Technology brings postgrads in from the cold

By Helena Pozniak. Smartphones and laptops mean students on field trips can interact with universities. A postgraduate student is on a field trip to the Orkney Islands collecting data for her PhD in cultural heritage. She checks her RSS feed on her smart phone over breakfast, honing in on the most relevant reports from hundreds of professional journals and blogs that she follows.  Her working day begins with a Skype meeting with supervisors in Leicester and Glasgow. Together they edit an article via Google Docs. She then publishes a blog via Wordpress, which she uses to share and test ideas-in-progress with peers and experts worldwide. Read more...