Meeting with Ed.D. thesis supervisor: restructuring
Last night I had a Skype conversation with Steve Higgins, my Ed.D. thesis supervisor at Durham University, for the first time in a few months. As I half-expected when I set myself the challenge, a deadline of 1st January 2011 is going to be pretty much unachievable now as I’m only 34,000 words into a 60,000 word thesis. That being said, Easter 2011 is looking good.
I find it useful to record our Skype conversations to go back through at my leisure. I haven’t done that yet – but I did capture the main points of our conversation via the Skype chat window. Here’s the highlights:
Other people’s work
As long as I acknowledge them, I can get other people to draw what I can only describe. Whilst I’ve made an attempt at representing what I discuss in diagrammatic form, there’s certain conventions and methods that I’m just not familiar with. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to afford to commission someone, especially given that I want to publish my thesis as a book.
Adjectives & verbs
Steve said something which, although he’s mentioned it before, struck a chord with me. He stated his belief that with ‘digital literacy’ the adjective and the verb seem to be the wrong way around. That is to say that ‘digital’ is the modifier for ‘literacy’ when it should be vice-versa. This led to a conversation about the final two chapters of my thesis before the conclusion. I intend to show that ‘digital literacy’ – and even ‘new literacies’ are too ambiguous to be nailed-down for all time. Instead, we should focus on notions of ‘digitality’ or similar.
Structure of thesis
Most theses, or so I’m led to believe, contain an introduction, followed by a methodology followed by a literature review, explication of points, and a conclusion. Not mine. As I’m writing a philosophical, non-empirical yet vocational doctoral thesis a slightly different format is required. As I began to explain in Ed.D. thesis restructure, I’m going to situate my methodology section almost half-way through my thesis, using it as a lever or a lens through which to focus the rest of my thesis. As for the literature review, this will be in (at least) four parts:
- History of traditional (print) literacy
- The history of digital literac(ies)
- New Literacies
- Policy documents (digitality)
That should keep things interesting. 🙂
Conclusion
Usually, as with most people writing something lengthy, I’d decide on my conclusion and then work backwards. That’s not entirely possible given the constant state of flux my thesis is in. As befitting Pragmatism, I’m making tentative conclusions. At the moment I’m given to concluding that the process (i.e. the inquiry) of notions surrounding ‘digital literacy’ and the like is at least as important as the resultant definition. In fact, I’m leaning more 70/30 in favour of process over product.
Steve quoted Douglas Adams at me. If this quotation doesn’t end up in my thesis, then you know something has gone horribly wrong:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Awesome.
Image CC BY pshutterbug
