Day 9: Return of the Thesis

Some pretty fantastic results today. My goals were to outline Chapter 6 and start drafting Chapter 5. The new word count = 4592 for the outline, and 1684 for Chapter 5. (There was a massive amount of copy-pasta for the outline. There's no way I could ever write that many words in the two hours it took me to put that one together. Or in a day. Or three days.)

Attentive readers will note that the dateline includes an interval of 3 days since my last post, rather than the two I predicted at the time. Yesterday turned into a massive re-evaluation of my writing targets following some really productive conversations on Tuesday. Also, I was super exhausted and needed a lot of breaks. But it was the right choice, as today's progress shows.

Back to it tomorrow. My plan is to finish drafting Chapter 5 and then move on to outlining the chapter for the new study. I'm a little skeptical that I'll be able to get that far, but we'll see.

Day 8: The Outline Strikes Back

I want to complain today. I really do, because nothing went as planned. BUT, I can't complain. I went back to Chapter 5 today (where I explain my system and theory), and I had thought I would be able to turn the outline into prose. I decided that first I would just do a little tweak to the outline. Nothing big.

3 hours later, there was still no prose, but the outline had gone from confusing and unclear to tight and understandable. I'm pretty happy with it.

Then I had to spend about 2 hours planning, because outlining instead of drafting messed up everything. I also had to reschedule when I had been planning to do my analysis. So everything is a confusing mess right now, but I think I have accounted for everything.

Tomorrow I won't be writing. There simply is no time, but I am proud I wrote every day for 8 days in a row. Then I have 3 days of writing before taking Saturday off as well.

Maybe.

Day 7: No rest

It took five hours more than I had planned on, but I finally finished drafting the related works section. Chapter 2 is officially v.01 complete. I cranked out 1971 words today. Way above my average daily output. And I am so happy to report that I owe it to my good friends Jim & Iris.



Some background here. Iris is a former HCII grad like what I'm fixing to become. Now she's a fancy professor at Williams College. (Alright, assistant professor, but whatever.) Jim is her sweet husband (and former Qeexo researcher). Business aside, our friendship was cemented through a shared love of Minecraft, as well as many hours of collaborative play between the three of us on their server. (Hence that kick-ass Minecraft themed quilt that Iris made for our coming baby. Look at that!)

So anyway, they drop into town this weekend basically unannounced and ask me and Vivian to come out for a spell. Absolutely. Wouldn't miss it. But also I have only a few hours available before I have to go back to writing, because Chapter 2 is taking way longer than it was supposed to.

Anyway, heading out to go see them I discover that we have a damage rim and a flat tire. (Pittsburgh potholes are famous.) Well they offer to pick us up rather than wait at the restaurant. Then after listening to me fret about how I don't know where I will find the time to get the tire fixed before our pre-baby class in Monroeville on Thursday, they then offer to take it in for us and let me go back to work. We weren't optimistic that it would get solved today, but at least I could pick it up later in the week.

So the garage tells Jim it'll be a 2 hour wait, which was fine because they were supposed to just drop it off. But no. Jim tells him about the friend with the pregnant wife and the guy gets it done in 5 minutes.

But this blog is about my writing. So here's the point: if these kids hadn't done this for us, I know I wouldn't have finished the chapter today. And given the crammed schedule, that would have been a significant setback.

I just can't even describe how moved and grateful I am. I will seriously have to learn a craft so I can attempt to produce a return gift some day. I'm open to ideas.

Day 6: Personal Informatics and Smart Classrooms

1062 very challenging words today. I spent about 2/3 of them writing about personal informatics. I was surprised when I went back to the proposal to compare. In that document I spent about half a paragraph talking about it. Not enough. But now I wonder if I wrote too much. A lot of it feels week and rambling, too.

I'm not thrilled with the smart classrooms section, either. It doesn't feel completely cogent. But I had to just keep pushing forward without getting stuck. When I go back to edit I imagine I will see what the problems are.

I'm trying to stay optimistic about the next and final session of Chapter 2. I need to summarize what the contributions will be and then explain design-based research. One thing that I struggle to explain, and another that I have written about many times.

I had to add an unexpected day for Chapter 2. I had only budgeted ~10 hours to write it, but I'll need 1 or 2 more. This kind of mistake tends to cascade, but I'm keeping an eye on it. Here's a sample of my writing calendar. Each of the colors represents when things get moved.



Anyway, if this dissertation thing doesn't work out, I can always go back to making spreadsheets for a living.

Day 5: Piling it higher and deeper

I really should have waited longer before using up that joke.

Chapter 2 continues on with 1050 sparkling new words. I didn't get quite as far as I did yesterday because I spent a bit of time digging around in Scholar. I wanted to find out if anyone had already built what I call a "socio-technical training system," and wouldn't you know there's a whole lit review just waiting to be written. Now, I really should be familiar with that research already. As it turns out, I'm only familiar with Personal Informatics. That's one of the most recent branches of socio-technical system research, but far from the only one.

Oh well! I expect I will include a few papers for context and then move on. (Maybe MTFO should be my new motto?) I don't have time to include another entire arm of research if only to add a bit more smarty-pants "historiocity" to my work. It might make for a more interesting read, but it's more likely I would end up making a mess. And the thing is, this divergence just isn't necessary. PI is sufficient. MTFO.

My future boss told me the other day about an initialism she and her colleagues like to use. DTM. It means "do the minimum." (Of course, before revealing what it meant she gave me an elaborate qualification that what she was about to reveal was an exaggeration. A motivator. Not to be taken literally, but still helpful etc etc.) I told her I prefer the term "satisficing," as coined by Herb Simon. That's where you pick a handful of standards that something must meet and stick to them. And you stick to only them. You don't go looking for extras on your new car just because the salesman points out something you hadn't realized you might want. You don't put off buying the thing you need because someone somewhere someday might have it 5% cheaper. As soon as whatever you're doing reaches the minimum targets, MTFO.

But I digress. This writing project is anything but minimum. DTM hardly fits. So anywhere that I can at least avoid adding to my workload, I'll take it.

I'll be honest with you, though... I was totally ready to include it. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to ask one of my advisors what he thought. He slapped my hand and told me to stop it.

Day 4: It's getting theory in here

After 3 hours and 1440 words, I have finished drafting part of the related work section. The first part. Out of six distinct sections.

Fortunately, I don't think the rest will be as hard. This section had to introduce professional development for teachers, active learning, feedback, reflection, and self-efficacy.

Crap. I forgot about discursive teaching. It needs that, too. Okay, so I haven't fully drafted this section, but I'll have to come back to it. I've only budgeted 6 more hours for drafting this chapter. I'll push through with the rest and see how much time, if any, remains for fixing holes.

One thing I'm slightly concerned about is that I'm not taking time to go find the citations for anything. I just have (CITE) written everywhere I make some claim. I am hoping that I will be able to fill all of that in easily because I've written on this topic so many times. Also, it's usually easier to go through a document and find a lot of necessary references than to keep stopping and starting again. That said, I'm still afraid that writing in the citations will take a bit longer than I have the budget for.

Things to keep in mind this weekend when I don't feel like working...

Day 3: Chapter 5 gets outlined

The goal today was to take this model of how teachers learn to teach:


Clark and Hollingsworth's (2002) Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG)

And manhandle it until it conformed to this model of how I build technology-enhanced training systems:


Gerritsen, Zimmerman, & Ogan (in press) Planning/Action/Reflection model

It's not impossible, but it's not easy. The point I want to make with this chapter is that there are some really helpful ideas in the IMPG, but that it (a) doesn't really tell us how to deliver training, and (b) sort of falls apart if any of its components are missing. So take this view of the higher education classroom, where there is almost no incentive to get training or to reflect on your teaching:



The red lines show the missing components. This is pretty much the case throughout colleges and universities, where people teach because they know the content, not because they have teaching skills.

Without training and reflection, there is basically no chance that an instructor is going to spontaneously get better. Some of them do, and some of them are naturally awesome, but for those that struggle (like I do), and don't have time to seek out support on their own, there needs to be something else in place.

Hence my cycle of planning, action and reflection. I won't get into what that is now. I'll just say that I hope this chapter can show how the needs of the actual classroom, as identified by the IMPG, can be addressed by my framework.

843 words on the outline today, with a fair bit of editing to yesterday's 268. At any rate, the first pass of the outline is done. I am pretty sure it's confusing and hand wavy. Luckily I have advisors who are smarter than I am that can look at it.

Tomorrow I begin drafting Chapter 2: Context of the Research. That's just the fancy name I gave to the related works chapter.

Day 2 of dissertation writing

Since the post yesterday, I had a change in schedule come up and had to change a few things. My plan was to spend 6 hours writing today, but I had to move half of it to Thursday. (I am joining Marsha Lovett on a talk about this work coming up on Wednesday, and got a chance to collaborate with her this afternoon.)

The draft of Ch1 is done. Rough Introduction in the can. It took 834 words, so my estimate was close. It also went faster than I expected, at only about 90 minutes. This left me time to get started on outlining Ch5 ahead of schedule. And I am going to need it.

Ch5 is titled "A Framework for SmartPD," and I can now tell it's going to be quite hard to write. This framework is one of the primary contributions of my work. I've only written about it 3 times total. This has been over the past 6 months or so. For me—like a lot of folks I think—I generally come to understand my work best by writing about it. 3 times over 6 months, in my experience, is very little writing on a topic.

The main points I need to get across in this chapter are what SmartPD is meant to be, what the research tells me about how to plan for building toward it, and how Clark and Hollingsworth’s Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (2002) contributes to it. So it's a lot. And I'm not yet sure how it will all fit together.

I put down 268 words on Ch5, and also copy-pasted a lot of older text to draw from. I'll get back to it tomorrow and see if I can make any better sense of it.

Dissertation writing officially under way

As of today, five weeks later than I had planned, I have begun writing my PhD thesis. On the upside, I at least prepared over the past few months by outlining most of the chapters and building a daily writing plan. Now it begins.

My goal today was to write for 3 hours. I produced 1291 words drafting the first chapter. I probably have about 900 more to go before my first draft of Ch1 is done. I plan to complete that tomorrow and then write the outline for Ch5.

I decided to revive this blog space in order to write reflections on the process. It might help me stay on track if I think there's a remote possibility that someone I know could be paying attention. It also helps me express my online exhibitionism in a relatively low-impact kind of way, now that I have lost all interest in the dominant social networking site.