Multilitteratus Incognitus

It seems like the cosmos is back on another round on beating down on the venerable dissertation as final exercise for a doctoral degree. Stephen Downes posted yesterday this article from Times Higher Education which is asking the question as to whether or not the Doctoral Dissertation is obsolete .† The article quotes Jeremy Farrar of Imperial College London: “An awful lot is going unused and unread,” he says. “Is this really appropriate for the modern world? Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s.” Another strand here is a recent post from Maha who writes : What’s a PhD got to do with…. Writing 6,000 word articles? My PhD was over 100,000 Words. That prepared me for writing books but not articles. Some PhDs are composed of articles but most aren’t so…  Working collaboratively – you work alone and you learn to manage. Then in real life your research can be so much ...

Since I have a captive, in a sense, audience, I thought I would use the power of the crowd to help me identify a suitable PhD program for myself :) Now, over the years I've been thinking about pursuing a PhD, but a sage mentor once told me that I should take at least a year break from school before making any decisions.  Essentially clear the head out, think about what I like to do, and then think about what PhD program might be most appropriate for me.  Well, it's been four years, and I've already made a few excel spreadsheets with potential programs, but they all fall short in some way shape or form, usually the main issue is financial ;-)  So, I thought I would tap into the wisdom of the crowds on the web, on #edcmooc, and people following the Sloan Consortium to see what you all think about my (potentially unreasonable) conditions for the "perfect" PhD program; it can be an EdD too - PhD is just short-hand for the purposes of this post. Program of Study...