One more thing!

... No seriously! I swear! This will be the last thing I read and then I will start to write my literature review ;-)

I am back up for some air.  When I originally made my plans last May to have the fall semester be the semester that I focused on the literature review part of my dissertation proposal I sort of envisioned a lot of reading.  Reading on the train. Reading on the weekends.  Reading while walking (through text to speech), reading while driving (also through TTS).  My goal was to put pen to paper (figuratively speaking) on November 30th.  Well, that date has come and gone and I still haven't put pen to paper yet.  And, I am still reading. 

A couple of times I've actually come close to being done reading - having my "to read" folder on dropbox empty and all things read, skimmed, or otherwise evaluated for usefulness for my proposal.   When I've come down to 10 items somehow the folder magically populates again.  Well...it's not magic - I add things to the folder.  Three weeks ago I remembered that I should have looked at the Horizon Reports to see if there were any prognosticated trends that related to my proposal. A couple of weeks ago I remembered that I didn't look at the Educause Review for related items. And, this past weekend I got notice that the OLJ (OLC's peer reviewed journal) just released a new issue and a couple of articles seemed relevant.  D'oh!

The encouraging news is that I am basically done. There are two or three relevant(ish?) articles on the OLJ, and I have the MOOC Invasion to read (or at least skim).  After that I am truly, 100%, no regrets, calling the literature review reading done and I will start to collect my notes to write the chapter up.

I suspect that I am not the only doctoral student who has suffered from the "one more article! one more book!" syndrome.  When doing research (alone or with colleagues) for an article or chapter-length piece there is a tacit understanding that you just can't fit everything in, and that stuff gets left on the cutting floor.  No one will do an oral exam for an article you submit to a journal for review - so if you haven't read something...well, no one's the wiser.  For a dissertation I feel like what you don't put in (and what you don't read), could come back to bite you in the oral defense, hence better be prepared.  But...can you take preparedness to an necessary extreme? 

Any thoughts from current doctoral students and recent grads?

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