Multilitteratus Incognitus

It's been about five years since I defended my dissertation (oh my! How time does fly!), and I caught myself thinking about my evolving relationship with academic writing. While I've been somewhat  active over the past few years, I also find that I'm a lot less interested in producing academic/journal writing as a genre of writing. And, when I want to engage in such an activity, 'going at it alone' when I don't have a guaranteed venue of publication (i.e., you write the article first and then submit to a journal for review), feels a lot less palatable as an activity during my leisure time. I neither need for professional purposes, nor do I have time during my regular work day for this kind of activity, so it's classified as leisure for me personally (is there an academic equivalent like athleisure , I wonder...🤔). I make the distinction between writing for journals and writing chapters for books. Not that writing chapters for books is a guaranteed venue, on...

This is Part IV of V of a look back to 2022. I know, my blogging is lacking a bit of urgency LOL 😂. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part, discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  Continuing with that academic framing, part IV will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where research fits in for me... At the end of last year I was reflecting on where research fits into my professional and hobby life; keeping in mind that my job does not require, nor does it make provisions for, me to do research - thus it's mostly a hobby.  My relationship with doing research, and where it fits in for me, has really evolved over the last decade. When I was attending my last Master's degree (before completing the degree), I had a hard time even imagining writing 7000 words...

A couple of blog posts ago I was pondering my dilemmas about peer reviewing as an alt-ac. This week I've been pondering actual publishing as an alt-ac.  Here's how my pondering started (after a long couple of weeks at the beginning of the semester)... Given that... As an alt-ac I do not need to have published articles to be promoted in my professional work; As an alc-ac I do not get professional recognition for works published (except for some internal delight when I see my citation numbers😅) As an alt-ac I don't get "work release" time from my dayjob to work on this research, so any research work I do eats into my hobby/free time; As a hobby, research publications don't pay (whereas other gigs do, providing an incentive to give up some of your free time in exchange for my expertise); Publication of research is hitting bottlenecks, both with peer reviews and periodic journal moratoria; Even without the bottlenecks, getting through peer review can be a challen...

Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay Okay...okay!  I know, it's only been a couple of months since I defended my dissertation, and it's only been one month since it was totally official and on my transcript, but in thinking about further research I am simultaneously filled with both excitement and dread.  There are some things I want to pull out of my dissertation and polish up for an article, there are also threads on MOOCs and lurking that I want to return to, but I am feeling this sense of "oof😫" when I think about actually jumping in again.   It is quite possible that I need a much longer break, and maybe an actual vacation, but this reflection on research and publishing has gotten me to ponder the point of publishing as an alt-ac. Now that I am done with the doc program, many people ask if I'm going to pursue a tenure position somewhere. It's an interesting thought (neither appealing nor unappealing), but then the question does make me reflect on what I d...

Have PhD...( source ) George Station had posted this article titled " The academy I dreamed of for 20 years no longer exists, and I am waking up " with the lead in of: Ellen Kirkpatrick has yearned for an academic career for many years. But 18 months after finally earning her doctorate, she is no longer sure she wants to remain in a sector defined by precarity, exploitation – and ‘quit lit’  George asked us (tried to bait us? 😏) to see what we think about it in his Fb posting, and I am surprised (given the circle of people George and I follow) that no one else jumped into the discussion.  I though I'd give it the old college try and write a blog post about it.  It is something that's been on my mind in the past couple of years. Once the coursework component of my EdD was done people started asking me what I plan to do after I earn my EdD.  I am still at the proposal stage (one of these days I'll write about it), but inching forward, so I guess the end wil...

A week or so ago...well...maybe two weeks by now♣, the topic of eLearning 3.0 was identity , and the video guest of the week was Maha Bali .  I finally managed to view all of it, even though it was in 10 minute increments. My Pocket's save-for-later is getting rather lengthy now that I am saving articles on the daily to read at some other future time. This time of the semester is rather busy, so I guess that's my disclaimer for this post: I am only commenting on the video and points that were brought up. In looking at the notes I took during the vConnecting session during week 4 (mid-way through the MOOC!) there are a few organizing factors that sort of came to me, so I've organized the post in this manner. What's in a name? At the beginning of the conversation Stephen had a bit of a hard time getting the native pronunciation of Maha's name. It's interesting to kick off a discussion about identity in such a mundane way, but I think that the concept of a n...

 Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Dissertation proposal, draft number...I don't know - lost count - has been submitted.  Things look good, well at least in my humble view, so I hope I am ready to defend this proposal within the coming month and become a "candidate" soon‡. With the draft submitted I can now focus on the other pile of academic work that needs attending to, and is more collaborative than my dissertation. In any case, a recent incident (incident sound too austere...happening? occurrence?) I was reminded, for the umpteenth time that what we, as educational researchers, are expected to have a purpose in our research. What is the rationale for the study?  people ask. Why undertake this study?  Who benefits? What is the problem you are trying to solve? As you can tell from the title of this blog post I hold the position that I don't need no stinkin' rationale. I could make something up like "by examining population X, ...

I originally posted this as a response in a post that Paul Prinsloo wrote on facebook (in response to this Chronicle Article on Beall's list and why it died ), but it seemed lengthy enough to cross-post as a blog post :-) -------------- So many issues to dissect and analyze is such a (relatively) brief article. It is important to see and analyze predatory journals (and academic publishing) in general systematically with other trends in academia. This includes the fetishization of publish or perish, and the increased research requirements to even get a job in academia ( see recent article on daily noos as an example ) One thing that bugged me was this line --"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should be your first clue." There are legitimate journals out there that are new, and hence don't have any current readership because they are new, so they can't necessarily rely on the word of mouth to get submissions for...

Paul Prinsloo has a wealth of thought provoking posts on his facebook ;-)  I wasn't planning on blogging until tomorrow, but this got my mental gears moving and thinking (not about my dissertation, but it's thinking nevertheless).  This blog started as a continuation of a comment I left on Paul's facebook feed. The article that got me thinking is an article on the Daily Nous titled The Publication Emergency . In the article a journal editor (in the field of philosophy) opines (although not with his editor hat on) that graduate students (I guess this means doctoral students) should be barred from publishing until they are done with their degree. He says that this is not a barring of people who don't hold a doctorate, but rather of people who are in process  of earning their doctorate.  So, in theory, some with an MA, but not pursuing a doctorate would be welcome to publish their stuff.  So, even if an article is good and has merit, if its author is in proc...

Recently I came across a post by Josh Kim on whether LinkedIn will replace the traditional academic CV . My short answer to that is "no".  This isn't because I think LinkedIn is bad (it's not), or that the CV is awesome (it's not).  I've got a bone to pick with the traditional, paper-based, academic CV. The common wisdom, as Kim alludes to, is that a resume is short and targeted, while a CV is longer and is meant to include everything (and the kitchen sink) in your career.  Resumes, for me, seem constraining. How can you adequately describe yourself in 2 pages, especially for seasoned professionals who are older than I am and have a wealth of knowledge and skills?  At the same time a resume is a creative puzzle to solve.  It's a tool for communicating what you will bring to the team you want to be hired into when you apply for a job. A resume encourages your to look into a company and a department, and tailor it to fit where you want to be. It fits ...

Over the years I've tried out almost every social network I could get my hands on. What can I say, I love tinkering and trying new things :-).  However, on source of irritation these days are networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.  I like listing the few things that I co-author (or author for that matter) in a variety of places because (let's face it), most people aren't going to find you just by looking at your blog or website.  That said, when you're listing your fine work on these sites there is an option to upload the file itself - to make it easier for other members of that community to access your writing. I don't mind putting up a pre-publication version of what I write but I do mind needlessly uploading PDF files of articles that are published in open access journals!   The whole point of publishing in open access journals is so that you don't have to upload copies elsewhere (and for people to be able to find them for free!). Yet, social netw...

One of the nice things about being a language geek and an academic is that you get access to research that has been published in other languages.  In addition to English I fare quite well with research written in French, Italian, and Greek. Even though I don't have any formal experience with learning Spanish I could probably get the gist of Spanish articles based on my familiarity of French and Italian.  When it comes to writing (producing language), the process is a bit painful.  My academic vocabulary isn't as developed in the other languages and the necessary stylistics of research publications in other languages is a skill that I don't yet have. I am actually quite interested in developing that competency just for my own edification, but I would love to be able to publish research in other languages, with practice comes more familiarity and ability to use those languages anyway, and that's a goal that I strive toward.  That said, I started pondering the ...

It's been a while, but I am finally (sort of) getting back to addressing some feedback that my colleague and I got on an article we are working on with regard to MOOCs.  My colleague, Zaharias, thought it would be a great idea to sit down and make an (initial) typology of issues around the development of MOOCs. The abstract was accepted for a special issue of a journal, but our final version was not.  This I found a bit odd, but I've taken the peer reviewer's comments to heart, and I am thinking of ways of addressing them.  Some, in my mind, are valid.  I "live" in my head, so for me terms like cMOOC, xMOOC, FSLT12, CCK11, MobiMOOC, connectivism and so on are second nature.  I think to some audiences there might be some need to explain what this alphabet soup means.  Other comments that I also took to heart revolve around typos that just sneaked under our radars. After 8200 words, and multiple readings, who could blame us ;-) As a newly minted editor, tho...

This past week I was able to attend Campus Technology and AAEEBL 2014 in Boston. I count myself lucky that I have two conferences every year that are pretty close to me (the other one being NERCOMP) that allows me to go and see some interesting presentations, engage with colleagues, and talk to vendors (and let's not forget the cool vendor swag ;-) ). This year, unfortunately, I didn't get an opportunity for post-conference beers, dinner, and discussion as I had last year with some pretty interesting people from both the US and Canada. Oh well, next year maybe :) Even though these things are local I don't submit session proposals. I feel more comfortable on the audience end (where I can report and comment on via twitter) than the presenter end. That said, I did want to comment on one session that I went to that has really made me rethink book publishing.  The session was titled "Are MOOCs the equivalent of college courses" (you can check out the recording of t...