This is my last blog entry as a Ph.D. student and represents the bridge between my learning as a Ph.D. student and my research journey as a Ph.D. candidate. For those of you reading because you’re on your own journey – welcome. I hope you find use in the articles tagged Ph.D. and the corresponding course number.
If you happen to find my blog and are not a UNT student or professor, and want the world’s shortest summary of what I’ve learned in a class about qualitative research in online learning spaces & digital pedagogy, here it is: • Good pedagogy transcends teaching and learning modalities • Building relationships with students and between students promotes • Know your specific learning goals then think through what technology helps your students reach those goals
The culmination of 6040, for me, was the creation of graphic organizers to support critical thinking skills while teaching about AI for personal and academic growth. I synthesized research, and combined AI & information literacy frameworks, and created 6 different graphic organizers. Not a research prospectus, not active research. An application of research that can be used in my own and other people’s classrooms. I will be using them for research, but that’s for another day. Hopefully, the start of next school year.
I came into this class with a strong pedagogical background, and a decent research background. My growth in this class has been more focused on managing project scope and solving the right problem. I had some issues this semester with getting caught up in being stuck on doing things a particular way (developing a quiz), and the way I wanted to share it (published on this website) turned into a much, much, much larger problem than I anticipated. Instead, I evaluated a few platforms out, tried a new-to-me service (Perplexity Computer) and got a functional interactive quiz, just without hosting it on my website. Was it exactly what I wanted? No, but it met the requirements of the assignment and that’s what mattered at that point. I can solve the personal problems in other iterations. Another instance of this was my struggles with the annotated bibliography. My workflow for paper reading, note taking, and syntheses is quite different than the method prescribed in our assignment. Rule 1 of Ph.D. is be your own advocate. If something isn’t right, if you’re struggling, reach out and get help, clarification, or clearance to do things another way. The reading and synthesis were the point, not the specific methodology. I wasted a lot of time and frustration not discussing these issues sooner. Additionally, I struggled with the best ways to utilize AI tools to help me synthesize the data. I am happy to have AI help me design resources for work but somehow using it as part of the reading and synthesis process was much trickier for me. I have now developed tools and workflows to help, but for now I am a slow reader when it comes to papers I’m truly interested in.