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Survey on alternative dissertation formats
The following email is circulating around, asking for help collecting data for a study we are doing. I think this will provide some good insight for the field about the possibility of alternative formats for dissertations for our students. It’s part of a thesis by Rebecca Thomas, who is doing a fantastic job with it. Please help by circulating and taking the survey!
————————– Email below—————-
Dr. Peter Rich, Becca Thomas (a graduate student) and myself would like to invite you to participate in our study on “The Effectiveness of Alternative Dissertation Models in Graduate Education” by taking the survey linked below. As an incentive, each person who completes the survey, which should only take about 15 minutes, will be entered into a raffle with a 10% chance of winning a $20 Visa gift card.
In this study, we are surveying current students, alumni, faculty, and administrators of Instructional Technology programs who have completed either traditional or alternative dissertations. We hope to investigate the usefulness, benefits, and challenges of alternative dissertation formats, so we can help departments make informed decisions about pursuing alternative dissertation formats and help students in the field complete alternative dissertations more effectively.
This survey is an updated version of a survey we sent out in 2010. If you completed the 2010 survey and would like a summary report of our findings, please email us and we will happily send your our summary report. This new survey will build on the knowledge that we gained from our previous survey and extend it. We anticipate publishing these new results and will be happy to share a summary report of the data or draft of the article with anyone who completes the survey and requests it. We greatly appreciate your participation.
Link to survey for DEPARTMENT REPRESENTATIVES OR CHAIRS (about what your department’s policies and thoughts are on this topic): https://byu.qualtrics.
Link to survey for FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND ALUMNI OF DEPARTMENTS (whether you did traditional or alternative format dissertation, we want both!): https://byu.
Sincerely,
Dr. Rick West, Brigham Young University
Future AECT locations
Here’s the future dates for AECT conventions. Good to know for planning!
2013 Anaheim
2014 Jacksonville FL
2015 Indianapolis
2016 Las Vegas
2017 Jacksonville FL
2018 Louisville
Interview on “Thinking Out Loud” about Group Creativity and COIs
I was very excited to be featured on an episode of Thinking Out Loud for an episode that aired August 30, 2013, discussing some of my ideas about Communities of Innovation. Thinking Out Loud is a really interesting show that I didn’t know about before, but will be listening to now! On this show, the host interviews a wide variety of people with expertise in really interesting fields, and the show is about bringing knowledge to a wider audience. It’s perfect for people who are curious about nearly everything, which I am! In fact, I kind of wish I had the job Marcus, the host, has! How fun is that to do these interviews each week? The show is heard online and on Satellite Radio.
As is probably typical, our 30-minute interview went by much too fast, and I was left with a lot of notes that I had prepared for questions they had sent to me ahead of time. Rather than let those notes go to waste, I will probably start posting these notes on this blog space, to just give my rough, and unrevised, thoughts about questions related to group creativity.
Here is the link to the actual episode I was on.
Fun stuff!
Presentation on technology integration
Here’s a presentation I gave recently to the librarians at BYU, who wanted me to teach them about how technology can improve instruction (since they are also involved as teachers in many regards). The video needs to be edited to take out some stuff at the beginning before the real presentation begins, but at least it’s online now!
Library Presentation from McKay School of Education on Vimeo.
Research into group creativity
Some students and I recently presented our current findings from three studies into group creativity, in the context of the BYU Innovation Boot Camp. Here’s a recording of the presentation.
Now if we could just get these articles out and under review!
Dr. Rick West – IP&T Seminar 11/17/2010 from McKay School of Education on Vimeo.
Tech-enhanced Qualitative Research
Here’s a file of an interview that we can practice coding as part of our workshop on technologies for qualitative research.
The Suzuki effect
Interesting research came out recently supporting Dr. Suzuki’s approach to music education. Specifically, a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience explains that while listening to relevant stimuli is not enough, practicing some, and then listening to the stimuli was as effective in improving future performance as if the participants had practiced twice as long (instead of listening to the stimuli).
Interesting. I wonder whether this effect can be seen in other areas of expertise outside of music? Perhaps instead of listening to Suzuki CDs, can an employee spend some of his time simply observing correct activity and be as expert as if he had been engaged in the activity himself? This lends itself to the “stolen knowledge” theory perhaps, as proposed by Brown and Duguid, implying that some knowledge is best stolen by observing others in situated, authentic activity?
“all really good ideas end up being collaborative”
I love this quote from Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley forecaster (what does THAT mean, BTW? How do I get that job?). Here’s the full quote, in reference to Facebook’s creation and whether we can really call any technology ideas original or plagiarized because these ideas are nearly always developed in collaboration with others. I would argue the same is true outside of the technological realm as well:
“Being first is heavily overrated in the technology space because all really good ideas end up being collaborative,” says Saffo, of the San Francisco analysis firm Discern. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that matters. And if you look at where Facebook is now compared to where it started, it’s a very difficult comparison. … I wouldn’t give a whole lot of credence to people who are showing up and claiming credit.”
Mini-genius grants—genius!
Playing off of the Google Rule (which has been used for years by other innovative companies like Gore and 3M), Dan Pink recommends that companies give their employees mini genius grants of time and flexibility to work on their own creative projects. I like this—it describes this unstructured time as what it is: a grant gifted to the employee to allow their inner genius to emerge.
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