Accelerated decrepitude: musings and inferences

So I just realized it's been about a year since I've posted anything to this blog. Don't say you weren't warned. I. Suck.
Wow, how do I recap a year now? Do I just say forget it? Move on to something else? I guess I'll try to fill you in on what happened, which can be summarized in one word: statistics. Which suck more than my consistent posting ability.

Let me double-check to make sure I'm not making something up. Nope, statistics still suck. Actually, that is what has prevented me from posting. Not my being burned out completely from work and school. Nope, not at all.

So after my last post I started
Quantitative Research Methods. This I really, really hate. Quantitative research is like...science. Control groups, variables, and tests upon tests upon chi measures.

Different fields shoot for different things:
Sports professionals want a shoe named after them.
Pinstripers want a brush named after them.
Skateboarders want their own brand of board.
Statisticians apparently want some test named after them. Problem is that apparently only people with really long names are successful at this.

The people that really bone out over this stuff usually lose sleep over things that put me to sleep. It's like a secret club where only other statisticians know the secret handshake.

I thought I would seek help with a book called Taking the Fear out of Data Analysis written by Diamantopoulos and Schlegelmich. Shit, I'm in trouble just with the names of the authors. Real book. No. Kidding.

So I suffered through and survived. Still couldn't tell you the difference between Chi-square and t-test. (statisticians laugh at this obvious difference) If you laughed, don't ever invite me to a social gathering of your closest friends. {crosses fingers for:qualitative}

Qualitative Research Design
Okay, this I get a little. Artifacts, interviews, talking to people. Finding out why they do what they do. Bingo. I can make this work for my topic. I find out through my yahoo group that most qualitative designs are being rejected, or at least drug down the first two levels of hell, really having to justify what they are doing. Damn, I barely have a grasp on it. No way I can defend that. Besides, I'm relatively lazy.

I understand that the dissertation isn't really my thing, but the thing that my committee does with my name on it. I can live with that. Besides, I work with a hardcore statistics lady who is willing to help me. Bummed out, but hoping for relief with easy passage by paying homage to researchers past through the "normal" analysis.

Survey Research Methodology
This ends up being pretty ok. Hey, I'm a marketing guy, remember? Surveys and me play nice (just turn them over to the nerds to run the numbers)

It's during this class that I receive word that the program is changing. Mostly in the dissertation process. For. Everyone. I have four classes left, which now looks like 6. SIX. 6, meaning I'm not going to graduate by June. Glory.

The new organization looks pretty ok. I stop where I'm at, take a "transitional" course and finish off in the new course organization. whew. I would be pretty pissed if I was in my course order and didn't plan ahead. Perhaps its why so many poor saps on Yahoo were always complaining about stuff getting rejected.

The new structure starts with comps, into the rsh courses, then the diss courses, all centered on a topic. I had a topic in mind, so all of my "pretend" to develop and test a survey type work was focused on that topic. Cut>paste>cruise into concept proposal.

So for all of you traditional types: yes, this is a strange thing. NCU has classes for the dissertation, wich is really just the stepping stones of the chapters. Next class for me, between the research and dissertation courses is my comps. I'm ABD (all but dissertation) but not technically, since I haven't had comps. Even though I'm done with my normal classes.

Next comes my first shot at real work: finding a committee and developing my concept proposal, which is the paper that defines my topic that I work from. I C-R-U-I-S-E through this. cut>paste>cruise, remember? Like bar of soap on a prison shower floor kinda cruise.

Instructor has very few comments on my CP, but says I did a great job were most people get stuck. I find a committee in four days. I get a list, email people, they reply. Fill out form, done. Now very confident, I laugh to myself at the people on Yahoo who complain about going a month with no committee. Or going through a dozen revisions on their proposal. Big, belly jiggling kinda laugh. If I had a big, jiggly belly. Which I don't. Picture Santa Clause on a 6 month crank bender. As a pirate. Not very loud. Kinda scary. More like that kinda laugh. But still fun when people-who now seem like incompitent schmucks, mind you-are having troubles with their stuff.

{This is getting really long.}

hey, I'm trying to be humorous here! stick with me...I'm going through a whole year, remember?

ah, so now I'm in the thick of it. 2010 is here. My year. My fucking year. 6 months of subtle hell, graduation, a week drunk out of my mind in Mexico, and then 5 months and 3 weeks of life. Like real life. With friends. And social activities. And. I forget...it's been so long.

I chose my chair with great strategy. I looked for an angle (go figure, right?) and found one. Ha. I had an issue with her in a previous class over a paper I thought was stupid. Which as you all know, was. Because I said so. But she was direct, thorough, and held nothing back. I shrugged off the fact that I have a 3.94 and not a 4.0 because of her. One other teacher caused that as well, so she's my 3 hundreth of a reason why I can't wear the Kappa Delta Pi stole at graduation. I still getta wear the rope, though. I still get to wear the rope.

So my committe in one hand, my concept proposal (with very little red ink) in the other, I'm off. Let the dissertation dog and pony show begin. The first thing I need to do is submit the proposal to my chair, revise, and then start chapters that go into my concept paper. I'm as cocky as Kid Rock with an armload of midget porn about right now.

She declines my proposal. Like "I'm disinclined to acquiese to your request" kind of declined.

You can find me on twitter now.











...just sayin.
Big update coming soon.

How many pdf's become unmanageable? How many will make you feel like you're swimming in bits of data that seem more like quicksand than lightweight portions of electronic nothing?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say 52. That's how many I have (to date) as I begin to look for resources to develop my topic. They might not be too mismanaged if it were not for the fact they're in multiple folders on my laptop, flash drive, and desktop at work. And the fact that ProQuest and other databases always name them something like 36400464.pdf. Yeah, because that's helpful.

Thank god for Adobe Bridge. I'm in the process of renaming and adding keywords to them all based on content. And putting them all on my flash drive. And...somewhere else, because if I end up losing that flash drive, I'll probably end up playing Frogger across the interstate. Whew.

Breathe. Take time to organize.

It's almost 9pm. I've started this adventure at 11 am today, and am fairly sure my eyes are bleeding. But I believe I have made my decision.

Here were my constraints for the dissertation:
1. must be relevant to design
2. must have a relative application: theory could be put to immediate use/testing

I wanted to look at web 2.0 applications in teaching, or the scheme developed by the telecoms to devise a cable pay scale web system. Worthwhile (in my opinion) topics that could shed some interesting light, especially on those rotten ISP bastards.

Narrowing those down, I came to find some interesting points on BitTorrent and textbooks. Okay, so what about making Wikis instead of textbooks and distributing the source files via torrents? Hmmm...will people use them? What happens if I develop it and the torrents are all dead, downloading from one seed?

...moving on with 2.0 technologies that don't suck. I wish I tracked all the pages I went through for this flow, but here's my idea flow, ironically not displayed in a visual sensemaking chart (item #3). Seriously, don't ask how I went through this, because I don't remember. At one time I had 20 tabs open in firefox. If you refer to the previous post, you can see a reference my obsessive compulsive nature.

-designer of 2015
-design 3.0
-visual sensemaking
-tagging and mapping through meta structures
-issuescreencrawler
-censorship online
-meta tagging (again)
-innovation acceleration-damn, this phrase is cool. Moving on
-VUE. Bingo. We have a winner.

Tie in web 2.0 without examining technologies that have been done for a while you ask? Yes, yes indeed. Enter VUE: "The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information."

In short, you can visually connect relevant items together and map them. Pedagogically, this would allow one to show connectedness between, say classic works of art or poetry.

i was looking at meta tagging, especially with what we have now with ilife, but this operates on that framework. How you ask? Because it works with one of the key principles of design 3.0: integrated design development.

Does it have a relevant application? yes, I imagine not as many people have heard of it yet as those that have heard of wikis.

Is it relevant to designers? heck yeah! this is not "how do I make a brochure" instruction here.

ahhh...now to get it to work and flesh it out.

and if it doesn't work out, I'm going back to metatagging the world. Hey, gotta go for global domination somehow.

I'm sick. Strangely sick. I usually get bad sinus issues this time of year and in the spring.
I've had a headache for 2 days and my schedule is all messed up. Fell asleep some time after 2am and woke up at 6 this morning, exhausted and unable to work during both. Fell asleep from I'm not sure until Lu woke me up at 10am.

to avoid not working on what I need to, I compromised. I need to start with something, right?

Are you ready? I present to you the Notebook of Doom ©, or hereforth labeled

"The dialectical examination of constructivist educational thoughts and reflections as viewed through the mind of a slightly obsessive compulsive online and distance education PhD student."

Or TDEOCETARAVTTMOASOCOADEPS for short.

Aaaahhh...to think that a mere 10 years ago right now I'd be complaining that the bar is closed, or contemplating running to Iowa for last call there in some form of drunken stupor.

Nope. Now I wake up at 1 am realizing that I forgot to add a reference to my last paper I submitted. I run downstairs and hop online only to realize I'm too late, and it's already been graded. And he didn't notice.










At least the photo would still look the same.