Jeffrey Keefer has an interesting post on doc students using the blog to share or chronicle their academic/research journey (e.g., Why do this via a blog? How does it feel to be public with your thinking?). At the end of his post asks, I wonder if there is a research problem and question in here?.
I think there is. One angle might be reluctance. Blogs often represent a person’s fragmented, truncated, rough-hewn thinking on something. They’re not something that’s polished and subjected to numerous R&R cycles as is the case with traditional journal publishing. But I think that precisely because the research journal has been the dominant model in higher ed for so many years that it’s difficult for some to bring the messy, fragmentary thinking that leads into those more polished journal pieces out into the open. For the reluctant doc student, there is the question of value: what value do I get by sharing my fragmented, iterative thinking? Will it go into a community? How active will the community be in reciprocal sharing?
Phil, thank you for stopping by and sharing your thoughts on my research direction.
I find that your style, in this one single post, has elements of that more traditional academic-speak where you as researcher maintains a distance between yourself and your writing. Of course, this is only one post, though I find myself drawn to processing and learning in the very act of writing (as per Laurel Richardson’s work, which has greatly influenced my thinking). In many ways, I suppose my interest is developing into some form of study where those “fragmented, truncated, rough-hewn thinking” nuggets can in turn reveal profound learning shifts.
In some ways, my research interests are a bit different from my practitioner work in project management and ISD!
Jeffrey
Posted by Jeffrey Keefer on December 12th, 2009.
Thanks for the suggestion on the Laurel Richardson book!
Posted by phil on December 16th, 2009.