Final Post

I really have enjoyed my experience in blogging the past several months, and I see that I even got 37 page reviews from France today.  Perhaps I'm becoming famous! No, but seriously I do like the potential of blogs for gaining an academic audience.  In fact this is one thing that N. Katherine Hayles (2012) has discussed - that is, technology is changing the medium for academic research.  Just recently I referenced an Academia.edu paper into one of my own, and the paper seemed sound enough, though I did not find it published elsewhere.  It is really exciting to see how blogs and other media hold the potential to disrupt the preeminence of academic journals.  Yet, I acknowledge there is a flip side to this that I will not delve into in this post.

As for my favorite posts, they have been those in which I interrogated sources on phenomenology in working my way towards the final project for the course.  In particular I became intrigued by the assumptions underlying two approaches, and I have criticisms.  Yet, in their defense there is no perfect method.

Finally, while I am uncertain what methodological approaches I will take in my own dissertation, I could see myself doing phenomenological research, and that is why I chose  it.  Initially, I came into the program with a passion to become a voice for the oppressed public school teachers in this country - to tell their stories and make policy leaders ashamed. While I might have deviated somewhat from this original aim, the subject still remains dear to my heart, and if I continue in my academic pursuits beyond this program, I think I might like to take it up again.

If I could change one thing, though, it evolves around another interest I discovered I had in discourse analysis, as I have mentioned I could see this complementing a critical theoretical perspective quite nicely, and I do have a background in history (I have one in psychology too, though).  It is possible I would have chosen to look at this more closely if I'd come across it earlier in the course.  Yet, I do understand Yiming's comment regarding the density of the course and the tremendous challenge of incorporating numerous methods.  


Hayles, K. N. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.