Change the Dissertation

OK, attempt #2 at this post, first time around BlogPress ate my blog post, or rather it lied and said that it posted it but in fact it just lost it! Let's see if the blogger app on my iPhone fares any better.

Anywho, I was reading this article from inside higher edu last week on the MLA's bold plans to change the dissertation (queue the Oooooooh sound track) - see bottom for link since I can't really do much Wysiwyg on this app.

I've written before on the topic of updating PhD programs but I dont think I've touched upon the dissertation aspect. Some tend to see their dissertation as the magnum opus of their student career (at least I hope it's tier student career and not their entire career). They see it as a solitary path, between them and their committees - perhaps this is why we have so Many dissertations in university archives gathering dust...

As you might be able to tell I have a different view. Working in academia for more than 10 years now I have come to see the dissertation metamorphose from the boogie man (this was earlier me) to an academic exercise that shows odd your skills in research and critical thinking. Adding new Knowledge to the world's repository is only an incidental by product (and a badly used one at that since in my experience dissertations are going unused).

So if this is the case, showing off that you can do research, why not show it off with actually publishing a series of smaller pieces in peer reviewed journals? Why not create a documentary or a open educational resource that can be used by more people and shows off that you can research and write? Or maybe a combination of the above? There is no need for a dissertation to be defined as a book-style document, with X-Many chapters ad x-many appendixes, formatted with 1 inch margins except for the chapter heading pages that are 1.5 inches from the top and other arcane rules.

There are obviously bottlenecks that prevent institutions from just turning on a dime - the evaluators do not know how to evaluate alternatives to the book style dissertation and as such can't advise PhD candidates and can't judge adequately the quality of their work. Hopefully in the not too distant future there will be more options for the PhD dissertation.


IHE link: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/09/mla-considers-radical-changes-dissertation

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more