ulises mejias » blogs http://blog.ulisesmejias.com assistant professor, suny oswego Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:46:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 More on Dissertations, Blogs, Knowledge, etc. http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/02/08/more-on-dissertations-blogs-knowledge-etc/ http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/02/08/more-on-dissertations-blogs-knowledge-etc/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:35:00 +0000 ulises http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/02/08/more-on-dissertations-blogs-knowledge-etc/ In case you missed the excellent comment thread, both authors of the article and rubric I used in my recent post about the blog as literature review replied (within days!) to challenge some of my assumptions. Thank you, David and Penny!
David pointed out that, in fact, my post was not so much about the literature review per se but about the process of scholarly communication in general. It’s true that what I am really interested in is how the ‘typical’ dissertation fails to facilitate this communication process, and how new technologies can recover some of the benefits of this process. Ultimately, however, I think we are all in agreement that this has more to do with how the affordances of the technology are being realized through certain actions in certain contexts than with any intrinsic properties of the technology or the process.

Another reader, pedagogic (apprentice), referred me to an earlier (pre-blogs, or at least before the time when blogs were mainstream) article that corroborates some of the things I suggested were broken, and that social software could help fix (if the will was there). The article is Education Should Consider Alternative Formats for the Dissertation (Duke and Beck, 1999).

These authors begin by establishing what we expect the dissertation to be:

…the prevailing view of the dissertation has alternated between that of the dissertation as a “training instrument” and that of the dissertation as an “original and significant contribution to knowledge” (Berelson, 1960, p. 173). Presently, the consensus seems to be that the dissertation should be both of these things. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 31)

One could add another goal, fostering scholarly communication, to that list. It is in relation to this goal that Duke and Beck identify two major shortcomings of the dissertation: limited audience and dissemination, and lack of generalizability.

They begin by pointing out (as I did in relation to the lit review), that the audience for a dissertation is extremely small:

Theoretically, the dissertation is a public document, usually available from a University library to anyone who requests it. But in fact, the readership of this “public” document is small in number and intimate in character. In most cases, the only readers of a dissertation are the three or four members of the writer’s committee… Even if technological advances in the future facilitate more rapid retrieval of dissertations, there is no guarantee that the documents will have a significantly larger audience… In order for dissertation material to be received by a wider audience, it must be reworked and altered from its original dissertation form. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 32)

They also point out the failure of many dissertations to result in published work:

Indeed, many dissertations in our field, as in others, are never published, in the sense of being distributed widely in a public forum. We do not have current statistics as to the number for which this is the case, but as of 1973 from one quarter to one half of dissertations across fields never resulted in a published paper. (ibid)

As I suggested in my earlier post, blogs (and other social software) could foster scholarly communication by facilitating the dissemination of dissertation materials.

The second obstacles relates to the lack of generalizability of the dissertation writing process: “except for the very rare case of someone who has multiple doctorates, one writes (at most) one dissertation in one’s life. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 32, emphasis in original)”

Why not, Duke and Beck suggest, write something in a manner or format similar to how the scholar will conduct her research in the future?

With an ungeneralizable genre comes a missed opportunity for transfer of knowledge and skills that will actually be of benefit to students in the long a term. Indeed, for some time, many scholars (particularly those in the sciences) have argued that the dissertation provides poor training for future academic writing. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 33)

To the extent that research will increasingly happen within an open/distributed framework, and be distributed online, I think it makes sense to recognize blogging as a potential environment for writing and sharing a dissertation.

Duke and Beck ask those who would evaluate the format and content of a dissertation to consider two questions:

  • Will the format of this dissertation make it possible to disseminate the work to a wide audience?
  • Will writing a dissertation in this format help prepare candidates for the type of writing they will be expected to do throughout their career? (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 33).

Accordingly, one possible alternative for the traditional dissertation is the one that Krathwohl (1994) suggests:

write the dissertation as an article (or series or set of such articles) ready for publication, [using] appendices for any additional information the committee may desire for pedagogical and examination purposes” (p. 31).

Are we that far from blogging when considering such approaches? Couldn’t blogging serve as the preparation process for generating those articles that will (hopefully) be accepted for publication, that final step of vetting and validation?

But scholarly blogging has the potential to be more than just a publishing process. Like Latour suggests, “textual accounts are the social scientist’s laboratory” (2005, p. 127). My blog is my lab, in a sense, where developing my arguments is an iterative and open process. Yes, it’s embarrassing when some experiments (some arguments) fail miserably, but overall I think the benefits of conducting research in the open outweigh the risks.

I would like to think that this discussion of blogging and dissertations is merely one of form v. content, but somehow in the back of my head I can’t help but hear Lyotard’s questions: “who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what is to be decided?” (1984, p. 9).

David ends his comments by posing a set of questions to me, which I turn would like to pose to 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?

I’m sure some of you out there have interesting ideas about this. Please share them with us!

References:

Boote, D. N. & Beile, P. (2005) Scholars Before Researchers: On the
Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research
Preparation. Educational Researcher 34(6), p. 3-15.

Duke, N. K. & Beck, S. W. (1999). Education Should Consider Alternative Formats for the Dissertation. Educational Researcher, v. 28, no.3 (Apr., 1999), p. 31-36.

Krathwohl, D. (1994). A slice of advice. Educational Researcher, 23(1), pp. 29-32, 42.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tags:

literature.review
dissertation
blogs
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education

]]> http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/02/08/more-on-dissertations-blogs-knowledge-etc/feed/ 2 The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review? http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/01/25/the-blog-as-dissertation-literature-review/ http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/01/25/the-blog-as-dissertation-literature-review/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:05:56 +0000 ulises http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2006/01/25/the-blog-as-dissertation-literature-review/ (See Updates at the end of the post. See also this subsequent post)

Abstract

Can a certain type of academic blogging be a more adequate form of literature review than the traditional chapter in a dissertation? In this post, I employ the rubric proposed by Boote & Beile (2005) to determine whether blogging can be considered a form of literature review. I also make some suggestions for how blogging may be incorporated formally into the research and writing activities of some doctoral students, although it certainly might not be useful to others. I am not suggesting that this single post is my literature review; I am merely providing a map that outlines how my blogging during the past years constitutes a form of ongoing literature review.

Rationale

This blog, started in the Fall of 2003 just as I began my EdD, has served to collect —among other more mundane things— notes and responses to various readings I’ve done during my graduate studies. Those notes have served as brief explorations into themes worked at greater length in other posts (some of which have eventually become published papers). In other words, my blog has served as a place to review some of the literature relevant to my research, and a platform to develop my own arguments and theories.

When confronted recently with the task of putting together a literature review for my dissertation, I naturally turned to the work I’ve been doing in my blog. I couldn’t help but to fear some duplication of effort. I had facetiously argued that when it came time to write my dissertation, I would be able to simply hit the Print button on my blog. While this is obviously not true of the dissertation, could it be true of the literature review? I asked myself if indeed my blogging, done outside of the prescribed dissertation writing process in my graduate program, could be considered a literature review. Or am I, as I heard someone ask of themselves recently, “too high on my own dope?”

In the article Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation, Boote & Beile (2005) argue that the importance of the literature review is often overlooked. As they rightly point out, “[t]o be useful and meaningful, education research must be cumulative; it must build on and learn from prior research and scholarship on the topic” (p. 3). However, the literature review is often perceived as the least important or creative part of the dissertation. Instead, emphasis is often placed on the Methodology section. But as Boote & Beile argue:

… by focusing on methodological issues, the educational research community is addressing the symptom rather than the cause. That is, researchers must understand prior research in their field, and its strengths and weaknesses, before they can be expected to choose appropriate methods of data collection and data analysis. Moreover, sophisticated methods of data collection and analysis are of little use if one is studying an unproductive problem. They are also of little use if one lacks the sophisticated understanding of the literature needed to understand the meaning of the data. (p. 12)

I couldn’t agree more on that point. However, the literature review process that Boote & Beile allude to still seems to me rather out of touch with the demands of the information age. To be sure, nothing says that the certification process by which someone gets a doctorate degree needs to comply with the demands of the information age. In many cases, the opposite is probably the case. But for some people in some fields (such as mine) this is an important point to consider. Before reviewing the criteria that Boote & Beile propose for evaluating lit reviews, I want to belabor this point in the context of certain blogging practices.

We live in an age, I believe, when the term ’state-of-the-art’ literature review has little meaning, at least when it comes to the field I am familiar with: education and technology. ICTs have made available to us all the journals in the world, so to conduct an exhaustive search of the literature is impossible. Furthermore, new research, new theories, and new technologies which open up avenues for new research appear every week. I myself subscribe to about 150 channels of information (RSS feeds) that I monitor regularly, and it would be next to impossible to try to summarize and synthesize what is happening even on a single day in this field (and this is not even taking into account the fact that I am oblivious to research published in languages that I don’t speak). In other words, to stand still for long enough to write a literature review means to become out of sync with advances in research and development. If I were to complete one today, I would probably find it inadequate by next week. I am not trying to argue that a review of the established works in one’s field is not crucial (in fact, my own lit review focuses on these kinds of works). I am merely arguing against the illusion of a ‘complete’ literature review, an illusion that even dissertation advisors acknowledge, but that it is not proper to recognize openly (what would become of academic authority, then?). Instead, I am and proposing that we need something that allows the literature review process to unfold in parallel to the other aspects of the research, and to continue beyond the dissertation.

At the same time, it would be nice if the literature review had a broader audience. Certainly, a traditional literature review is prepared primarily for the benefit of the researcher, to make sure she has read all the important works that anyone claiming mastery over a particular topic must supposedly read. Only secondarily is the lit review intended to be for the benefit of those who might actually get to read it (with little chance that it will reach anyone outside the dissertation committee). But even though a literature review is something of an archeological artifact that gives us an insight into what the author thought was relevant at a particular point in time, does that mean no one else might think it is relevant also at that time? Wouldn’t it be better if researchers could share their literature reviews as they were being developed?

Which brings me back to blogging. Blogs, with their chronological sequencing, have no qualms about their historicity. If I were to publish my writings on a regular web page, I would be concerned that someone stumbling upon them a year later would mistakenly believe those are my current opinions. But putting something down on a blog post—with its time stamp, with its comments, with its links to previous and later posts—provides a fuller picture of a text in its historical context.

Blogging (a particular kind of academic blogging, anyway) can be like an ongoing literature review. True, blogging doesn’t have the linear structure nor does it offer the fixed conclusions of a traditional lit review, but I would argue that it gains precisely by offering alternatives. For instance, while the chronological sequencing of blogs makes it impossible to provide a linear structure, bloggers are still able to structure their literature reviews non-linearly by organizing their posts into categories. These categories are defined according to whatever criteria makes sense to the author, and can be used to later access all posts related to a particular category. For those not satisfied with rigid categories, there is also the increasing use of keywords to tag each post, which connects the text not just to internal categories (previously used tags) but to broader collective categories (so-called folksonomies).

Instead of the finite scope of a traditional literature review, bloggers are also able to continuously add to their literature reviews. There is no chronological or procedural break between the act of writing the literature review and the act of writing the rest of the dissertation. The two can continue in parallel, and the former can continue to inform the latter as long as the process unfolds. In essence, this means that bloggers can post literature reviews at any time, which are then synthesized and incorporated into larger pieces advancing the author’s argument. These pieces then continue to develop and mature through subsequent drafts, perhaps informed by other literature reviews. Research does not stop at the end of a book, a class, a semester or a degree, but is the process of constantly refining ideas and arguments based on new knowledge (in this sense, the blog is closer to a portfolio that tracks the development of the author’s work).

And there is also the collective aspect. In an ideal scenario in which bloggers have carved a place for themselves in a larger research community, literature review posts then invite comments from peers and advisors, or themselves become the source material for another blogger’s lit review. This means there is an audience benefitting from the lit review as it is being written.

In summary, the dissertation process is not as linear as before, but it gains from openness, iteration, and feedback. But instead of taking my word for it, let’s see if there is a way to evaluate blogs in terms of their effectiveness as literature reviews.

Literature Review Rubric

According to Boote & Beile (2005), a literature review should be evaluated according to the following criteria.

Literature Review Scoring Rubric:

  1. Coverage:

    A. Justified criteria for inclusion and exclusion from review.

  2. Synthesis:

    B. Distinguished what has been done in the field from what needs to be done.

    C. Placed the topic or problem in the broader scholarly literature.

    D. Placed the research in the historical context of the field.

    E. Acquired and enhanced the subject vocabulary.

    F. Articulated important variables and phenomena relevant to the topic.

    G. Synthesized and gained a new perspective on the literature.

  3. Methodology:

    H. Identified the main methodologies and research techniques that have been used in the field, and their advantages and disadvantages.

    I. Related ideas and theories in the field to research methodologies.

  4. Significance:

    J. Rationalized the practical significance of the research problem.

    K. Rationalized the scholarly significance of the research problem.

  5. Rhetoric

    L. Was written with a coherent, clear structure that supported the review.

How does my blog, and academic blogging in general —which I am arguing might be a more adequate form of literature review than the traditional chapter in a dissertation— score on that rubric?

Evaluating Blogging as a form of Literature Review

Below, I take each one of the rubric items defined by Boote & Beile (2005) and consider them in the context of academic blogging. My analysis focuses not so much on questions of content or format, but on the unique advantages that blogging can contribute to the literature reviewing process (again, I am not suggesting that this model of research applies equally well to all disciplines and to all students; my intention is merely to share some of my experiences).

1. Coverage

A. Justified criteria for inclusion and exclusion from review. I suppose specifying a theme for one’s blog means establishing an intention to cover certain topics and not others, and review certain examples of the literature and not others. Most bloggers enjoy being able to represents various aspects of their interests in their blogs, which means they frequently post about things not directly related to their stated theme. So while the criteria for inclusion and exclusion is not very strict in a blog, this actually allows for some flexibility to explore different kinds of research. Another way of saying this is that while in a traditional lit review the selection criteria is predefined (one decides on the criteria, and then sets out to look for items that fit that criteria), in a blog it is organic, unfolding as the interests of the researcher evolve.

2. Synthesis

B. Distinguished what has been done in the field from what needs to be done. Reacting to and synthesizing previous research while developing one’s argument is a continuous process of distinguishing what has been done from what needs to be done. But in an blog, the notion of what needs to be done is not static, and it is allowed to evolve and mature in reaction to new research and new synthesis. In essence, blogging frames this process as an ongoing, iterative task, not simply a milestone in a process.

C. Placed the topic or problem in the broader scholarly literature. With its non-linear structure and hyperlinking, a blog can aid in tracing the connections between one’s research and the broader literature in the field. Blogging allows for informal brainstorming and note-taking, which can then contribute to exploring related themes in the literature. Also, by providing a direct audience, the author benefits from suggestions by peers to explore this or that related resource.

D. Placed the research in the historical context of the field. Good bloggers avoid doing a lot of echo-blogging (merely repeating or linking to what other bloggers are posting). This means publishing original research or commentary. The point is not merely to repeat what is being said in other places, but to conduct research that frames the issue in the context of what has been done and what needs to be done. A lot of my posts are actually reviews and reactions to older works, which help to put my research in a historical context (see the section on Mapping below).

E. Acquired and enhanced the subject vocabulary. Blogs are ideal places for introducing new vocabulary. If the meme spreads, it means it is useful. If it doesn’t, it means the new construction is not really enhancing the vocabulary (of course, this assumes that the blogger has access to a critical mass audience, and that sufficient time is allowed for the meme to spread).

F. Articulated important variables and phenomena relevant to the topic. Blogging provides an ongoing platform for evaluating new variables and phenomena as they appear. In a traditional literature review, on the contrary, this process stops when the writing of the literature review stops.

G. Synthesized and gained a new perspective on the literature. This, again, is an ongoing process in a blog. Blogging allows for constant revisions to one’s arguments, which develop as a result of new perspectives on the literature. My blog actually maps the evolution of my understanding of concepts and theories in my field, which should allow others to evaluate my progress.

3. Methodology

H. Identified the main methodologies and research techniques that have been used in the field, and their advantages and disadvantages. Instead of a summative, once-only review of the methodologies, blogging allows for the continuous critical assessment of methods. This ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumb-down’ type of reviewing is a familiar form of writing to bloggers, although care should be exercised in order to not allow this to become too superficial.

I. Related ideas and theories in the field to research methodologies. In my case I am not doing empirical research, and my methodology is more philosophical in nature. In this context, my blog has been instrumental in allowing me to experiment with previous ideas and theories as they relate to my arguments, and see what works and what doesn’t.

4. Significance:

J. Rationalized the practical significance of the research problem. More than rationalizing, blogs provide a real platform for validating the significance of the research. Blogs are social software, which means they connect people. Making a post means submitting something for peer review. If the blogger has been successful in positioning himself or herself within a research community, feedback can come from a global panel of reviewers, not just from a small dissertation committee. If the research fails to attract attention and feedback, it means its practical significance is probably not that great, at least in the way in which it has been framed.

K. Rationalized the scholarly significance of the research problem. See my point above. More than just rationalizing in a vacuum, blogs allow for an actual test-case of the scholarly significance of the research. The attention economics of the blogosphere might seem rather cut-throat, but a blogger’s standing in the community (measured by the number of visitors, nature of the comments, linking to the blog, and general recognition among peers) are a good index of the significance of the research the author is doing.

5. Rhetoric

L. Was written with a coherent, clear structure that supported the review. Poorly written blogs fail to hold the attention of the reader, which translates into a diminished audience. When it comes to rhetoric and style, blogs are actually less forgiving than traditional media. Audiences have little tolerance for hyperbole, diatribes, sloppy styles, and badly structured arguments. Blogging makes better writers, because the audience is no longer just imagined, but something that can protest (if only by their absence).

Mapping my blog posts to the literature

What follows is a list of the literature I’ve reviewed in my posts during the past years, followed by links to the specific posts where the references are made. Since the topic at hand is literature reviews, I am presenting this list organized by author (for a list of posts organized by theme, see here).

I am not suggesting that by merely posting this list I am meeting the requirements of a good literature review. What makes a blog a good lit review, ultimately, is not the number of references cited but how they have been integrated into one’s argument. Thus, someone trying to assess the quality of my blog as a literature review would have to actually read the posts! This is why it is also important that this process gets institutionalized at the academic program level, so that advisors and peers are part of the audience of the blog from the beginning, not just the recipients of a ‘finished’ product at the end.

Furthermore, what follows should not be considered a bibliography. Although I have read quite a few other things on technology, society and education, I have limited myself here to listing only sources I have actually referenced in my posts.

Lastly, given what I argued earlier, you should expect this list to become outdated soon after it is published, as I continue to review literature in my blog.

Agre, P. E. (2004). The practical republic: Social skills and the progress of citizenship. In A. Feenberg & M. Bakardjieva (Eds.), Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice (pp. 201-223). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Agre, P.E. (2004). Internet Research: For and Against. In Internet Research Annual Volume 1: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conferences 2000-2002, eds. M. Consalvo, N. Baym, J. Hunsinger, K. Bruhn Jensen, J. Logie, M. Murero & L. Regan Shade. New York: Peter Lange. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/research.html

Barabâasi, A.-L. (2002). Linked: The new science of networks. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Pub.

Benjamin, W., & Arendt, H. (1986). Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.

Bhola, H. S. (1992). Literacy, knowledge, power, and development: Multiple
connections. Springfield, Virginia: DYNEDRS.

Borgmann, A. (2000). Information, nearness, and farness. In K. Goldberg, (Ed.) The robot in the garden: Telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 90-107). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Borgmann, A. (2004). Is the internet the solution to the problem of community? In A. Feenberg & M. Bakardjieva (Eds.), Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice (pp. 53-67). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. 2000, The social life of information, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the internet. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dewey, J. (1991). The public and its problems. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.

Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2000). Telepistemology: Descartes’ last stand. In K. Goldberg (Ed.), The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 48-63). Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2004). Nihilism on the information highway: Anonymity versus commitment in the present age. In A. Feenberg & M. Bakardjieva (Eds.), Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice (pp. 69-82). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Durkheim, E., & Halls, W. D. (1984). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.

Elias, N. (1998). The Norbert Elias reader: a biographical selection. (J. Goudsblom, Ed.), Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers

Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning technology. London; New York: Routledge.

Feenberg, A., & Barney, D. D. (2004). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Gibbs, J.C. (2003). Moral development and reality: beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE

Goldberg, K. (2000). The robot in the garden: Telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the internet. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hoffman, M.L. (2002). Empathy and moral development: implications for caring and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hoggart, R. (1970). The uses of literacy: Aspects of working-class life, with special reference to publications and entertainments. New York: Oxford University Press.

Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., & Schmid Noerr, G. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Horwitz, N. 2003, The reality of the virtual: Continental philosophy and the digital age. Unpublished Dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

Huyke, H. J. (2003). Technologies and the devaluation of what is near. Techné, 6(3), 57-70.

Innis, H. A. (1995). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Johnson, S. (2002). Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed. New York: Simon & Schuster

Kress, G. R. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham [England]; Philadelphia, Pa.: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Lippmann, W. (1997). Public opinion (1st Free Press pbks. ed.). New York: Free Press Paperbacks.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marcuse, H. (2002). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. New York: Routledge.

Mills, C. W. (1999). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge.

Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Simpson, L. C. (1995). Technology, time, and the conversations of modernity. New York: Routledge.

Tolstoy, L. (1987). A confession and other religious writings. New York, N.Y.: Penguin.

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Walther, J.B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 20(1), 3-43.

Winner, L. (1977). Autonomous technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wise, M. J. (1997). Exploring technology and social space. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.

References

Boote, D. N. & Beile, P. (2005) Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation. Educational Researcher v. 34 no. 6 (August/September 2005) p. 3-15

Tags

literature.review
dissertation
blogs
technology
education

UPDATES

I am thankful for the comments to this post, as well as for the references made by David and Stephen. To qualify my review based on the people included or excluded, as Stephen does, is sort of missing the point of my argument, as it is treating the review as a finished and comprehensive product, which I argue it is not; and it assumes that research—unlike blogging, according to Stephen—does not submit to “the needs and interests of the author.”

But more importantly, I should address the concerns of Prof. Beile, one of the co-authors of the paper I discuss, who was kind enough to leave some comments below.

First, an apology. In the original post I cited the authors of the paper as “Boote et al.” Unfortunately, this is the way the article is cited in the online database I was accessing (WilsonWeb). Since there are only two authors, the correct reference should be “Boote & Biele.” I have gone ahead and made that correction.

As far as the rest of Penny’s critique:

  • I wouldn’t say that I am privileging “process over product” as much as trying to balance the two in the context of distributed research communities. Many times students develop lit reviews in isolation, with support only from committee. Why not open it up? Couldn’t a more open process make for a better product?
  • Prof. Beile suggests that social and collaborative software and tools should be a means to an end (in this case, mastery of a topic and expertise in scholarship), not some reified quasi-academic activity (”I blog therefore I am an academic”). I couldn’t agree more.
  • Yes, not all of the readers of my blog might qualify as appropriate reviewers of the quality of my academic work. I did not mean to suggest that we should suspend all critical thinking and treat them all the same. However, in my experience, even those readers without PhDs are quite capable of contributing to a discussion!
  • Similarly, I did not mean to suggest that web ‘traffic’ should be taken as the sole or major indicator of an argument’s value. At the same time, I do believe there should be a correlation between the quality and innovativeness of our arguments and some degree of validation from our peers, which in this case translates into page ‘hits.’
  • Having said all that, I do agree with Prof. Beile’s recommendation that publishing in peer-review journals should be the final form of vetting and validation of our work. But peer-review is a social process, not something intrinsic to a bound collection of paper we call a journal. My bet is that eventually we will become comfortable with ‘distributed’ forms of peer-review, that they will be as effective as those of today’s journals, and that journals will become obsolete.
  • Until then, I promise to fix all my APA formatting before submitting my work to the journals! ;-)

I guess what it boils down to is that I am resisting the notion of 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 am, by choice, a product of the Open movement, and I believe that the more collaboration, the stronger the process and the product—even in the seemingly lonely task of writing a dissertation!

Thanks again for the feedback.

[See also this subsequent post]

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