Multilitteratus Incognitus

From PhD Comics It's been a while since I've had the bandwidth to think about something other than my dissertation proposal.  When I started this process four years ago (starting with matriculation in March 2014) I thought I'd be the first or second person in my cohort to be done (ha!), but like most marathoners I guess I am part of the pack looking at the fast folks ahead of me 😏.  Being part of the pack does have its benefits, such as getting an idea of how long the process takes (having friends in other cohorts also helps with this).  I thought, initially, when someone submitted their draft (be it proposal or final dissertation) that you would get feedback and signs of life from your various committees soonish, but seeing Lisa's journey (currently at 5 weeks and counting) gave me a reality check. Waiting isn't bad per se (we wait for a ton of things in life), but I think it is the expectation of things to come that makes this type waiting much more anxiou...

From wikipedia: 1779 illustration of a Catholic Armenian monk of the Order of St Gregory the Illuminator,   Happy New Year! Yeah... it's the fourth of January, but I figure I can get away with it since we're still in the first week of 2018, and this is my first post for the year 😉 Things have been a little quiet here on the blog as of late. Not a lot of MOOCing, not a lot of virtual connecting, not a lot of collaborative or cooperative learning as was the case in previous years.  There has been a lot of reading, mostly in monastic form - you know, lock yourself in a room and read until your inner teenager starts screaming at you "are we done yeeeeeet????" - I guess I am really in the thick of dissertation prep "stuff" (reading and sorting mostly) which I hope I'll get through in 2018 (for the most part anyway) I thought I would take a break from the monastic lifestyle to put together a few things that really struck me in 2017, at least as far as...

... 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  When I originally made my plans last May to have the fall semester be the semester that I focused on the literature review part of my dissertation proposal I sort of envisioned a lot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 been a while since I've blogged, or at least it really feels like it.  I've had my nose stuck in (virtual) books trying to get through my literature review - but more on that on some other blog post. I came across an article on InsideHigherEd this past week asking whether or not letters of recommendation are really necessary . My most immediate context is admissions, given that that's part of my work at the university, but the people who gave their two cents also mentioned something I had not considered: academic jobs. I won't rehash the opinions of the people who wrote for the article, but I will add my own two cents, mostly from a graduate admissions perspective. I don't have a fully formed opinion on letters of recommendation for employment purposes, but I'll add my two cents as a prospective hire (in a few years when I might be done with my EdD :p) For admissions to graduate course of study, be it a masters program, a PhD program, or even a cer...

I think I am going to commission a saint painting (Byzantine style, of course) of Paul Prinsloo (I just need to find a clever Saint Epithet for him).  Here is another though process sparked by something he shared recently on his Facebook.  Paul shared this blog post without comment (I swear, sometimes I feel like this is an online class he's conducting and we're all participating in a massive discussion ;-) ) and it got me thinking... I do recognize the adjunctification (and probably de-profesionalization) of the professoriate, and I see it as a trend that's not new.  If I really think back to my undergraduate days, almost 20 years ago now, I could probably see it back then as well. There is, however, plenty of blame to go around. Academia is (slowly or quickly, depending on your standpoint) becoming a capitalist monster operating on a greedy algorithm. My own university, a state university, seems to be in competition with other state universities in the same state...

The lit-review (lit-review 2.0 as a dub it) has been going from a crawl to, a walk, to hopefully hitting speedwalking pace.  Lit-review 1.0 was last fall, which was a little too broad to be fit for purpose, and it really explored a lot of themes that might be worthwhile keeping in mind as things to discuss in the discussion portion of the dissertation  - you know, after I pass the proposal defense, and collect and analyze data - so it's not all that useful now. Because I am working on collaboration as a topic, and more specifically collaboration borne out of participation in a specific set of MOOCs, I am looking some literature on MOOCs and some literature on collaboration.  After I finished reading a handful of books on collaboration, I've made my way to academic articles on MOOCs (before I go back to collaboration discussed in academic articles).  It's been a couple of years since I've sat down to make a concerted effort to read articles on MOOCs (given th...

...ambivalent?  I am not sure if ambivalence is the word I am going for because I am getting hints of nostalgia too.  Perhaps though I should take a step back, and start from the beginning. This past weekend two things happened: The first thing is that I've completed reading full books as part of my literature review for my dissertation, and I have moved onto academic articles, articles I've been collecting on MOOCs and collaboration in general. While MOOCs aren't really the main focus of my dissertation study, they do form the basis, or rather the campgrounds on which the collaborative activities occurred on, and it's those collaborative activities I want to examine. This review of MOOC articles (while still relatively in the early stages) made me reflect back on  my own MOOC experiences since 2011. The second thing is that I received a message from FutureLearn which was a little jarring and made me ponder.  Here is a screenshot: My usual process, when ...

Yet another post that started as a comment on something that Paul Prinsloo posted on facebook (I guess I should be blaming facebook and Paul for getting me to think of things other than my dissertation :p hahaha). Anyway,  Paul posted an IHE story about a research study which indicates that instructional designers (IDers) think that they would benefit from conducting research in their field (teaching and learning), but they don't necessarily have the tools to do this.  This got me thinking, and it made me ponder a bit about the demographics of IDers in this research. These IDers were  in higher education.  I do wonder if IDers in corporate settings don't value research as much. When I was a student and studying for my MEd in instructional design (about 10 years ago), I was interested in the research aspects and the Whys of the theories I was learning. I guess this is why further education in the field of teaching and learning was appealing to me, and why I a...

I originally posted this as a response in a post that Paul Prinsloo wrote on facebook (in response to this Chronicle Article on Beall's list and why it died ), but it seemed lengthy enough to cross-post as a blog post :-) -------------- So many issues to dissect and analyze is such a (relatively) brief article. It is important to see and analyze predatory journals (and academic publishing) in general systematically with other trends in academia. This includes the fetishization of publish or perish, and the increased research requirements to even get a job in academia ( see recent article on daily noos as an example ) One thing that bugged me was this line --"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should be your first clue." There are legitimate journals out there that are new, and hence don't have any current readership because they are new, so they can't necessarily rely on the word of mouth to get submissions for...

It's been a crazy few days!  If it weren't for my brother coming down to hangout for a while I probably would have more in common with Nosferatu than a regular human being😹 (having been stuck indoors for most of the weekend).  When I started off this summer I gave myself a deadline to be done with my methods chapter by August 30th (chapter 3 of my proposal).  After reading...and reading...and reading...and re-reading (select articles form EDDE 802), I reached a point of saturation when it comes to methods.  I really wanted to read all of Lincoln & Guba's 1985 book called  Naturalistic Inquiry during this round, but it seems like I will just need to focus on specific aspects of the book. So, in this whirlwind of activity, I went through the preamble to my methods section, my target participant descriptions, my data collection, my data analysis techniques, and any limitations.  I added to these sections, explicated, went more in-depth in each sec...