Teaching/Education

Connecting the two previous posts (sort of) is a link (via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools - Deep Fun) which points to UUA - Deep Fun. This is a booklet you can download with a whole lot of ideas for youth and youth workers for small group games and activities. (The resource is produced by Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, and while I wouldn’t fall into that camp, there’s no reason why the resources couldn’t be adapted to any small group situation - religious or not).

Via Mary (Great overview of new research on children, youth and family a link through to a resource reviewing the emerging literature on children, youth and Christian formation by Karen Marie Yust. See Review of the emerging literature on children, youth and Christian formation.

The School of Theology at the University of Auckland has just advertised for a full-time church history lecturer. You can read the job advertisement at VAC A377-08I Lecturer in Church History School of Theology.

From James over at Exploring Our Matrix we get Exploring Our Matrix: 1 Corinthians 13 paraphrased for academics.

I printed this out yesterday to have a look at it, after I was forward the link to it the other day. Looks really helpful, and a good resource for something like the General Education course “Bible and Popular Culture” (old blurb about it here) that I’m teaching next year.

See Bitemybible: The Bible Style Guide

The Bible Style Guide is a reference text designed specifically for those working within the media industry. It provides a crash course in the Bible for busy journalists, broadcasters and bloggers.

I’ll add it to other resources I used to introduce students to basic biblical studies such as:

• “Be an Expert in 137 Minutes in Interpreting the Bible” (Richard Briggs) (Now available as “Light to Live by: How to Interpret the Bible” (Richard Briggs), I think)
• “Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms” (Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, Cherith Fee Nordling)
• “Pocket Dictionary of Biblical Studies” (Arthur G. Patzia, Anthony J. Petrotta, Stanley J. Grenz)
• Spirituality of Jesus (Jon Horne)

Rap and particle physics collide in this interesting YouTube presentation:

• YouTube - The Large Hadron Rap
• When particle physics and hip hop collide - 02 Sep 2008 - NZ Herald

A couple of related recent web links about online publishing.

The first, Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com looks at some recent initiatives relating to creating accessible (from a cost point of view) text books.

Similarly, Tensegrities » Blog Archive » Digital media and civic learning, notes that MIT have released some more books in an online, open access forum - relating particularly to digital media and learning.

Also, Mary (also via a Tensegrities post) notes the availability of a guide to using multimedia tools with youth available over at Participation Works How To Guide on Multimedia Participation | Tim’s Blog.

Damaris have a philosophy and ethics model for schools available as a free sample at the moment, based around The Cosmological Argument. I’m going to have a look because next year I should be teaching a theological ethics course and I’m interested in how other people are approaching teaching philosophical and ethical in engaging ways.

See Damaris Schools: FREE sample lesson for A Level RE (Philosophy and Ethics modules).

This looks interesting Students who use ‘clickers’ score better on physics tests. I’d like to do some in-class polling of students (probably for the large General Education paper I’m teaching next year) - to be able to elicit a poll on a subject in order to spark discussion or emphasise a point, and also to check whether key concepts have been picked up in a lecture.

Now one way to do it would be with ‘clicker’ technology, though that isn’t very widespread at all in NZ (but I stand to be corrected). The other way would be to take an ‘Idol’ approach - TXT/SMS messaging that’s collated automatically and the results put up on an internal web page or such. Different costs, I guess. The one-off cost of the clicker against the ‘micro’ costs of txt-ing. Given the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones in the NZ context, perhaps working towards the TXT approach would work.

In a class of 300-odd doing the non-anonymous survey of hands doesn’t really cut it.

Various learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle allow you to create online activities like quizzes and polls as part of the course content and engagement. But what do you do if you need something like that but you don’t have access to an LMS that does it or you need to put that content in an environment outside of the LMS.

I’ve been playing around with Hot Potatoes which gives you some of this functionality. It feels a bit clunky in places, but it will certainly get the job done if you want basic multi-choice quizzes, crosswords and matching exercises.

If course if you want to create a quiz that logs the results against the student (say for assessment purposes) then you’ll need to step up to something more like an LMS.

Who owns the intellectual content of lecture notes you take in class? And can you sell them? Lawsuit Claim: Students’ Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor’s Copyright

To add to my mostly Mac OS X based list of writing tools -
Bean: An OS X Word Processor.

(Oh, and I think I left NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) off the original list too.)

Some more links relating to the recent bibliographic software postings - mostly Mac related.

Firstly, TidBITS - Endnote, Bookends, Sente, Zotero, oh my, which looks at possible alternatives to EndNote on the Mac by an ecologist - with follow up comments by others.

Then there’s a review and a follow up at on the SBL web site of Bookends (which, like Sente, integrates well with the Mellel word processor). See Society of Biblical Literature - Bookends Review: Bibliographic Software For Mac and Society of Biblical Literature - Update to Bookends Review.

Also, does anyone know anything about the Windows software Nota Bene?

Tim’s recent post SansBlogue: Referencing for the financially challenged generated a few comments, so he’s followed it up with SansBlogue: Zotero is brilliant, and integrates nicely which includes some movies of how Zotero works in practice.

I have Zotero installed on the old iBook and it’s integration with MS Word v.X for Mac is quite painless and seems to work well. Certainly I think it’d be useful for working on shorter documents (essays, articles and chapters) providing you were using a common citation style.

Of interest particularly to biblical scholars is Zotero Forums - Using Zotero with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) style. SBL with EndNote is supported (see here), though it is only for versions later than EndNote 9, I think.

See also:

• Greenflame · MS Word’s native bibliography/citation handling?
• Greenflame · Thinking about writing tools

Both MS Word 2007 (Windows) and MS Word 2008 (Mac) claim to have citation and bibliographic features for writers who need that support - though with a limited set of bibliographic styles. Does anyone have any experience working with them or compared them to a third-party add-on like Endnote? If you only used the supplied styles could you do away with EndNote (and the perennial compatibility problems whenever the OS, word processor or EndNote gets updated)?

Links:

• Create a bibliography - Word - Microsoft Office Online (Word 2007).

• Microsoft Word Processing Software for Your Mac | Mactopia (Word:Mac 2008)
• AppleInsider | Road to Mac Office 2008: Word ‘08 vs Pages 3.0 [Page 3] (Some screenshots of the tools)

I enjoy seeing the different ways that libraries use to promote reading - the recent NZ libraries ‘Inspire me!’ campaign using some well-known faces is a good example.

Here’s one from the American Library Association that uses Alex Ross comic book watercolor artwork (and a couple of others) to promote reading. See Comics Should Be Good! » Some Neat Posters

Various books on the go at the moment. Some good, some not so. Random comments follow.

“Metal Swarm” by Kevin J. Anderson (Book 6(!) in the “The Saga of Seven Suns” series). Should be right up my alley - ancient powerful alien races continue ancient wars while plucky humans (with strange alien sometime allies) strive to survive. It’s Babylon 5 all over again - even down to the human politics and civil war. But it reads really badly - too many characters to follow and a million very short chapters focusing on different characters means it feels like watching a TV where someone’s changing the channel every 10 seconds. No time for empathy to develop with any of the characters, and by now it feels like it’s just going through the motions. On a plus side you can skip whole chapters and not miss much of the plot. Undecided on whether I’ll read the next book.

“The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” by Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Recommended to me by a non-scientist/non-theologian (in the professional sense) so I’ve picked it up from the library. As usual I’ve started reading from the back, in this case the first few pages of the appendix on bioethics which gives some nice summaries of that field. (See also: Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . PROFILE . DR. FRANCIS COLLINS . July 21, 2006 | PBS)

“Saturnalia: A Marcus Didius Falco Novel” by Lindsey Davis. Falco novels are like a comfortable old pair of slippers for me. When I don’t feel like reading anything too heavy then I get the next one out of the library. I didn’t really like the last one (“See Delphi and Die”), but you know what you’re getting and I’ve always been interested in Ancient Rome. “Saturnalia” improved on the last book, but still missed something of the dramatic tension present in the early novels. (Related information: Second-born (9) has been devouring the children’s equivalent of the Falco novels - Caroline Lawrence’s “Roman Mysteries” - effectively a ‘Famous Five in Ancient Rome’)-

“Practical Theology: On Earth As It Is in Heaven” by Terry A. Veling. Because it was spoken highly of over at Simply Simon: Practicing theology and Simply Simon: Practicing theology II.

“The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology (Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology)” by John Patton. Because it was near the Veling book on the shelf in the GSC library, and because it covers a wide range of perspectives on the field.

“Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction (Online Teaching and Learning Series (OTL))” by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson. A book that collects a large number of different online learning examples and is really useful for showing you what other people have down and why, and also for helping design your own activities and assessements.

A couple of times I’ve found it useful to use Marc Prensky’s concepts of the digital native and digital immigrant to make points in things I’ve written. As one reviewer noted of one of these pieces, these are helpful concepts but can’t be realized as absolute categories, which I agree with entirely. The adoption or uptake of digital technologies is far more complicated than seeing people as either ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’.

Prensky’s work was originally situated in discussions about education, and in particular, perceived differences between teachers and students in terms of familiarity with and use of digital technology. Now, several years on, Henry Jenkins has an interesting article on the relevance and helpfulness of the terminology. See Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Reconsidering Digital Immigrants….

Brief article on designing a computer games to allow students to explore ethical issues. In this case, you play an ‘Igor’ assistant in a Frankenstein scenario. Sounds intriguing. See Universities bring video games into classrooms | CNET News.com.

The other week I borrowed a friend’s copy of “a genuinely educated ministry”: Three Studies on Theological Education in the Uniting Church of Australia by Andrew Dutney, principal of Parkin-Wesley College in Adelaide.

It’s a collection of Dutney’s three research projects submitted for a course at Flinders University designed for educational administrators and managers. As such, each section reads like an academic report (which may not be your cup of tea), but I found it quite accessible, though each report draws upon common material so sometimes I skimmed ahead.

Each project is oriented around a different question or subject:

Part 1. An historical study of the place of theological education in the inherited traditions of the Uniting Church in Australia

Which looked at tensions that can arise from different views of theological education within Reformed and Methodist traditions

Part 2. Theological education in the Uniting Church in Australia: historical trajectories and the future

Which, in part, looked at how different parts of the church viewed their roles in the shaping and control of theological education, as well as the impact of para-church educators

Part 3. Where do our ministers come from now?

The issues arising from candidates for ministry coming for training later in life, often with prior theological education, and often already established in lay ministry.

That’s only a brief summary of some of the points in the book, but if you’re interested in theological education and some of the issues it faces in this part of the world then it’s well worth the read.

Related links:

• New Books at Parkin-Wesley College
• A couple of Bible studies by Andrew Dutney at the recent Presbytery and Synod of SA meeting: Part 1 (mp3) and Part 2 (mp3).
• I can’t remember if I cited this in the thesis, but I definitely skimmed Dutney’s book “Playing God: Ethics and Faith” and found it interesting.

In the wake of PhD submission and graduation I’ve been interviewed a couple of times by the University of Auckland about being a theology PhD student. In particular, having four PhD graduates in September from a such small school/faculty has been reported on the front page of the university’s fortnightly internal magazine, and then the Alumni has a current spiel which I’m interviewed in, along with fellow PhD grad Brian Harris. (Brian features in this promo video for BTC in Perth here).

See Record number of Theology PhDs - Alumni and Advancement - The University of Auckland

Also got interviewed a while back for the university’s postgraduate campaign ‘In our own words’, and now I know why people hate seeing themselves on television. First time I’ve ever been interviewed on camera and now I know bit more about not what to do
Postgraduate study at The University of Auckland - In our own words and A Doctorate from The University of Auckland.

Video footage lurking on The University of Auckland - In our own words - Meet our students and supervisors.

Here’s a PDF of collating all the Finishing the PhD material.

tribulationorrapture.pdf

(Part 10 of 10)

To finish the thesis you have to want to finish it, and be prepared to sacrifice time and energy to get there. As a friend once told me, doing a PhD is 90-99% perseverance (and much less brilliance). Once you’re committed to finishing you just have to get on and do it.

PHD Comics: Time to end this

If you just enjoy the process and lifestyle of being a PhD student, and you don’t care about the result or are happy to live in the process forever, then there’s no motivation to finish. Plus, once you’ve done the hard work of getting to this stage of wrapping it all up, it’s really easy to say you know you can do a PhD and then not finish because the rest of it is just plain boring.

PHD Comics: Time-lapse Montage:

Getting to submission (with the thesis finally completed and all the paperwork done) is also just the beginning for the next stage in the PhD process.

My own experience (and that of others I know) is that after submission and the initial euphoria (or exhausted collapse) you can fall into a nice deep blue hole. Particularly if you don’t have anything else (job etc.) to keep you occupied. After months of intense pressure, late nights, sore eyes from the computer screen, and not talking intelligently (or politely) to other people, you are suddenly left with this gap in your life. It can take you (and your family) a little while to recover from that. So bear that in mind.

PHD Comics: No rest for the weary

Also, don’t forget that you may still have an oral exam, defence or viva voce to do a few months down the track with it’s own stresses and strains, plus the outcome of your thesis examination and defence which will probably require some extra work before you can finally hand in the final hard-bound copies to the university. Don’t fall into the trap that some students do, of passing the oral defense and the not finishing the required changes in the specified time. (This can cause significant financial penalties because you might have to pay another year’s worth of fees!!!)

I submitted on the 10 January, had my oral defence 21 May, had confirmation of the oral result 1 June, handed the modified copies in on 22 July, and graduated 27 September. That’s another 8-9 months on top of the four and half years it took to write the PhD thesis. It does feel good to be finally done.

And having done all that, have fun graduating, and remember that all the people who helped you get there in the end need to be thanked and to celebrate too.

So with these essential Top 10 points finishing the PhD is ‘easy peasy’

(Part 9 of 10)

Fairly simple point, but harder, perhaps, to get right.

When someone reads your thesis can they clearly distinguishing you and your arguments in there. It’s all about communicating your own contribution clearly. In the midst of citations, quotations, footnotes and comparing/contrasting ideas it’s important to be heard clearly. Are my views, opinions and arguments clearly differentiated from the wider discussion. Sometime it may feel like you’re shouting at the examiner/reader, or that it’s obvious that this section is your own contribution, but better to be safe than sorry.

In a couple of places one of my examiners thought I’d said something that I definitely hadn’t. I could point that out in the oral exam, but it would have been nicer to have been clearer on those points at first reading.

Also, good to have a consistent style or voice throughout the whole thesis. Because it’s written over a ‘long’ period it’s easy for subtle differences in writing styles to creep in.

(Part 8 of 10)

In television or film production people, such as a script supervisor, are responsible for making sure that there is a consistency seen about the persons, plot, objects, places and events as seen by the viewer, even though the episode or film is made up of small pieces and later edited together. When things aren’t consistent you get ‘continuity errors’ of one sort or another that annoy or jar the reader or viewer.

It’s the same in putting the thesis together. You need to check that you’re being consistent in how you’re bringing the final product together. So it’s important to check things like:

• Are all the questions I raised in the early chapters, and said I was going to address, actually addressed? It pays to go through looking for those questions, noting them down, and then looking to see if you did actually answer them in some way.
• If I pointed forward to a later section of the thesis or back to an earlier section, does that section actually exist as I refer to it? Sometimes you’ll edit out a section that you referred to elsewhere and you’re left with some loose ends for the examiner to pick up on.
• Are all references to chapters and sub-sections in the thesis correct? I had a couple of chapters that got merged and split several times and I had to keep updating chapter references in other chapters around those changes. (Missed one in the submitted copy and had to fix it in the final, bound copy).
• Is all the formatting - headings, quotes, citations, actually consistent? Sneaky things might be when you’ve referenced a magazine article in a journal format in one part of the thesis and as a magazine article in another part.
• Is the thesis an integrated whole or just a series of smaller snapshots or vignettes? Do the beginnings and ends of each chapter work to generate a smooth, continuous flow through the thesis for the reader?

It’s time-consuming to do this sort of checking, but it’s worth it to present a thesis that takes the reader/examiner through a carefully plotted journey to the end that leaves them satisfied that you’re competent, have arranged your material well, and haven’t left any questions unanswered (unless you meant to).

Don’t give the examiner reason to be annoyed or disappointed with your thesis because of continuity errors.

(Part 7 of 10)

One of the temptations when trying to finish off the PhD thesis is to continue to try and stay up with the latest reading material, and to incorporate that into the thesis. However, there comes a time when you simply have to stop doing that. To draw a line in the sand and say that the body of work you’re referencing is as closed as it can be.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t pay attention to new material in your area that’s being published. In a worst-case scenario someone else will publish very similar work to yours and you should definitely know about it (and maybe even have to rework you own work in response). But while you’re paying attention to new material, spending a lot of time on it will get in the way of the final writing and editing.

Keep track of the new material, and some of it may make it into the bibliography (depending on what’s required there), but don’t be overwhelmed by it. After submission, you should probably revisit the new material so you can talk about it in the oral defense and demonstrate that, while it isn’t in the thesis, you do know about it and can respond to it there.

Your thesis is a snapshot of the state of the field at a particular time, and by its very nature cannot include references and responses to every piece of related material up until the day of submission.

(Part 6 of 10)

One of the things that needs to be taken into account as you struggle to finish the thesis are your supervisors. For you, finishing the thesis has probably become you entire life and it’s easy to assume the same of your supervisors. However, they have their own lives to live - and your project is just a small part of that, along with their own teaching, research, other grad students, marking, and their life outside of university.

Simple courtesies really.

• Don’t dump 50,000-100,000 words on them and expect it back tomorrow or the next day with comments.
• Check that they’re not disappearing off to conferences etc. when you need them to sign essential forms for submission or to cast an eye over a final draft. Also, check what they have to do for you to submit.
• By the end of the process you should be defending your research and writing decisions to them as peers and colleagues. If you differ in opinion (and you will in places), then you must be prepared to defend that to the examiners (and in the oral exam, if you have one).
• Don’t forget to thank them for their input and work in the process - in person and in the thesis acknowledgments.

(Part 5 of 10)

Everyone has a horror story about losing part of their thesis. In my case it wasn’t so bad, just a day or two’s notes I’d typed out a year or two back which weren’t there when I came to check something. I was lucky because I had a day or two spare to write them out again.

Mostly though, I don’t have a horror story because I’m fairly obsessive about backups. Here a measure of paranoia is useful, because basically, the thesis is your life and your life’s work. Computers fail and die. Computers have accidents (a friend’s 2 year old poured a glass of cola into his laptop keyboard!). Computers get stolen.

If you do not know how to back up your thesis then learn. Now!

Here’s how I did it. Pick what works for you.

• Work out what you need to back up. Backing up half of your research is better than nothing, but you don’t want to miss anything. I had a single Research folder on the computer, plus my email mailbox. With those backed up, I was pretty good.
• Every day or so I put a copy of my recent files on my flash disk I carried around with me. If it was important I made sure I had a copy at the end of the day (or even at lunchtime). That included the EndNote database if I’d make lots of edits or additions. Flash disks are cheap. Go get one.
• I’d regularly burn a thesis CD or DVD with all my notes, drafts, bibliographic databases, downloaded material, essential fonts and emails!. CDs are really cheap. Don’t lose a whole lot of work because you were too cheap to spend less than 50 cents on a CD. If you don’t know how to burn a CD then get someone to teach you.
• At any significant milestone in the writing I’d print out a draft of that writing and put it in the filing cabinet. Worst case scenario I can type it in again from the paper (and it would be all cited properly - see the footnoting post earlier).
• Sometimes I’d dump the thesis stuff to my iPod’s hard drive. Big disk that allowed me to keep multiple versions of the thesis. Not necessarily easy to bring back on another computer though. A straight USB hard disk would do the trick too.
• Off-site storage is useful too. If your house burns down and takes the computer, your printing and your backups with it, what will you do? In my (obsessive) case, I left a CD backup every now and then with someone I trusted. You might also look at using an online storage facility.
• Always backup your work before you or someone else does something to your computer. New versions of Mac OS X or Windows, upgrades to your primary writing tools (e.g. MS Office and EndNote), and new hardware shouldn’t happen until you have a copy of your most recent work made. If you’re near to the end of the thesis and all your writing tools are working well, then hold off changing anything until you’ve submitted.
• Check your backup worked. Obvious, really, but try to get a file or set of files back from the backup and see if they’re usable.
• Clearly label your backups. A bunch of unlabeled CDs is a nightmare to find a file on.

Mostly, it’s just common sense. If your work is important to you then make sure you won’t lose it.

As a former database administrator for large computer systems I’m pretty paranoid about making sure my work is recoverable, but you have to pick the level of risk you want to take. Just remember how you will justify it to your ’significant other’ and your supervisor.

(Part 4 of 10)

Just some brief tips here relating to citations, footnotes and the like.

• Cite as fully as you can when write and edit. Put full citation details etc. in your notes even. Makes it much easier to find where a quote or idea came from when you’re looking for it in a hurry.
• Do not attempt to do the footnoting/citations when you’ve written the thesis text. Recipe for disaster.
• I kept a separate EndNote database of everything I had in my filing cabinet. Essential for determining whether I could check a source immediately or whether I had to find it online or at the library.
• If you have any references you meant to follow up later, follow them up now. I had a footnote for some Justin Martyr stuff that said ‘check this reference at some point’. Took ages to find the correct reference because I’d written the wrong one down. You don’t want to be doing this at the last minute because the source might be unavailable (e.g. borrowed from the library).
• Check all the references/citations thoroughly. I had a couple that EndNote bodged because I’d manually edited the citation tags at some point.
• Check you computer can generate the bibliography and format the citations with all the thesis text if you’re using citation software. You don’t need last minute resource issues with the computer.
• Check people’s names. In a couple of places I swapped the first names (Mary for Margaret and vice versa) because I was thinking about the one person while writing another person’s name.
• Be consistent with publishers and place names. If you aren’t sure of US state abbreviations etc. then here’s a useful list.
• Do not muck about changing the citation style at the last minute. You should have been working with one of the department or faculty styles for the past 2-3 years. Even though software like EndNote allows you to switch styles you may fall foul of things like how that new style’s default settings handle repeat citations.
• Clearly identify what is required in your bibliography. Some institutions only want material cited. Others want you to demonstrate you know the field well by listing other material that isn’t directly cited to show you know about it. Others want the bibliography arranged into different sub-sections (e.g. primary sources vs. secondary sources). Make sure you get it right early on.

Get your citation system and formatting sorted early on and you’ll sleep better when you’re trying to bring everything together. Plus, I’ve met several examiners who say they check references rigorously (e.g. taking the thesis to the library and looking up every third reference in a chapter!). Good citation style and use demonstrates you know what you’re doing and is informative and helpful to the examiner.

A footnote on EndNote.

Many institutions have site licences etc. for EndNote and it’s the most widely used bibliographic software (though not the only one). If they do have a site licence then often there will be nice extras that allow you to connect to the campus libraries. Take advantage of this - getting the bibliographic information from your campus library catalogue means it will be for that same book you used (probably). Also, learn to use EndNote or similar early on. Just get the basics right. I didn’t have too many problems with it but I’ve heard some horror stories. If your student learning centre/library run courses on it, then go along. Taking a couple of hours to do that early on can save you major grief later.

(Part 3 of 10)

Putting the actual thesis together into its final form can be tricky. It will involve bringing together:

• The chapters you’ve written (with their text, tables, figures etc.)
• The material at the front of the thesis: title page, abstract, dedication, preface, table of contents, and various other lists of figures and tables and acknowledgements
• A bibliography
• Various appendices
• Anything else that needs to be added

As such it will involve some serious work with a word processor, your bibliographic software (if you’re using some), lots of paper, and a computer printer.

Now, assuming that what you’ve been writing is formatted according to your institution’s guideline put aside a couple of days and have a play at putting what you have together into a prototype thesis. If you haven’t written certain bits yet then put in place holder pages with the titles on them but with no content (or content generated by something like Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator).

In doing so you’ll be forced to deal with making sure that the page numbers are right (I had to have roman numbers for the front material and arabic numbers (starting at 1) for the chapters.) You’ll also have to make sure the you can generate a table of contents and lists of figures and tables correctly. If you’ve worked on chapters as separate files then merging them poses issues to do with footnote/endnote numbers being updated, as well as citations possibly needing to be reformatted.

Bibliographic material too can become a bit of a drama. Automated systems like EndNote etc. are really good at scanning the word processor files for references you’ve entered using it and generating a bibliography. If, however, you’re bibliography needs to include material outside of that which you have cited then you’ll need to figure out how to add the extra material - and remember, regenerating the citation based bibliography will replace any bibliography you have at the end of your document. (I solved that problem by keeping an EndNote database that contained the material I cited, plus other references I wanted to include. I generated the bibliography from that database and manually pasted it into Word at the end.)

Also, it takes a long time to print, copy and bind a thesis (even spiral binding). Plus it costs a lot to copy and bind multiple copies if you don’t have access to free copying and binding. Until you’ve done that once and worked out the kinks in the process you don’t know what you’re up against if you’re doing it in a hurry.

So, do it at least once or twice well in advance of submission to get a feel for the task at hand. And if you’re not skilled with using your writing tools find someone who can help you learn well in advance of the panic stage.

Also, I printed and bound a prototype thesis about a year out from submission. Really useful to see what was missing and I carried around with me all the time. Very useful to have it sitting beside you when you’re writing other stuff. You can scrawl on it, reference it without having to balance too many word processor windows, and if you keep updating it you have growing proof that the thesis is actually growing. Plus it looks the goods if it’s formatted right.

While I’m posting about my experiences on finishing a thesis off, Tim is posting on how to pass (arts/humanities) undergraduate exams. I’ve read his first post and would agree with much of it. I look forward to the next post.

See SansBlogue: How to pass exams: Part One: Revision

(Part 2 of 10)

Okay, assuming we’ve assuaged the overwhelming sense of panic the next thing to talk about relates to the formatting of the thesis.

By the time you’re in the third year of the PhD you should be sleeping with your institution’s guide to formatting/presenting/preparing a thesis under your pillow. This booklet, or similar, is the essential guide to how things must be done. Your faculty or department may also have a similar publication. Read this thoroughly until you know what is required in terms of the layout, sections, margins, line spacing, and bibliographic and citation requirements etc. And if you don’t understand something then find out as soon as possible. Don’t wait until you’re printing the final draft to discover you’ve mucked something up. (For example, the University of Auckland booklet is here).

Next, there is often support from your Student Learning Centre or equivalent. I did a workshop of formatting your thesis which was really helpful, even thought I was a competent user of a word processor for academic writing. There was also a workshop on how to bring all the different parts of the thesis together for submission. Again useful to make sure you haven’t forgotten something. (For example, University of Auckland - Centre for Academic Development - Postgraduates).

The university also provided a thesis template for MS Word that had a set of styles that matched the university’s guidelines. Really useful, and once I started writing early on with only those styles and document formatting then I really didn’t have to worry about whether I was going to have to do major edits for formatting later. Write everything in the styles the final draft will use - then you won’t have problems with formatting cut-and-paste issues later.

It was really helpful because it helped me to see how big (physically) a chapter would finally be, as well as how many words fitted on a page and what the footnotes etc. looked like in reality.

Also, set your reference/citation/bibliographic style in concrete early on and in accordance with what’s recommended for your department and faculty. Far better to get that sorted now than trying to do it later (even with bibliographic tools like EndNote).

I’d also recommend going to the library and getting out a selection of theses from your discipline to have a look at. What did people write in their abstracts, acknowledgements and prefaces? What did you like about how some theses were formatted? What didn’t you like? It helps to see what the finished product looks like - though a bit daunting too.

Oh, and make sure you really understand how big the thesis is meant to be. I found that the PhD guidelines said 100,000 words in one place and the also said between 250-300 pages. Depending on the citation style you pick and whether you’re a heavy footnoter you may find that 100,000 words won’t really fit into 250-300 pages. So you need to check which one is the real limit.

Finally, track down a good thesis proofreader. You may need to pay for one, but if you can find a good one (and I did) who can pick up not just typos but also grammar then strive to keep them. Also, don’t wait for the final draft if possible. If they’ll take early material in pieces then go with that - then your supervisor’s time reading your work can be focused on the content and you avoid overloading the proofreader with a last minute panic.

See also: PHD Comics: Thesis submission, pt. 3

(Part 1 of 10)

When faced with the perceived enormity of finishing the thesis (N.B. the thesis by this stage is often referred to in less polite terms), it is not unreasonable to experience varying degrees of panic. However, while some manner of concern over finishing the thesis and indeed feeling pressure to finish are useful motivators, panic is not your friend. Neither is excessive stress.

So, sit down and work out exactly what has to be done and when it has to be done by. Take into account all the other commitments you have to family, other people, work, your own health etc, and break the path to finishing down into bite-sized, manageable chunks. This is helpful because:

1. You can identify what is critical to finishing and thereby ignore things that look important but are actually distractions.
2. Each mini-section or task you complete helps to affirm you’re on the right track.
3. You know when in the day you do different types of work well and can select (within reason) the right type of work to do. For example, I don’t concentrate well straight after lunch (1-3pm) so I’d do thesis tasks then that required less concentration. The best times to write for me are 10am-12pm and 4pm-8pm (which never worked out with family life). Sure you need to work whenever you can but try to work smarter.
4. You get an idea of how long particular tasks take, such as revising an established piece of writing or checking a set of references, so you can estimate how long other tasks might take (allowing for the fact that they always take longer than you think).

At this stage it’s all about grinding it out. You know your stuff, the thesis structure is pretty much set in stone, and it’s just plod, plod, plod until it’s done. There is no other way.

One other thing. Related to the feelings of panic are also feelings of guilt about how much you haven’t done, and the perception that you mucked around in the first two years and should have worked harder. Perhaps, but things that took weeks then now take hours or days because you’ve become immersed in the material for so long and have thought researchy-type thoughts for longer. The worst case scenario is that the guilty feeling gets in the way of getting finished, as you wallow around in it for a while. You are where you are, acknowledge that you might have been able to be further along, also acknowledge that you know more now than then, and then get on and finish anyway.

See PHD Comics: Time to end this

Making sure you’re getting regular exercise and contact with other people helps both with managing the panic and guilt stuff. It may help to have an ‘academic confessor’ (not your supervisor necessarily) to vent to - I had one or two from time to time and it was useful to get my head straight in the thesis process.

I’ve been asked to speak later on this month to the third+ year theology PhD students on that last year or so of getting the PhD thesis to submission (and beyond). The university’s Student Learning Centre has lots of resources and tutorials to walk PhD students through the process of writing, research and formatting etc. so I want to add to the material that they (should) have already seen.

I’ve decided to do a quick Top 10 things that came out of my PhD journey and to help that process over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging them here to help get them straight in my head before the actual meeting. I also figure they might be useful to other students outside of that group, though the discipline you’re involved in will have specific requirements that will shape thesis development.

My current Top 10 list is:

1. Don’t Panic!
2. Doing it with style
3. Practice makes perfect
4. A footnote in history
5. You have backed up your work, haven’t you?
6. Supervisors are people too
7. Reading. Just say No!
8. Thesis trajectory
9. Finding my own voice
10. Finish or else!

I’ll expand on each of these in later posts.

A while back I wrote an increasingly long list of (predominantly Mac-based) writing tools - Greenflame · Thinking about writing tools.

Fernando has recently written some more on than theme and on one of those tools (Scrivener), including some comments on how it helps manage his writing processes. See Fernando’s Desk » Getting It Down On Screen.

A selection of links that intersect around the role of new media in educational environments. Henry Jenkins has an essay (in two parts) that looks at the tension between participatory media and traditional educational models, and in particular emphasises the critical application of the following skill set:

1. Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.
2. Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.
3. Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.
4. Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

See:

• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART ONE)
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART TWO)

Connected to this, is Mary Hess’ post about a review of her book on theological education promoting this type of critical engagement with new media by teachers and students. See:

• Tensegrities » Struggling to respond… and Tensegrities » A response to a review
• Tensegrities » Teaching/learning in theological education

Then AKMA has this post on reflecting on a meeting to discuss related matters - AKMA’s Random Thoughts - Retrospect and Prospect.

And then Tim chimes in with this post (connected to AKMA’s) - SansBlogue: Bible, Babel and Web 2.0. (Some long comments there - including some from Mark which he refers to here: E-BCNZer: Brighouse - “On Education”).

The integration of digital technologies, with existing pedagogues and technologies, will be here for a while yet. I know that I’ve found it frustrating as both a student and teacher that the roles I’m being trained for/are training people for are collaborative - they stand or fall based upon healthy, dynamic relationships (both in IT and religion) - and yet the systems promote individualism (for assessment particularly) and work to stamp out collaborative efforts (it’s called cheating). Intellectual property discussions (esp. academic ones) also connect here. There must be a better way.

AKMA has some gentle reminders about the need for typographical simplicity when selecting typefaces, and has some helpful links to some related typeface resources. See AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Type Trove.

Over the years I’ve used lots of different text and word processors to support writing I’ve needed to do:

• nroff and similar on UNIX systems for writing documentation
• View on the BBC Microcomputer in the 1980s
• Something on an Apple II+ which only displayed 40 characters per line
• WordStar, MS Word and WordPerfect under MS-DOS (pre-Windows)
• Nisus and MacWrite on my Mac Plus and Mac LC to write my Masters thesis
• MS Word 2.0, Word 95, Word 97 and Word 2003 on various Windows computers.
• MS Word 3, 4 and 5 and ClarisWorks on my Apple Powerbook 150 and 520c and PowerMac 6100 (Still have a set of Word 5 install floppies somewhere)
• AppleWorks and MS Word v.X on the Mac OS X G3 iBook (the latter for the PhD thesis)

Of all of these, MS Word 5 on the PB150 and PB520c offered the best system for just blatting out text without getting distracted by the bells and whistles of the software. The black-and-white display and keyboard of the PB150 seemed to work for me, plus with no internet connection etc. I only turned it on to write. Word v.X was okay (and it supported EndNote) but it didn’t really inspire me to write.

Now with the thesis all written up I’m wondering whether it’s time to look at trying some different things to aid the writing process in the next few months. Some tools that help organize the writing process as much as just allowing text entry and formatting. I’d like them to run on the iBook (which won’t be replaced in the near future) and to have some support if possible for bibliographic data. MS Word compatibility is less of an issue as I still have Word v.X and Word 2003.

From looking around the net these links look helpful.

Applications that help with note-taking and organising writing material

• Note Taking Application Faceoff at The Apple Blog
• Literature and Latte - Scrivener - looks really interesting
• Mellel, which looks good for academic writing and support for non-English languages
• Journler - Wherever Life Takes You
• mekentosj.com | Introducing Papers… Your personal library of science

Bibliographic support

• Bookends, reference and bibliography software for Macintosh
• Third Street Software - Sente
• I’ve used EndNote and avoided much of the grief others I know have had with it, so that’s still a possibility. It’s integration with non-Word word processors remains an issue though.

Some articles about Mac word processing

• Mac360 - Why The Mac Is The Ultimate Writers Tool Box.
• Mac360 - Is This The Best Word Processor For Real Writing?

I wouldn’t be adverse to a Windows XP/Vista word processor and material organizer though, if they did the job. Just don’t have a Windows laptop to run it on.

Anyway, now feels like a good time to try something new, before I get caught up in not being able to change while projects are ongoing.

Updates

• For Windows users then perhaps PageFour - Software for writers - novel outliner and tabbed word processor might do the task (thanks to Bill for the link)
• Mac OPML Editor for building outlines
• Acta, the classic outliner - available free and runs under MacOS Classic and earlier. (I used it extensively to write the Masters thesis back in 1990)
• Son of Acta - Opal: Easy notes and organizing for Mac OS X 10.4. See also Opal is the new Acta - O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog
• Outlining should also include consideration of The Omni Group - Applications - OmniOutliner
• I’ve also played with Inspiration - a mind-mapping tool of sorts. Useful for visual learners like me, who love to diagram ideas.
• DEVONthink
• Sidenote
• Notational Velocity - minimalist notetaker
• SOHO Notes
• Dan Schimpf Software: MacJournal
• Bartas Technologies - CopyWrite
• Flying Meat: VoodooPad
• Mori - Productivity Tools
• Sebastian Krauß / Software - My Mind

Jo pointed to this article about Google Books. Food for thought.

American Historical Association Blog: Google Books: What’s Not to Like?

Does anyone know if Sente from Third Street Software is any good for managing bibliographic data and handling citations in word processing documents. I’m currently locked into the MS Word/Endnote system, but I wouldn’t mind having the option to try out Mellel for academic writing (which Sente supports as well as Word).

I picked it up here at Faith and Theology: Footnotes or endnotes? but it started here at Frankly, Mr Shankly: TF Torrance, footnotes and endnotes. Then it evolved to here to Aaron Ghiloni’s poll pointed to by Faith and Theology: The footnote controversy.

At the end of the day - “Endnotes - just say no!”

Having returned from holiday with more books (see Greenflame: Back from holiday (with books)) we all went out a few days back to one of the local secondhand bookshops with a box of books to exchange. A successful trip with all 6 of us finding something amongst the volumes. To my delight I picked up a copy of Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by a favourite author of mine, Alastair Reynolds.

Reynold’s ‘Revelation Space’ explores, among other things, how human society might shape itself with different responses to technology interfacing with the human body. As such it is a good example of transhumanism in fiction. Wikipedia has an article on transhumanist fiction as a genre, including links through to some works that are available for download.

I see that EndNote now has a basic style for SBL which would have saved me grief a while back. Only problem I’d need to upgrade EndNote to a new version that requires a G4 as minimum. The poor old G3 iBook doesn’t make the cut even though it word processes just fine with EndNote 7. I’d really like an EndNote style for McIntosh too - anyone (Australians?) know of one?

One thing that really annoys me about EndNote 7 (I don’t know about later versions) is it’s handling of (book) reviews as a entry type is non-existent (or I just can’t see it).