Saturday, August 18, 2007

Quick! Decide!

Okay. It's getting down to the wire -- my thesis adviser informally gave me til mid-August to wind up my research and start narrowing my focus. Yeah, it's past mid-August. But I still don't feel anywhere near ready to begin a proposal.

By now I have read quite a few articles, have been "introduced" to the world of blogs several times over. I've run across idea after idea that could feasibly lead me down a particular path, but at the moment everything is pretty jumbled. One article by Barbara Ganley, a professor in the writing program at Middlebury College, was fairly intriguing; she proposes that blogging could be a "dynamic, transformative medium" in the liberal arts classroom, one that allows "students [to] become the course." I've also grown more interested in the use of blogs for research and project management, thanks to certain other studies. While these "knowledge management" studies tend to focus on applications in the corporate world, my experience this summer as an intern at a local nonprofit agency has revealed the similarities between for-profit and grants-funded companies. So I can appreciate that knowledge management is a key component of nonprofit operations as well, and therefore blog communities and "k-logs" (knowledge blogs) could contribute just as much to nonprofits.

I need to meet with my adviser ASAP to find out just how narrow my proposal should be, though I can't imagine narrowing it very much and still expecting to fill 60 pages. I suppose it would help if I dug up the thesis guidelines that the graduate coordinator handed out at our orientation last fall.

For my future reference, here are some possible thesis issues I jotted down a couple of days ago:
- learning communities
- learning dynamics, potential (see Ganley)
- increasing global awareness
- apprenticeship and expertise
- record of learning/ knowledge management
- linking, parallel analysis
- reading and writing
- development of voice

I doubt things are really quite as urgent as I'm making them out to be right now, but if I slip back into my procrastinatory ways, I could be shooting myself in both feet! Best to hit the ground running instead...

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