Wouldn't it be nice?

In the online grad student support group I belong to, we post each day to detail the goals we set for ourselves, whether or not we achieve them, and to discuss other research-related struggles and questions. We comment on each others' posts, sometimes just with brief encouraging comments; other times with more detailed advice, helpful links or suggestions for new ways to approach our problems.

And I've been thinking lately about how awesome it would be if supervision followed this same model.

Imagine if you posted every day to a blog chronicling what you had been working on, what you were struggling with, and what you wanted to work on next. And your advisor could comment to encourage you, make suggestions or point you in the right direction when you were getting lost. If you had to post at least once daily, that would be huge motivation for working on your thesis every day.

Then, if your supervisor had to comment on every post, that would force them to be more supportive, remember who you are, and they would also have a much clearer idea of what you were going through with your research (especially how much of your work each day did not lead to productive results, so that they wouldn't give you That Look when you had only a few pages of new work to present at a face-to-face meeting).

Hah, better yet, imagine if your supervisor had to be equally accountable with posts about his/her own research! The best discussions I've had with my supervisor have been when she has admitted she is struggling with something in the book she is writing, and I've been able to use that as a jumping off point for talking about problems with my dissertation.

Now you might argue that this would be too time-intensive for supervisors. But this strategy could replace face-to-face meetings almost entirely, so that you'd only really have to get together to discuss draft chapters, and (be honest here) how often do you have one of those? The few minutes a day that it took for your supervisor to read your post and comment wouldn't add up to more than the one hour per week that supervisors are expected (at our university at least) to be available to their students for meetings.

And an unexpected bonus: if you have the sort of scary supervisor who is likely to be unsupportive and make mean comments, you'd have them in writing to show people if you needed to make a formal complaint.

Well I think it would be an improvement anyway. Online interactions are so much less difficult than real life conversations.

Is it obvious I have a meeting with my supervisor tomorrow?