New Year's resolution...

Happy new year to all!

I thought I would start my new year with a little (PhD) humor...


While I don't think I'll be graduating by the end of 2017 (wouldn't that be nice?) I would like to make considerable headway with my dissertation.  This coming term (in 8 days, in-fact!) my spring semester (or as they call it in Canada "winter term") will begin.  This coming winter term I am doing my final (final! and I mean it!) course/seminar/structured thinking time for my doctoral work.  EDDE 806.  The overview of the course is a little outdated (although I won't ding the web folks for that because I find some outdated verbiage on my work's website too!  Sometime's it's like a game a whack-a-mole).

In any case, EDDE 806 is described as:

This Doctoral seminar course is designed to provide informal support and opportunities for presentation and peer review of activities associated with completion of the doctoral dissertation.  Completion of the course is required prior to graduation for all doctoral students. Students may register in the course only after passing the candidacy exam. The course is seminar based and will consist of registered students who are actively working on their dissertation.  Other EdD students may participate in the course as guests on a voluntary basis and are encouraged to do so. The format is real time web conferencing seminars held every two weeks during the fall and winter terms. Besides student presentations, faculty and guest presentations will be scheduled. The seminar is designed to allow participation and build networks among all EdD cohorts and graduates.
I have not yet passed my candidacy exam (which at Athabasca means passing your dissertation proposal defense), but due to recent regulation changes I am able to be in the seminar even if I am not done with that part.  

Hence my goal, to be achieved by December 30th 2017 is this: Complete my dissertation proposal to a degree that is passable and successfully defend it.  

Ideally I'd like to have this thing wrapped up by September so I can begin working on data collection and analysis, but I don't know how feasible that is given that I am scheduled to teach 2 courses in the summer (June-August) and the spring semester is looking busy with collaborations.  Still, I expect to be making some meaningful headway with this project during the spring and the summer.  Having organized my collected readings today I can say that I have 205 academic articles download and ready to read (excluding duplicates), some dozen or so blogs and news stories (background info), and 5 books on research methods and ethics. I think the articles will lead me to more articles that I will need to look up.  So... 205 articles - does that sound doable between now and July? ;-)

In addition to EDDE 806, I am also auditing MDDE 701.  That course  is more about quantitative research. While I don't really expect my dissertation to go the quantitative route, I am keeping the mixed methods approach open, and quantitative knowledge is good to have anyway. 

When I started this degree I was hoping for a 4 year end-to-end, but increasingly it's looking like it's going to take me 5 years. That said, I'd prefer to take a little longer but take the time to smell the metaphorical roses on the way and take part in interesting collaborations.

So, what are your learning or academic goals for 2017?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academic Facepalm (evaluation edition)

Image
Back in December, I was searching for the #tenure hashtag on twitter.   There was some discussion (probably stated by Jesse Stommel 😜) which prompted me to search for this #hashtag out of curiosity to see what was tagged.  Along with heartwarming stories of people who've just earned tenure (a nice perk right before the winter break!), there was this wonderful tweet specimen... I'm not gonna lie.  IT BUGS ME. It bugs me as a learner.   I've always completed course evaluations and I tried to give honest feedback to the professor.  If the course was easy, hard, just right, I wanted them to know.  If I was appreciative, I wanted them to know.  Yes, sometimes I've half-assed it and just completed the Likert scale with a "loved the course" comment at the end, but many times I try to be more concrete about the feedback. It bugs me as a program manager. I am the individual who sets up, collects, and often reminds students, about the course evaluations.  M
Read more

Discussion forums in MOOCs are counter-productive...well, sort of...

Image
The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle contextual
Read more

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