Category: Academia

Supervising the Doctorate Experience – Invitation to Participate in a Study

Who is Invited?

Are you (or were you) a staff / faculty member who supervises, directs, mentors, or tutors doctoral students, who for at least part of their programme (including thesis / dissertation writing) are studying at a distance?

If so, have you ever had experiences of helping or supporting these students confront and work through any threshold concepts or areas of troublesome knowledge (i.e., aha moments, trouble spots, breakthrough areas, or defining moments of epistemological or ontological shift that may be pivotal in one’s identity development)?

Want to share these experiences for an approved  research project sponsored through the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT) in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University?

What is the Purpose of the Study?

The purpose of this research is to better understand the experiences of faculty members who work with doctoral students, at least in part via information and communications technology or technology-enhanced learning or e-learning, who have identified threshold concepts (i.e., aha moments, trouble spots, breakthrough areas, or defining moments of epistemological or ontological shift that may be pivotal in one’s identity development) for their students and were successful helping these learners through this troublesome knowledge.

Who are the Researchers?

This research is being conducted by Dr. Gale Parchoma (Lecturer / Assistant Professor in North America) and Jeffrey Keefer (Doctoral Student) at Lancaster University’s Educational Research Department, Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology (CSALT).

What will Participation Involve?

Participation in this study will involve:

  1. An approximately one-hour interview via telephone or Skype.
  2. Approximately one hour of your time to review and potentially revise your interview transcript and/or summarized narrative.

We will organize our interview schedule as soon as we receive confirmation of participants. We anticipate interviews taking place between December, 2010 and January, 2011. We hope to be able to return transcripts to participants before the end of February, 2011.

How Can I Learn More?

Our approved Consent Form with more information is available for review. If you have questions, want to speak about this, or wish to participate, please email either Gale or Jeffrey.

Thank you for considering this request for participation. We hope to add to the academic body of knowledge through our work together.

Use Google Scholar for Full-Text Articles

I just learned that I can enter my university-library specific information into Google Scholar Preferences and have it check to see if the articles that come up in the search results are available in the library. This has fundamentally shifted the way I use Google Scholar, which otherwise only identifies articles without helping you to access them.

The one limitation is that this works only if you have access to a university library, and if so you must be logged into it for remote database access or otherwise have direct access for the full-text accessibility to work. The full-text is based on the library access you already have, so if your institution does not have access to a particular database, you will not magically have access to it here, either. Alas, knowledge has to be kept safely locked away from the public (though I know these companies all have to generate revenue)!

NYU has a nice tutorial on using this that can easily be adapted to any other university database.

AERC & CASAE Call for Papers 2011

I just learned that the call for papers for the 2011 AERC, Adult Education Research Conference, and CASAE, Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education, Joint Conference was just released. While the information does not yet appear on their websites, it can be found on a PDF I uploaded here: AERC-CASAE Call 2011. 

As this conference is later than I can remember it in the past,  June 10 – 12, 2011, and is at the University of Toronto (beautiful campus), and I have some close friends in Toronto, perhaps I will consider submitting something for this. With the proposals due by October 3, no time to waste!

Anybody else interested in attending this?

Learning Journal Entry

I am reworking a learning journal entry I made concerning the methodology I used for this module’s project, grounded theory. While I posted this within our course Moodle website, I thought it may be of some interest (or not) to share it here, especially given how little time I have had for blogging recently.

I have intentionally selected a different strategy of inquiry for each of our modules, having moved from case study to narrative inquiry to ethnography and now to grounded theory, based on Kathy Charmaz’s work. I recently attended a workshop that Kathy offered, as I had previously heard how this can be a rather involved and complicated process. I thought I understood it, until I tried my hand at it. As I imagined, I did need a computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) application to manage all the data that I generated (who would have ever thought I would drown in data of only 3 people?), so purchased and learned MAXQDA, one of the programs that people commonly use to handle and manage large amounts of data. I found the program a life-saver, as I never would have been able to do the 2 levels of coding that then I used to proceed to theoretical sampling, ultimately learning something that I did not expect to find at all.

Perhaps that is one of the benefits of grounded theory; I started with the text and was open to anything I found along the way, upon which I would ground (or build) my theory, without having some things in mind I was hoping (or even not hoping) to find.

“Faculty Support” Draft Research Paper Initial Feedback

Well, I was able to submit the draft version of my paper in time (as long as 3:00 am EDT was still midnight in some time zone!), knowing that the grounded theory design I selected needed a lot more work. I thought it better to make the due date and acknowledge the areas I still need to complete and work, rather than miss the deadline completely. Some of the initial feedback I have received indicates I am moving in the right direction. I look forward to the remaining peer reviews I should get in the next few days.

So, now time to focus even more upon Kathy Charmaz’s grounded theory work while crunching my data using the new version of MAXQDA (a CAQDAS application, also known as a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) I just bought and installed for the purpose.

The revision due date is August 2; so time to again get cracking!