Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet

Last week, I defended my qualifying exam and was advanced to candidacy. Today, I finished creating, checking, and uploading reports and data files for the 11 institutions who administered my survey to their students. So now I’m officially done with everything except my dissertation proper. I plan on spending the long weekend holiday (Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. so I’ll have Thursday and Friday off) working on my proposal so I can get a few drafts and outlines of chapters to my chair so I can move towards defended my proposal.

Thank you, Wen, for checking the numbers in my reports! You’re the best!

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I’m in Appleton, Wisconsin, tonight because tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a keynote and then leading a concurrent session at this year’s meeting of the Wisconsin Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (WASFAA). In my keynote I’ll discuss using newer technologies to network with colleagues and in my concurrent session I’ll discuss using technology to reach students. I’ll post some notes and reflections from both events in a day or two.

Like many similar presentations people have given lately, #sachat will feature prominently in my discussion about networking as it’s a great example of many of things about which I’ll be talking. I’m also trying to encourage the use of a public backchannel during my keynote using the #WASFAA hashtag so you can follow along there, too. Finally, I’m a bit amused that one of the major topics of my keynote – intentionality and goal-setting – is also the subject of Eric Stoller’s newest blog post at Inside Higher Ed. Great minds think alike.

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Unless there are some surprises in store for me, I have all of the data for the first “half” of my dissertation. Before I can organize and analyze it for my own purposes, however, I want to get it organized and analyzed for the institutions that so graciously asked their students to participate in this survey. I’ve had a lot of fun creating all of the (SPSS and Excel) macros that generated the necessary reports and data files. Once someone else double-checks a few of the reports by independently generating and checking the numbers, I’ll send them out to the institutions so I can move on.

But moving on will be tricky, at least for the next couple of weeks. As much as I’d like to dive in to the proposal and related data analysis (which will be crucial to the chapter about methodology seeing as how these data will determine part of my methodology; more about that later), I have quite a few distractions. In the next three weeks I will be:

• Presenting a keynote address at a state financial aid administrator conference. I’ll be talking about networking with colleagues in the 21st century (i.e. using social media and other technologies). I’ll post some notes about this soon because preparing for this talk has helped me crystallize some of my thoughts and ideas in this area, particularly the role of intentionality and goals in effectively using technology to communicate and network.
• Leading a concurrent session at the same conference. It will be a follow-up to the keynote but focusing on networking and communicating with students. I think this session will have a different flavor compared to the talk because this is an area where there is more solid research and data.
• Defending my qualifying exam. This should be straight forward and low key judging by the feedback I received on my written responses. The primary challenge is that this is sandwiched between two conferences so I’ll have to work hard to maintain my focus and give this the attention it deserves.
• Presenting a paper at a national conference. Luckily, the conference is in my backyard (Indianapolis) and I’m already very familiar with the topic. We still have to finish the paper, however, and nail down the details. Thanks goodness it’s a roundtable presentation so (a) we have had more time to write the paper and (b) it will be low key and low stress.

All of these things are worthwhile and arguably necessary. But their timing is awkward and I can already see my hoped-for dissertation proposal defense slowly moving further and further away. Hopefully I can hit it hard once I’m through with these major commitments. A turkey-fueled Thanksgiving write-a-thon may be in my future!

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