Academic Stagnation?

It's been about a month since I finished reading all the books, articles, news-items and non-print media items for my research on Digital Natives. I also went through and I classified everything, took notes and in general just got prepared to write, but I have not done so. Part of it is that I can't bear to rehash the sheer amount of bullshit and "common  wisdom" that's been mindlessly reproduced by some scholars, even if this rehashing is so that I can disprove the concept of the digital native.  I've did make some headway this week in completing a draft of the introduction which sets the pace for the article, but I need to whip myself into shape and get this article going! :-)  Perhaps this is something to undertake this weekend.  I guess the silver lining here is that in stagnating in this project I was able to read Noam Chomsky's Failed States (awesome book by the way), Catch-22 (another great book), Microserfs and I am finishing off Marshall McLuhan: You know nothing of my work - so I guess I wasn't totally stagnant ;-)

In other news, mobiMOOC is getting close to wrapping up. Some pretty interesting concepts have cropped up in mLearning, knowledge that will certainly help at least one of my friends and colleagues in her work and a base for me to continue to expand my knowledge in mLearning.  Another idea that has come up is that of the metaMOOC - a MOOC about MOOCs.  Considering that I would like to use a MOOC in my PhD project, I'd like to start thinking about the pedagogical underpinnings of MOOCs, their orientation, biases and comparisons with other modes of teaching. Getting this work done in advance of starting a PhD, while quite ambitious and TOO forward thinking, might help in shortening how much time a PhD program take to complete :-)

Comments

Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
It does take an effort to go over stuff! Sympathise here....

This digital immigrant/native stuff got me riled a while back. Being at the other end of the age range I naturally resented the idea that I was, by definition, a permanent digital immigrant. So posted about the idea of being a digital pioneer (tech-adopters) . More recently, after some frustration with supposedly digital natives who did only just enough to get them digitally by (and it applies to dig imms too) I wrote about the digitally entrenched. I guess labels are fine but they are just that - a way of describing people which sometimes do not fit.

Good luck with your writing!
May 9, 2011 at 6:12 PM
Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
Thanks for the encouragement!
I actually finished writing the first half of the article last weekend. I'll try to finish off the first draft this weekend. The digitally entrenched actually came up in one of the articles I read as part of my literature search. One thing that really stands out to me is the plethora of names out there to describe the current generation. This rush to name this generation seems like a fetish more than anything else. Names like Net-Generation, Digital Natives and Millenials are "quick wins" that don't require much knowledge of the characteristics of this generation.
May 10, 2011 at 10:14 AM
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