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!