The Potential and the Challenges of the Open Web in the Doctoral Journey: The Goal Orientations of Italian and UK PhD Students

This paper is concerned with the exploration of the motivations of individual Italian and UK doctoral researchers dealing with the potential and challenges of the open Web in their doctoral journey. The paper takes cue from the peculiar situation experienced by current PhD candidates, who are challenged to act more as ‘doctoral researchers’ rather than as ‘doctoral students’ and are increasingly exposed to the unprecedented opportunities of the Web 2.0 tools and services for improving personal development and practicing innovative scholarly activities. The study assumes that the new learning scenarios for doctoral education should be more permeable to the emerging forms of knowledge production and distribution and should look at doctoral researchers’ current self-organized practices in the digital as an informed basis to critically innovate research training. Building on selected, qualitative findings drawn from a wider research, this paper provides a snapshot of drivers, hindrances and concerns characterizing the digital engagement of two non representative samples of individual doctoral candidates. Focus of this paper is on the dispositions of the PhD students toward the open Web, as arising from the free comments received in the initial, exploratory online questionnaire delivered across three Italian and one UK universities. Data triangulation has been applied across diverse contexts, according to the grounded theory principle of the constant comparative method. This approach has allowed us to assess the empirical categories of Benefits, Criticalities, Inhibitors and Individual Perspectives, that respectively summarize the accounted advantages, the factors that are likely to prevent or slow down the uptake of new digital tools and the stated individual views about the role of the digital in the doctoral journey.