Category: Academia

Doctoral Thesis (Dissertation) Research – Approved to Begin

I just received final ethical (institutional review board) approval to begin my thesis research!

After adding one sentence to address data encryption, I revised and resubmitted my Invitation to Participate  and Consent Form for my study, Navigating Liminality in Distance Education: The Experiences of Research and Professional Doctorate Learners. I am now ready to go, and expect to create a location for my research information here on my webpage, after which I will talk more specifically about what I hope to study and how I plan to do this.

If you are a doctoral student (or recently completed your doctorate), you just may be a potential participants for my research!  I may ask you to tell me about your experiences . . .

Research Ethics Update

I want to share some (initial) good news–my first-round of ethics review for my proposed doctoral thesis (dissertation), Navigating Liminality in Distance Education:The Experiences of Research and Professional Doctorate Learners, has now made it through the research ethics officer.

It came back to me last week with a request to provide more detail in 3 specific areas, and not wanting to sit on what was essentially minor re-wording, I turned it around and resubmitted the following day. I learned this morning that my proposal has now made its way to the Chair of UREC (University’s Research Ethics Committee) for consideration.

Let us hope the Chair is comfortable and enjoying the wonders of spring’s transition into summer and smiles kindly upon my work. In layman’s language — if this person gives me ethical approval, I can engage in my study. I don’t want to consider alternate responses . . .

Blog is Again Online

After having endless errors with WordPress over the past week and a half, I finally backed up the database, cleared the domain of everything, and reinstalled the system, posts, images, and plug-ins. Along the way, working with the fine support staff at Pair Networks, I now have a WordPress install that works better than ever. I am actually able to install plug-ins and upload files through the Dashboard, which is something that never quite worked right before. I expect to continue tweaking the install, including adding (and removing) some plug-ins that I have wanted to use for some time, along with a new template that I have had my eye on that I will install and customize in the next several days.

True, spending all the hours I have done over the past 2 weeks has meant that I have not gotten as much of my research done as I would have liked, but Silence and Voice is not simply a blog, but rather my online space where I discuss and share aspects of my research. Silencing me here effectively silences my work.

My Page on the Lancaster University Website

My department at Lancaster University, Educational Research, requested that doctoral students consider having a presence on the Graduate School, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, website. Now that my doctoral thesis proposal was approved, I thought it was time to list my thesis working title, along with my areas of research interest.

Creating a page on the school’s website in some way shows my current connection to my studies and the university, though it also caused me to do something long-overdue, namely update my CV. Seems like an easy thing to do, but listing my areas of interest, along with the keywords to describe them, is a challenging thing at best, and an seemingly overwhelming excercise for somebody as interdisciplinary (and somewhat postmodern) as I am. I felt a bit paralyzed with something seemingly so simple, as I was concerned I would be specifying myself to the point that I would limit myself and in the process fail to capture how rich I believe my interests are.

Of course, this is in itself one of the challenges with doctoral studies, as that tiny little piece of original work we are expected to do will naturally have to be specific. Any surprise I am interested in threshold concepts as a focal point in my doctoral research itself?

Threshold Concepts Conference 2012: Call for Abstracts

I know that yesterday I mentioned I do not ordinarily mention calls for abstracts, but I think this conference is somewhat different in that it is so very specific and is not widely known about beyond the specific group that often attends (do I sense a trend here?!). As a matter of fact, I have never even attended this, though I hope to do so next year.

The 4th Biennial Threshold Concepts Symposium will be held 27-29 June 2012 at Trinity College, Dublin. The Call for Abstracts may be found here. The most comprehensive online repository of links to nearly everything related to Threshold Concepts is maintained by Mick Flanagan here, and it is a great place to begin for those who want to learn more about them.

Threshold concepts are a-ha moments that are central for learners to grasp or understand when working through some discipline or academic process in order for them to be able to progress or grow in that area. These thresholds are often transformative, troublesome, irreversible, integrative, bounded, discursive, reconstitutive, and linked to a liminal experience.

Threshold concepts are one of the frames I am using in my doctoral thesis, and while it stems from the 2003 work of Jan Meyer and Ray Land that focused around undergraduate education, Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines, I am following these insights and application in the area of doctoral research and identity development itself.  

I really hope to attend this conference, as everything I have heard about it makes it seem central to my studies.