progress check

Well its half way through my 2nd full year of PhD and still finding my way. This year feels like it has mostly been writing and rewriting. Phase 1 findings have been 90% written up into a conference paper that was originally intended for the Australasian Evaluation Society Conference in Brisbane. It was accepted but then funding from the department was not forthcoming. So a last minute change of plans required a rewrite of the abstract and have recently received acceptance to The 5th Asian Conference on Education. It's in Osaka but I will hopefully present virtually (funding pending). My dilemma now is how to reduce what is about an 8 and a half thousand word paper into just 5000 for the conference. Also how do I ensure the paper is selected for the journal as a publication is really my intended outcome for participating in this conference.

My literature review has also been submitted to the Journal Studies in Educational Evaluation. This was peer reviewed and received considerable constructive feedback. However the editor did invite resubmission so that has been done and I'm now awaiting the second round of feedback (or rejection).

So it is time to return to data collection for phase 2. I'm transcribing interviews from phase 2 and need to soon turn to analysis and writing. But first need to do wrap up interviews for phase 2 case studies.

What have I learned from all this writing? That improvements can always be made; that people see and read different meanings than you sometimes intend; that writing short (5000 word) articles is difficult; that I am able to write.

Also, I need to do some more work on theory. I have briefly touched on the use of pragmatism or realism but it might be interesting to try and write either a short paper or definitely more for the chapter in the thesis.

And finally whilst considering how to cut down paper on phase 1, we have discussed the possibility of removing the Leximancer information and either trying to publish something on the methodology, using the results tables as examples or  putting that information into the thesis.