So, it's done. I've submitted the final draft of my dissertation to my committee and will defend on July 1st. I reworked it a bit more after the last draft, moving my process into the methods chapter and making chapter 4 all about the preliminary results. Then chapter 5 is my new elaborated TPACK model and chapter 6 is the conclusion. I think it's pretty cool, but we'll see in about a week! 

I am now most nervous about the questions my committee might ask me in the defense. I have no idea what to prepare for. I finished my coursework several years ago, so while I understand the concepts from the courses I couldn't necessarily give any specific details about my courses. I also don't know how thoroughly I need to review the literature from my chapter 2 or whether they'll mostly focus on chapter 5. I've asked my chair if he can provide some guidance, so we'll see what he says.

Putting it all together

I just finished putting everything together in one document for the first time. Kind of invigorating, but there's still a lot of work to do. I especially need to go through and clean up my APA styling. I also need to make sure all of my references are there and cited correctly. My biggest question is how to handle the tenses. I wrote the first three chapters in future tense because I hadn't done the study yet when I wrote them. Do I revise that to past tense now? I'm waiting to hear back from my chair on that. Maybe I'll ask my editor, too.

I'm also waiting to hear back from my chair on whether I can send out my results chapter to some of the people I interviewed for review. That chapter has the new model as well as three case studies that illustrate the constructs and their boundaries. One thing I said I would do in my prospectus was send those cases out for review by others in the field. So I need to get that done. I was supposed to do it a week ago, but with the major changes we made to the results section and the new model, I just wasn't ready. But I really need to send those out today and get quick feedback on them, so I hope I hear from my chair soon.

I also had the rug pulled out from under me a bit yesterday when one of my committee members suddenly announced that he will be out of the country June 20-30, which is exactly when I was planning to defend. Now I have to hope that my dean at UVU will allow me to defend on July 1st as my contract said I would have defende BY July 1st. Needless to say, I'm a bit anxious right now.

I'm really proud of and excited about what I've done here and hope everyone else will be, too. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is nice but also scary. To get my mind off of it, I'm going to go give a conference presentation about effective blogging in higher education. Fun for me!

A total overhaul

After I got everything written last week, my chair challenged me to find a better way to organize everything. I began by sorting the TCK examples into examples of how technology can represent content, how technology can generate new content, and how content can transform technology. This proved somewhat difficult as there really aren't examples of teachers' knowledge of how content transforms technology and there were very few examples of teachers' knowledge of how technology generates new content.

I also sorted the TPK section into different different pedagogical strategies, namely motivation, communication, visualization, and classroom management.

My chair suggested that I use the chapter by Magnusson, Krajcik, and Borko in Gess-Newsome and Lederman's "Examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge" to organize the TPACK section. In this chapter, they talk about subject- and topic-specific pedagogical strategies. So I sorted everything according to that.

We wanted to further illuminate the distinctions between the constructs, though, so as I looked closer at their definition of topic-specific strategies, I noticed that they listed two things: activities and representations. Those two things seemed to really explain what we were trying to define as the distinctions between the constructs. This resulted in a major shakeup of my dissertation. I rewrote Chapter 4 (I'm actually still working on it) as an explanation of the process I've gone through. Chapter 5 is now the clean results section that defines this new model using activities and representations, provides the graphics, and shows some model cases as support. Then Chapter 6 is the conclusion. So I'm in the midst of finishing up all of the writing on all of these.

I'm behind as I was supposed to have parts of the dissertation to my committee members a week or more ago for their review, but we changed it so much that doing that doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. So I'm taking a bit of a risk turning in the whole thing for a first glance hopefully the middle of this week. We'll have to see if I still send out borderline cases to my interviewees for their review. With this new approach, I'm not sure that's going to be necessary anymore. But I said I would in my prospectus, so I may have to.

Anyway, I'm a bit stressed. I don't like being behind. My deadline is fast approaching and I HAVE to be done, but on the other hand I want to make sure that my work is really good and that my committee is on board. I don't like not having control over things, so hoping for approval from others is hard for me, but I'm not a great researcher so this is a good experience.

Anyway, I'd better get back to writing what I'm supposed to be writing. I just hope that I'm doing what needs to be done in this field, that my work will make a contribution. We'll see soon enough!