a "doc" chronicle

Today has been a VERY LONG day, but it also has been very productive. I finished preparing the first draft of my research proposal. It included the title page, the table of contents, the first three chapters, a few appendices, and a list of references – a total of 63 pages. I wasn't really ready to let it go, but I did. I followed the recommendations I was given. I could here in my head the voices of professors saying, "Just put together what you have!" And although nobody said those exact words, I remembered the recommendations from the Seminar and from my professors, and ... I let it go!

It is hard to do so, especially when you feel you could have done a lot better, that you could have added other references, or that you could have revised the manuscript once more. But, I let it go!

And now, you might say, you can sit back and wait and see what the professors have to say. However, that is not what I am going to do. I will keep reading, revising, adding, trying to get these chapters, especially the third one, as ready as it can get, as complete as I think it should be.

And then when the meeting time arrives, I know more revisions will need to be made, more ideas will be presented, and changes will have to be made again. Remember the recursive process I talked about before? Well, it is like a never ending story, as long as we are alive, there will be something else to do, something else to read, something else to fix, something else to revise, …

Hey, … WAIT!!! You need to finish the degree, remember?

Having the opportunity to work and share with others that are going through the same process you are is invaluable. Having the opportunity to hear others’ successful experiences is inspirational. That’s how I felt last Thursday and Friday when participating of the seminar indicated above.

Working with the dissertation is a stressful time!
You want to do well.
You want to show you have what it gets.
You want to prove that doing well in your courses and
passing your qualifying exams was not in vain.
You want to make your professors proud!
And most of all,
you want to make your family proud!
You want to make sure,
the time you have spend away,
really moves you one step ahead,
really gets you closer to your dreams.

As Dr. Alfredo Artiles said, "the best dissertation is a completed dissertation." It does not matter if you have issues of translation, or how differently you want to do things. At the end what is important is to finish. So, to get into a system that will move you toward your goal, you need to write often &— writing to understand, writing to report.

It can be a painful process, feeling isolated, feeling you don’t have the skills to do a good job. And then, it is just about keeping at it, not stopping, writing, and rewriting, until it is done. A little every day, doesn’t seem much, but putting it together over a long period of time, you’ll see how it turns out to be a finished product. Dr. Bill McDiarmid suggested to write "a thousand works every night," that is probably two to three pages every day. Nothing much if you look at it individually, but over a two-month period it can be a whole chapter!

Other suggestions that were presented at the seminar include:

• Meetings every two weeks with a group of colleagues and sharing what we have written.


• Having an informal support system: friends you can talk to about how you are feeling, about your ups and downs in writing, in finding the "right" ideas.


• Parallel writing – sitting at the library with a friend and spending and hour or two writing, each working on their own projects.


• Not to worry if it seems it is not working as expected, just keep writing – "writing to understand, writing to report."


• Try finding support at conferences, present your work, ask questions to receive feedback, talk it through.


• Set goals and deadlines, then reward your self when you have reached them.


• Once in a while, give yourself a break.

Finally, this is the general advise I got from the seminar: Your dissertation might be part of your research agenda after your graduation, but it might not be. So, take time to do something you are proud of and realize that it is just one step in your professional journey. And remember, at the end it is about having three or four people (your committee members) approve your work!

Do you know about a specific author or a specific article in this area that can be considered a seminal work? Could you please add it to the comment's section?

I will greatly appreciate it!

After talking to different people yesterday, I kept thinking about the ideas of communities of learners and discourse analysis.

Developing communities of learners in the classroom: The question was related to the expectations a teacher could have in order to develop a community of learners with the students in a math course, especially when it is offered at a distance. My first answer was yes; it is possible. It might not be that easy, but there are many activities and technologies that can be used to help people interact, collaborate and learn, while developing a community. Some researchers in this area are: Palloff & Pratt (1999, 2005), Stepich & Ertmer (2003), Trentin (2001), Dunlap (2004), Nichini & Hung (2002), and Shumar & Renninger (2002).

The Math Forum is an example of such a community of learners, one that has matured through out more than a decade. Discussion forums are just one of the many interactive tools available for the math learner and the teacher. The question then is, how are the discussions developed in this environment, and how can these be examined to identify practices that will help the distance learner teacher in developing communities of practice in the classroom. Many do not view mathematics as a discursive discipline. Many think about mathematics in terms of numbers and symbols, nothing else. But the way we manipulate numbers and symbols in mathematics is discursive, there are reasons why one step is taken instead of another, and this is more than just numbers and symbols, it is discursive.

Then, when math is looked at as a discursive discipline, mathematical stories can be identified and analyzed. Discussion forums present stories fragmented into the postings of a thread. They inform how mathematics knowledge is constructed. Three phases can be identified in this process: the first includes the setting [where the scene takes place in terms of time, space, and characters] and the catalyst, a posting that presents the problem. Interaction takes place during the second phase where the problem is investigated and evaluated, building the problem to a point where a resolution is required (crisis). And finally, the solution and coda gives the participants one or more endings to the story and follow up possibilities. According to Gee (2005), each of these components of a story can inform the discursive process.

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References:

Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and method. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Nichini, M., & Hung, D. (2002). Can a community of practice exist online? Educational Technology 42(4), 49-54.

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Communities in Cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating Online: Learning together in community. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Shumar, W., & Renninger, K. A. (2002). Introduction: On conceptualizing community. In K. A. Renninger and W. Shumar (Eds.) Building Virtual Communities: Learning and change in cyberspace (pp. 1-17). NY: Cambridge University Press.

Stepich, D. A., & Ertmer, P. A. (2003). Building community as a critical element of online course design. Educational Technology 43(5), 33-43.

Trentin, G. (2001). From formal training to communities of practice via network-based learning. Educational Technology 41(2), 5-14.