational coding, XML enables content to be published efficiently in a multitude of forms – print and electronic. This article discusses XML itself – a metalanguage by which publishers can describe the particular features of their publications apart from how those features are to be rendered in specific presentations – and also surveys a number of other related technologies in the XML family for styling, transforming, and linking. The result of an unprecedented degree of collaboration among competing interests, XML is an enabling technology that greatly enriches our publishing environment.