No, haven’t completed my degree yet. Soon, hopefully. The work you are doing sounds interesting, plus very necessary. If you decide to blog your dissertation, send me the link.

Cheers.

dan

This looks to be a fantastic article over at ideant questioning if academic blogging can be suitable for a literature review.
The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review

…

I have resisted responding to your post and I was happy when Penny posted a reply. Yet many of the issues you raised begged for my attention. It seems that at the heart of your post you point vaguely towards some that is essentially right, but along way you confuse so many other issues that I feared it would take me far too long to provide an adequate reply. Nevertheless, I will at least sketch a reply.

First, let me say what I think you got right: Blogging has the potential to be another form of scholarly communication, one that might be useful for novice researchers and scholars. I frame it in this way to make it clear that your post is not really about the dissertation lit review. And your posting begs questions about what prevents that potential from being realized and what else might be necessary to foster such communication. But before I can fully articulate such questions, I need to suggest how I am framing your piece.

When the sophists gathered in Athens at the beginning of what we generally recognize as the beginning of Western culture, they taught people the arts of rhetoric and oratory – how to package taken-for-granted beliefs to persuade the masses. It was only when Socrates started his Academy and began asking hard questions of the sophists that it became a scholarly conversation. From then until now we have seen a variety of institutionalized forms of scholarly communication, each adding something, each changing it slightly, none necessarily better or worse, each becoming deadened through institutionalization (see Illich’s “Tools for conviviality.”) A rough list might include the Academy, the Library of Alexandria, the monastic scholars of the Middle ages, the Universities, the coffee houses and salons of the Enlightenment, the meetings of scholarly societies, academic journals, research institutes, etc. Each tries to bring people together to (a) preserve the collected wisdom of the scholarly community, and (b) push each other past the taken-for-granted wisdom of the community. Each once-novel institution emerged as a response to the limitations existing institutions. Yet as each became institutionalized it became a source of social power, attracted people who were more interested in prestige than scholarship, and became ossified. And within each of these institutionalized forms there are, frequently, attempts to create new environments to overcome the ossification – new journals, new universities, new conferences. And those new forms of scholarly communication within existing institutions, in turn, try to establish new norms to force participants toward the scholarly expectations of grounding their work within the collective wisdom and reaching past it – editorial reviews, blind reviews, new article formats, interactive scholarly presentations, graduate-only universities, etc, etc. In short, Ulises, yours is a very old battle.

The other way I frame your post is against my own (ongoing) intellectual development. As I think about my own graduate education and beyond, I see much of the same activity you claim to be novel on your blog – I drafted and circulated manuscripts for classes and colloquia, I presented papers at conferences large and small, I sent my papers to experts in my fields, and I submitted them to journals for review. Along the way I developed my ideas and, if I was lucky, got critical feedback on them. Some of those papers were eventually published, many abandoned because they deserved to be, and a few contain ideas I still adore. The feedback I got from my friends, peers, professors, and experts in my field shaped my thinking, helped me to understand which ideas were good and foolish, and shape my good ideas for my audience – the scholars in my fields. In turn, a few of those pieces found their way into my dissertation, shaped by these social processes of scholarship. In turn, these experiences shaped me as a scholar and shaped my understanding of my fields.

So when you characterize the dissertation as the “result of an individual’s work (under advisement of a few other individuals, and citing other individuals whom one rarely engages in direct conversation)” I can only feel sadness. Sadness because, I fear, that this is far-too-often the experience of Doctoral students. They are not, either literally or figuratively, part of the broader conversation in their field. And it seems very likely to me that the less-than-exemplary dissertations that Penny and I analyzed are a result of this isolation. Such students see themselves as writing for the approval of their dissertation committees, not for the approval their broader scholarly communities. They cannot even imagine themselves writing for the ages, for another doctoral students 50 or 100 years from now grappling with the same topic.

And this is basically how I see the dissertation lit review – a critical synthesis of the field. Your write, Ulises, that a “We live in an age, I believe, when the term ’state-of-the-art’ literature review has little meaning.” I beg to differ. The proliferation of sources available makes it even more meaningful and important. Exhaustive coverage was never the purpose of the literature review – making the literature meaningful was and is the purpose. As my own dissertation advisor never tired of asking: “What does it mean?” and “Why is it important?” Yes, ever more work is available to us, but I have no indication that the quality has increased as a result. Instead, it seems that in a very active field of inquiry we might see a small hand-full of even competent pieces a year and one truly noteworthy piece every few years. Criteria (a) asks, first and foremost, that people be selective with their attention – it is the most precious thing we have. Or, as Adler argued in “How to read a book” our first obligation is to be demanding readers and only spend our time reading that which is worth reading. The great majority of scholarly publishing is at best Kuhnian “normal science” – small steps within a program of research. Such pieces are rarely important enough to include in a lit review, except as examples of a type. (They are, as I argued in the case of most Deweyian scholarship, valuable mainly for their authors.) And, of course, a too often pieces are published that are not even competent. I am willing to assert that the latter is too often true of electronic publishing.

So it is, to reiterate, precisely because of the proliferation of electronically available writing that doctoral students must learn the arts and skills of the critical research synthesis. It is at least as important, if not more even more important to apply the skills of “critical media/information literacy.”

Now, you assert that blogging is an advance on traditional lit reviewing because it is dynamic and social. You can make such ascertains because there is a widespread beliefs that dissertations are neither. My brief arguments above suggest that at least my own experience using more traditional methods was similarly dynamic and social. More generally, I argued in a paper I presented at the American Educational Research Association a few years back that all good researchers and scholars recognize, implicitly or explicitly, that their work is improvisational and social. I based these arguments primarily on the work of Alvin Platinga, especially his “Warrant and proper function” book (1993) where he critiques the fallacy of what he calls “epistemic internalism” – the misbegotten epistemological beliefs that research is and should be deontic (researchers have a duty to follow the methods prescribed by particular methodologies), universalistic (it is the responsibility of a researcher or scholar to apply the methods prescribed by a methodology without regard to contextual contingencies), and individualistic (it is the responsibility of an individual researcher to demonstrate fidelity to prescribed methods). (My paper was called “Notes towards a naturalistic study of educational research methodology” and was presented in 2000.)

Epistemic internalism is pervasive and drives many people’s beliefs about how research and scholarship are and ought to be. Yet research about how people do research – in studies ranging from sociology, anthropology, and history of science to rhetorical studies of novice philosopher, for example – show that these assumptions are flat wrong. More generally, I asserted that it is only poorly prepared researchers and scholars who believe and act as if research and scholarship were deontic, universalistic, or individualistic. Excellent researchers and scholars recognize theirs is a social enterprise, that they must fashion their work improvisational and iteratively, and that ultimately their knowledge claims must be warranted based on a deep understanding of their field. Thus, knowing the literature in a deep, sophisticated way is crucial to every aspect of good scholarship and research. As Penny and I wrote, a good lit review is not merely decorative, it imbues our work with integrity and sophistication.

Along the way, I suspect that good scholars and researchers learn their craft through successive forms of legitimate peripheral participation – to use Jean Lave’s notion. Those papers, conferences presentation, and manuscripts I worked on helped me to move from rank-novice to minor-participant, doing the work of my scholarly cultures. The key point here is that these activities did at least two crucial things for me in my development – they focused my attention on writing for the broader scholarly community (and not simply my dissertation ctte) and they animated for me the “voices” within that community. I heard and saw the people I had only read, I witnessed the current debates in my field and saw how the literature had developed, and I imagined myself in those debates. In short, these previously inert ideas became “voices in my mind” (to borrow Jim Wertsch’s phrasing). And so, between conferences, even when I was not directly communicating with the people in my field, I could here these voices as I wrote and edited my work. Thus, I hope you can begin to see that scholarship is social not simply in the narrow sense of people interacting, but in a much deeper sense: that critically synthesizing the literature in our fields and working on its problems, and by writing for the audience of our field, we are becoming enculturated into our field. We are learning its norms, its values, its languages, and (most importantly) its problems.

This broader notion of the social nature of writing (supported by a broad range of studies) begins to suggest both the strengths and the weaknesses of your assertions, Ulises. The strength is at least two-fold: blogging may provide a forum for the kinds of academic conversations that many novice-scholars feel are lacking from their programs and blogging may enable greater scholarly reciprocity and a lower-threshold than many other forms of scholarly engagement entail. Too many doctoral classes at too many institutions view students as passive recipients rather than actively engaged participants. Too many academic conferences are similarly uni-directional. This is what I mean at the beginning by blogging having the potential to improve scholarly communication. But even in terms of electronic communication, of course, is not new. Email lists, listserves, newsgroups, and bulletin boards have been serving some of these roles for decades. And, of course, html was created at CERN to serve the purpose of scholarly communication among large groups of physicists.

So I accept the possibility that blogging may help notice scholars and researchers as they seek to become socialized in their field. But I will assert that blogging, by itself, is nowhere near sufficient for this purpose. Instead, my challenge to you is to imagine a harder task: I ask you, what additional design features would a blog have to incorporate for it to become truly scholarly communication? How can you design it to encourage selectivity of sources and warranting of selections? How can you encourage blog authors to move beyond providing mere summaries of the literature they discuss? How do you design to encourage critical synthesis? How you design to encourage robust, critical discussion of scholarly and practical significance? Or are these even things that you can design? Or are they beyond your control?

Best wishes with your project.

Dave Boote

The “blog as lit review” that the author proposes privileges process over product in that he thinks iterations and drafts are worthy of public dissemination (albeit blog publication). This model holds true for collaborative work, where the use of blogs and wikis is quite useful, but at some point a doctoral candidate must be able to demonstrate he or she has a solid understanding of the literature of the field. The dissertation is used to demonstrate a person’s potential to make scholarly contributions to the field and as a mechanism to gain entry into the academic field. To fulfill the role and purpose of a dissertation, the literature review by nature is temporally bound and must reflect the work of an author at some point in time. This is a recognized condition regardless of the medium the literature review was born in. Fortunately this does not preclude continued enhancement of the review, which can be conducted privately or publicly.

Blogging and scholarship are not mutually exclusive, but purposes to which a blog is used are different. A friend (Becky) who pointed out this blog to me is currently working on her dissertation. She is completely fluent in ICT and stands as a model as someone who has seamlessly integrated technologies that enhance her professional life. What I find most impressive about Becky’s ability is that she uses social and collaborative software and tools as a means to an end; the tools enhance Becky’s productivity, but her scholarship is predicated on an understanding of the theory behind the tools. And, her literature review more than incorporates the criteria set forth in Boote et al.’s rubric.

The blog as lit review model the author envisions is also somewhat at odds with scholarly publication norms. The author suggests that his peers, who review and comment on the blog, is sufficient vetting and that traffic alone dictates whether the topic is of interest (worth). Who is his audience? do they have the requisite authority to vet his work? By definition, a doctoral student’s peers are his or her fellow doctoral students, yet a doctoral candidate is writing for academicians to gain acceptance into their community. The heart of scholarly publication is review of the work by recognized authorities in the field. Ultimately, the dissertation (and its literature reivew) must be vetted by the dissertation committee. Scholarship remains a primary consideration.

Finally, dissertation literature reviews should be constructed with some attention to publishing conventions. It would further the author’s argument if he adhered to APA citation style, where et al. is not used with a paper authored by two people.

Sincerely,
Dr. Penny Beile (AKA “et al.,” co-author to the Boote article)