Year 1 of the EdD has come to an end. I feel happy and excited because things have gone really well. I don't want to become complacent, or sit on my laurels, but I feel so much more confident than when I started a year ago.
Let me recap on what I have achieved:
1. I've got 20,000 words of decent writing - almost half of what I'll need when I have to submit.
2. I might be able to publish an article on the work I've done so far. The abstract has been accepted.
3. The task I designed has been praised. Praise is so important to keep the motivation levels up. Important: I can reuse it for the Main Study (great! I didn't think of that. Thanks Regine! I thought I was going to have to design a new one).
4. I made mistakes and that has helped me to get a better idea of what I'm doing, what I want to do with my research.
5. I let my intuition guide me at times and that has proven to be very useful. I just read something I really liked about serendipity: the word comes from an ancient Persian story (The Three Princes of Serendip). It's a nice story which portrays skills I aim to possess as a researcher.
6. I run a pilot study which has been enormously helpful.
7. I became familiar with Activity Theory.
8. I made contact with Yrjö Engeström, leading figure in the Activity Theory area.
9. I made arrangements to take part in two important research visits next year (2011): Finland and MK.
And what next? This is what I'll be doing (fingers crossed) in the next months.
1. Getting to grips with Atlas.ti and Camtasia, which are going to be key tools in my Main Study
2. Keep reading (there's lots of important literature I haven't had the chance to read yet)
3. Set up and conduct the Main Study (this includes redesigning my task). With 10-15 students this time. Aiming for August 2010.
4. Once the Main Study is over, code and analyse like crazy to get all my data sorted in case I can go to Finland in January to analyse it with Yrjö.
That's all for now. Back to work.