Jan 22 meeting minutes

In our Jan 22 meeting, a number of problems relating to writing the dissertation at various stages were raised, they are:

1. Difficulty finding the right papers, journal articles related to one's study. Things we need to check such as are we looking in the right database? Are we using the right keywords for search? Some people suggest that we can book an appointment with an librarian to shape up our information searching skills

2. Strategies for reading/writing in the beginning. We can start by reading without a clear purpose, which takes longer but will allow one to have a broader understanding on topics. We can also start by reading with clear purpose such as reading in order to finish writing a chapter. A chapter outline will help in this case, to focus your reading on specific topics. This way is more efficient, but will certainly narrow your perspective.

3. Transcribing and translating non English medium data. Since most of the group memebers' data will come from Chinese language sources, such as interviews, the question was do we need to translate all the data into English in the very beginning. This is actually not necessary, even during the data analysis stage. You should analyze your data in its most raw/original format. And not until you are going to write about them, then you select the segments you need to demonstrate in your paper and translate them into English.

4. How to write a good discussion and conclusion based on the analysis findings. Some suggest that we may need further reading, and revisit our original research questions to find a focus for the paper conclusion.

Iris made a good suggestion that for future meetings, we can pick a particular theme to talk about, such as how to write a good lit review. The idea was to spend the 1st half of the meeting to report our progress, then the 2nd half to discuss the selected theme. So for our next meeting, the group has decided that we find some material or info on how to conduct good information search. If you have personal experience or you have come across material that you think would be useful for our next meeting theme, please do bring them with you next time!

Dear all,

First of all, thank the guys who have accepted my invitation to have a dinner party at my home this Saturday. I am heartily looking forward to sharing with you wonderful food, talk, and thought. For those who cannot come, I do hope that we have further opportunities to be together in the future :)

I set my goal to revise a paper last Tuesday. I have done it but was just told by my pervious supervisor that it was unnecessary :( Anyhow, I think that my work won't be wasted; at least I've done some writing and thinking :P I'd like to set myself a new goal: take notes and write summary at least for one article by next Tuesday meeting.

Finally, many thanks to Nicol who introducing the valuable learning web to us. I'd like to follow Nicol's example by sharing with you an article about procrastination since many of us claim that it is one of our biggest weaknesses :P http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

The beginnig of the article is like this :

"I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. "

Hey, happy to be the first one to post something on the blog. Frankly, I am the slowest one in our group and this surely is not a modest parlance. But thank you for all of you giving me the chance to grow gradually:) Responding to some of our members' request, I am advertising here for Cheng Kai Ming's course- Culture perspectives on Educational Studies, which is going to have the second session at 5:30pm tomorrow, the venue is Main Building Room 141, come if you are interested in:)

And my next goal will be, as I have said, translate one chapter of my master dissertation, which is around 3 pages. Considering my weak self-discipline, I think it's useful to set a small goal each time so that it is easy to fulfill and the outcome would be encouraging for me to keep working.

That's all, see you on Saturday and please remember to ask me how I am working on my task:)
By the way, I guess my dish that day will be some greenstuff cause I am a semi-vegetarian, but don't worry, I will try to make it look delicious, haha.

Some advice on lit review

The problem of reading and writing for your study comes up again and again. I found a good webpage that talks about lit review. Below is a short excerpt on the balance of reading and writing. You can go here for a full reading.

Excerpt:

When you read for your literature review, you are actually doing two things at the same time (which makes things more difficult for you!):

1. you are trying to define your research problem: finding a gap, asking a question, continuing previous research, counter-claiming (see the introductions page);
2. you are trying to read every source relevant to your research problem.

Naturally, until you have defined your problem, you will find that there are hundreds of sources that seem relevant. However, you cannot define your problem until you read around your research area. This seems a vicious circle, but what should happen is that as you read you define your problem, and as you define your problem you will more easily be able to decide what to read and what to ignore.

Discussions in Today's Meeting

Dear Super Writers,

First, congratulations on all those who have submitted the assignments and good luck to all those that are going to (Go! Go! You are almost there!) :P

Jessica, Nicol, Issa, Jun, Lucia, Wen Yu and Iris attended today’s meeting. We began with sharing our stories about how we managed to finish our assignments in the last week. Under the pressure of deadline, our “small universe” all exerted extraordinary power, some of us had to stay up for a few nights (such as me :P). But we all agreed that it was not desirable at all, especially at the cost of health and beauty J Surprisingly, the majority of our writing goals for next week were to revise and improve our assignments, that is to say, we regarded our submitted assignments as DRAFTS. Does itindicate the quality of our assignments is not satisfactory (to our standards)? Maybe. Anyhow, keeping on revising and improving our writing is always a good thing, isn’t it?

We also decide to take the advice by Nicol and Issa: if any of us wants to share and get feedback on our draft writing from other group members, we may circulate the piece of writing (e.g. drafts of thesis chapters) among our group through EMAILS (NOT Blog for the confidentiality reason). The other members are free to decide whether s/he will read / respond to it or not. But one important thing is – to show our respect to others’ hard work and our good sense of ethics :P – please don’t keep or circulate the others’ writing; delete it as soon as you finish reading it.

Last but not the least, let’s welcome Nicole to be our Chairperson for the next meeting J

Iris

My Wriing Goal (From 8 January to 15 January)

Hello everyone, my writing goal for this time is very clear: to finish one assignment of MEDD courses: globalization and educational policymaking in Mainland China.

Report of Super Writers Meeting on 8th Jan. 2008

It was nice to have our fist meeting in new year 2008, and thanks to everyone for contributing our group today: Alam, Catherine, Iris, Issa, Jessica, Jun, and Lucia. It is good to see many of group members are changing or reshaping the writing habit in better way!

The reflection and suggestions from group members are collected as following,
- a good piece of writing come from revision, which may develops your ideas while you write.(Issa)
- Write few paragraph everyday and then develop the ideas (Issa)
- Begin to write thesis in early stage: once you read or write, put the writing into the related parts of thesis (Iris’ supervisor)
- Need to know more about taking note in Endnote (Iris & Jessica)
- Mapping out how to use computer in efficient way (Issa)
- Thinking of framework in the mind at night and do it according to the framework the next day (Alam)
- If you have no idea about research, you’d better go out and talk to people, or collect data early (K.M.Cheng’s opinion from Iris & Alam)

Please be free to make comments!