These are random thoughts cataloguing the process of putting together my NILE MA dissertation. The dates at the beginning of each section show at what point I had these thoughts. I hope they’re interesting / useful for anybody going through the same process, or deciding whether they want to.
(23/10/2023 update: this post is incredibly long! There is no obligation to read it, but I’m happy to have it to look back on my dissertation journey. Hopefully I’ll share the dissertation itself once I have feedback on it, and I’ll definitely share the framework after my upcoming holiday. Watch this space!)
Before I started
I didn’t write a dissertation at undergraduate level, and although I write a lot, I’m not hugely confident about academic writing – this has generally been the area I’ve had the most feedback about/action points for during previous MA assignments.
I had no idea where to start, but I knew that I needed to set up systems to make the process easier right from the beginning, and to choose a topic which would be interesting enough for me to want to work on my dissertation for the next 18 months or so.
Preparing to do my dissertation
(April 2022) Ruth Clark’s NILE webinar on how to access the University of Chichester resources was very useful. Although I’d looked at them before, I hadn’t appreciated how much was available, or which were the most useful resources. I’d definitely recommend talking to a university librarian / attending a university library webinar to find out what is available to you, and how to make the most of journal sites for example.
(May 2022) I wanted to set up workflows which would make the dissertation process easier. I put a call out on facebook for advice, which gave me a set of possible tools to investigate.
I also searched for recommendations for “project management dissertation” and “referencing software dissertation”. In the end, I’ve decided on:
- A Trello board for day-to-day tasks, with Evernote and Google Drive power-ups added to the relevant boards (inspired by this article and this article, from which I took a journal article reading checklist)
- Zotero for managing references (I hovered between this and Mendeley, but after reading this and watching this, decided Zotero would probably be best for me)
- Evernote for managing all of my notes / reading (I’ve used diigo bookmarking for years, but wanted to have something super flexible that was only for my dissertation, and it also integrates with Feedly, another tool I’ve used for years. I set it up using this article)
- Google Drive for managing any other documents I create, including the outline (inspired by hacking your thesis)
It took me 2-3 hours to do the research and set up all of these tools, but a) it’s worth it to save me time and stress later if they work, and b) I’ve done some of the research so you might not have to, though I recommend doing comparisons yourself to find out what’s out there!
At this point in time, that feels like everything I might need – I’ll report back on whether it worked or not later on in this post!
Choosing a topic – initial thoughts
(May 2022) Having recently worked on a couple of projects related to teacher training through the medium of WhatsApp, I thought this would be an interesting area to investigate. However, I had no idea what the focus might be – it felt very woolly.
Then at IATEFL 2022, I attended a talk by Denise Santos called IATEFL Belfast 2022: CPD for materials writers: in search of a framework, which inspired me. I feel like this could be a great way to integrate what I’ve learnt from the teacher training and materials writing modules on the MA course, and to create something which would be useful for others in the future. There are frameworks for teachers, trainers and managers, but nothing for materials writers, despite the fact that they are very influential within our profession. This feels like a very useful gap to fill.
MAPDLE Dissertation preparation module
Terminology
I initially found reading about research theory to be quite frustrating, as I couldn’t see how this might apply to what I would really like to do: create a framework. I know I would need to do research as part of it, but the theory felt incredibly abstract to me at this point. The fact that there are no specific examples connected to the terms makes them quite challenging to wrap my head around. And then I found the term pragmatism, and I’ve found the research approach for me:
Research is undertaken to answer particular questions or help solve specific problems; these questions or problems determine the choices made about the research methods used
From the NILE Dissertation Module, Activity 1b, commentary
Sample proposals / My first draft proposal
Looking at the sample research proposals made me a little depressed – it felt like so much work, and not really what I’m interested in at all! However, once I saw the sample artefact proposal things seemed to fall into place. I paused working through the module and had a go at writing my own proposal. It took about an hour to produce a first draft, using the framework of the sample proposal. I’m not sure if it the research question is tight enough, or if it’s too broad, but at least now I have an initial proposal which I can send in for feedback, and start the process of narrowing it down to something I can actually work on.
Completing the preparation module
I found the example documents to be the most useful part of the module, and have also downloaded and bookmarked various things to come back to when relevant, like the full ethics guidelines for the university. Overall it’s taken me about 4.5 hours to work through this, but I know I’ll be back multiple times as I re-write the proposal and put together my dissertation.
Submitting the proposal
The first draft I submitted seemed to be along the right lines but had too much in it. I reduced the scope of my proposal ready for the second draft, and felt more confident it was along the right lines, but I also felt like I was somewhat in limbo until I got feedback on it. I knew I had a lot to do for it, but I didn’t know where to start without the proposal being officially accepted. I tried to get ahead with other work instead so that as soon as the proposal was accepted I could dedicate as much time as possible to it.
(23rd August 2022) My proposal has been accepted 🙂 The second draft was fine, pending approval by my dissertation supervisor once they’ve been allocated. I now feel like I can start making progress! Step 1: figure out the dates of each section, and add them to my calendar. Step 2: break down each of the large tasks into smaller ones, and allocate them to the ‘dissertation days’ I already have marked in my calendar, adding more of them if necessary to make sure I have time to do everything.
Other things I did once I found out the proposal had been accepted:
- Go through this Twitter thread of 15 tools to help you manage your writing to find any extra ones I hadn’t seen before.
- Read this useful article about what to look for when doing a literature review.
- I watched this webinar Stepping Beyond Teaching: Exploring Writing as a Career by George Chilton, once I’d come up with some questions to guide my watching.
Analysing frameworks
(5th October 2022)
My Master Schedule now looks like this:
Along the top I have the dates for every ‘dissertation day’ between now and my submission date. Down the side I have each of the main tasks I need to do, with yellow sub-headings to categorise them. The dark blue boxes show a period to complete a particular section of my needs analysis or framework creation. The light blue boxes show a particular task for a particular day.
If I complete the task, I turn the box green. Ditto if I successfully have a proper ‘dissertation day’. If something is with my tutor to check it’s orange. If I didn’t do a dissertation day, it’s red. This is really helping me to manage my time and see what’s coming up, and so far I’ve managed to pretty much keep up with the tasks, even if I haven’t managed all of the days (the two red ones so far were during a course which was more intensive to train on than I expected!) I find watching it gradually turn green to be quite motivating 🙂
So far I’ve been doing some preliminary work, analysing existing competency frameworks. These are mostly from teaching but a couple are from other fields. I’m using them to get an idea of possible designs, layout, wording, and categorisation, as well as to see what areas connected to materials writing might already be covered within existing frameworks. It’s actually been quite therapeutic – I’m not anticipating that the rest of the dissertation process will be quite this straightforward! First I decided on a set of things I wanted to look for in the frameworks, then I created a table with a row for each area. I have a blank template which I copy and paste as I start analysing each framework. It changed a little as I looked at the first two or three, but now I’ve looked at eight I feel I’ve got everything covered which I might find useful.
So far I’ve learnt that there are many possible ways to word a framework, and many ways of designing the final product. I’ve got lots of inspiration and ideas for my own framework already, and am excited about starting it. As I come up with possible needs analysis questions or framework ideas I’m dropping them into running notebooks on Evernote. I also drop any links or reading I’d like to follow up on into a single notebook – at some point I need to set aside time to go back and read them!
Yesterday I hit Amazon quite hard to get a few books, the first of which is two inches thick and arrived today (!) – there is an ebook version of it available via the University of Chichester eLibrary, but I was really struggling with navigating it and decided it would be easier with a paper copy. Now I’ve seen it, I’m wondering it that was wise! Definitely going to improve my muscle tone… I’ve also ordered books on designing competency frameworks in general, as they’re commonly used in Human Resources departments, and a book by Jack Richards which has been mentioned in many places I’ve looked at so far.
Doing some actual writing!
(11/10/22)
I’ve added in Thursdays as Dissertation Days as well from now on, as I’m currently pretty excited about my topic (very unlike what I expected would be the case!) and I think I should take full advantage of that while it lasts. That gives me some extra reading time too, which I don’t think I’d given myself enough of before.
I started this Tuesday by looking at feedback from my supervisor on potential interview questions which I’d put together as I analysed frameworks. This was really useful in helping me to refine the questions, and add a couple which I hadn’t considered.
I then moved on to trying to do set word count limits for myself, so that I know roughly how much I can ‘spend’ on each section of my dissertation before I start writing. This took about 2 hours, but I feel like it was time well spent. I copied section headings from Evernote to a new tab in my dissertation master schedule, and made a guess as to how many words I think I might need for each section, using formulas to automatically add up (to) the totals in the yellow boxes and the overall total as I readjusted the numbers.
I then went through the NILE library of dissertations to find other artefact-based dissertations, converted 4 of them to Word, and looked at their word counts:
As you can see, each of them has a quite different breakdown of categories and use of words. However, all of them have a dedicated separate literature review, which I originally thought would be included in my background and rationale. Having looked at those dissertations, I think it would be clearer as a separate section in my dissertation too, and would help me to frame my thinking more clearly. I also realised that I need to add a summary of findings at the end of my needs analysis findings. Based on what I’d seen, I renumbered my chapters and reallocated my target word counts:
By the way, so far I’ve found that using a range of notebooks in Evernote where I add everything I’m thinking about as I think about it, plus having my Dissertation Master Schedule, seems to be enough in terms of organising myself – I haven’t used Trello at all.
I’m adding references to Zotero as I go along, and have experimented with downloading the reference list a couple of times – I think that tool will probably stay. Today I experimented with the feature where you can input an ISBN and it finds the book. This made things a lot quicker, but you still need to check the info, as Penny Ur appeared twice as the author for one of her books, and only one author appeared for another book with two joint authors.
By the end of the day, I’d had a go at Chapter 1 and written almost 1000 words (1/15 of the whole total!). Looking back at the sample dissertations I’d downloaded earlier in the day was useful in helping me to work out what I could write in each part and how I could word it. Despite that, I wasn’t really sure what to include in the rationale which might be different to the background, nor the overview of stages that would be different to what was in the introduction (a summary of chapters). I decided to send what I had to my supervisor and ask for help.
That meant I’d done about 5 hours on my dissertation, which felt like a good day’s work 🙂 Seeing the word count add up was also very motivating:
On ethics and interviews
(18/10/22)
Lindsay’s feedback was very useful in helping me to restructure the first section of the dissertation. I started by doing this, but left comments for myself rather than doing the rewrites at this point, as I think it’ll be easier to rewrite once I have a better idea of other parts of the dissertation.
Today I focussed on needs analysis methodology. Lindsay suggested that I add a general section about ethics, so I started with some ideas about this. As you can see, my aim when writing is to get something on the page, adding questions and comments to come back to later, rather than trying to get it perfect straight away.
I’ll be conducting my first ‘real’ research tomorrow (or it feels like it as it actually involves another person!), doing an interview. I’ve been on the other side of dissertation interviews before, but it’s quite different being in the driving seat, and having to check that I’ve got everything in place for the interview to be as successful as possible.
As recommended by Jason Skeet, the coordinator of the dissertation module for NILE, I’ve been using Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link] to help me to understand the research side of the dissertation.
I started off by using the electronic version, available via the University of Chichester ebooks platform, but found it to be quite frustrating as I find ebooks challenging to use for reference. I decided to buy my own copy, and it’s a beast – 961 pages, nearly 2kg (yes, I just weighed it!), but I still find it easier to be able to flick back and forth in a paper book, and highlight relevant bits.
Today I read the chapter about interviews in depth, having already read a few other sections last week, including one on mixed methods and another on ethics. I used that to write a summary of why I’ve chosen a mixed methods approach, and the methodology behind my semi-structured interview, as well as to create an ‘interview schedule’ (a new term for me today!) ready for tomorrow. I already had the questions I wanted to ask, but now I know exactly how I’ll start and end the interview.
I’ve written over 1000 words, and realised that I’ve underestimated how many words I need to explain the methodology, but that’s a problem for another day…
Reviewing the literature
(25/10/2022)
Last week I interviewed one of the creators of a framework I’m analysing. We spoke for an hour, and it was incredibly useful. It validated some of my approach to researching for my framework, particularly the idea of examining existing competency frameworks, and challenged my thinking on other areas, for example what the top level of my framework should cover. I took notes during the interview, but also recorded it and uploaded it to Otter.ai for transcription. If you don’t already know about Otter, it’s an amazing bit of software which automatically transcribes audio. The results aren’t perfect, but they certainly save a lot of time compared to transcribing from scratch. My mum is going to help me tidy up the transcription (with the permission of the interviewee) and I’ll then write up my findings from the interview.
Today I planned to write as much of my literature review as possible, ready to compile my needs analysis questionnaire next week. I started by working out the headings for the section, and just writing those and a couple of introductory sentences came to 125 words!
Probably unsurprisingly, my initial ambition to ‘write as much of my literature review as possible’ hasn’t been realised! After 5 hours of work, I’ve produced 1190 words, mostly focussed on defining professionalisation (which hadn’t even appeard in my initial outline this morning!) and considering it in relation to materials writing, with lots of changes in the sub-headings I’ve come up with, which you can kind of see here:
I’ve found lots of sources I’d like to explore further, and somewhat as expected there’s a lot of rabbit holes I’ve gone down and probably will continue to go down on Thursday, when I’ll continue with the literature review.
The thorny nature of definitions
(27/10/2022)
Today I’ve spent almost four hours grappling with definitions of materials and materials writing from a number of sources. I’ve ended up with just over 1000 words justifying my final definitions, and added bits and pieces to sections on the effect of materials on learning and my background for the whole dissertation as I’ve read around today. I’ve brought the total for the literature review up to 2600 words, which is already 600 above my proposed amount and I’m nowhere near finished yet!
I ended up being super motivated and came back later in the evening (normally I stop at about 5pm!) to write another 475 words defining competencies and competency frameworks.
Compiling my questionnaire
(01/11/22)
Today I’ve spent 7 hours reading about questionnaires and surveys in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link], then compiling my bumper needs analysis questionniare. If you filled it in, I salute you. Thank you! Because I’m really not sure what I might need to include in my overall framework, I’ve tried to keep the NA questionnaire as open as possible, with the aim of getting a range of answers from a range of different people to inform the framework. I know it’ll involve a lot of data processing afterwards, but I’m not sure how else I can make the framework as representative as possible, rather than making it something I have produced by myself.
(29/11/22)
If it looks like a long time without doing anything, that’s because I’ve spent most of November on an amazing work / play trip to Australia, but now it’s time to get back to work on my dissertation. I’ve missed it!
I only had 4 hours today, so I spent the time using my tutor’s feedback to edit my questionnaire. I managed to make it a bit shorter, and have made more of the questions compulsory. However, as the aim is to get ideas for what to include in the framework, and I want to help people to think about a range of different areas of materials writing, I think there’s a limit to how short I can make it. After an hour or so of reorganising it, I sent it to a few people to pilot it this week, with the aim (hopefully!) of making it public next week.
I also put together the blog post and social media posts I want to use to publicise the questionnaire and try to get responses.
My first big hiccup
(06/12/22)
Today I’ve only been able to spend a couple of hours on my dissertation again – time seems really tight right now! Based on the 6 responses I got to piloting my questionnaire, I realised that it really didn’t do what I needed it to in terms of offering ideas for competences to include in my framework. I’ve therefore completely rewritten it to make it shorter and focus on qualititative data that could feed into possible competences. I’ve also clarified what I mean by knowledge, skills and abilities, partly with the help of a driving metaphor from this website.
(13/12/22)
I started the day by messing about on social media, which is quite common for me, but today it was actually useful! I came across a post from the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group (RESIG) which shared a tribute to Zoltán Dörnyei: a recording of him speaking about five issues in designing a questionnaire. I started my day by watching these videos, but it wasn’t so relevant to my questionnaire as it’s much more geared to quantitative research, and mine is more qualitative. Still useful to know about though!
In the morning, I created a third draft of the questionnaire and sent it to a few people for a last-minute pilot, with the aim of getting it out into the world today. I know Christmas isn’t an ideal period to send out questionnaires, but waiting until after Christmas would mean a huge delay in my dissertation as a whole. I’ve tried to work around this by adding extra time after Christmas (though it doesn’t factor in things like the Spanish Epiphany holiday on 6th January). Hopefully there will still be enough data to give me plenty of ideas to feed into the competency framework, which is the ultimate aim of this questionnaire.
Because of the problems with the questionnaire and the need for 3 drafts, I needed to reshuffle my overall schedule. It now pushes my predicted end dates to within a week of the submission date, rather than 3 weeks before. Some of the red dissertation days are planned, like a trip to Australia, Christmas, and the IATEFL conference, but there are more red days than I’d like :s Hopefully I can get some of that time back, but we’ll see! This is what the whole thing looks like now:
At the end of the day having received responses from a couple of people who I asked to pilot the questionnaire, I decided it was time to let it loose on the world. Thank you very much if you were one of the people who completed it or shared it!
Today I also shared the transcript from the interview I did in October with the interviewee for approval.
Collecting data
(20/12/2022)
I spent a couple of hours this morning sharing my questionnaire in as many places and with as many people as I could think of. I already have 44 responses, and the ideas shared have already made me think about new things to include in the framework which I hadn’t considered before.
Next I finalised the interview transcript and put it into my ongoing dissertation document, which already ran to 105 pages before adding the transcript. The document has many page breaks already in place – I haven’t written anywhere near that much, but it’s still great to see the document coming together.
I spent the rest of the day summarising findings from the interview, and the methodology for the questionnaire, as well as shaving about 100 words off the rest of my writing – every word counts!
(5/1/2023)
I’ve had 124 responses to the questionnaire, only 4 or 5 of which don’t have any data in (!), so thank you so much if you contributed. Today I started to work out how to analyse the data, beginning with reading the relevant chapters on analysing qualititative data in Research Methods in Education, 8th edition [Amazon affiliate link, Bookshop.org UK affiliate link]. This afternoon I started playing around with a spreadsheet where I can analyse the results based on the one that Google Forms automatically generated (which makes life so much easier!) I’ve added a few new tabs, and spent a couple of hours analysing data from the people who volunteered to be in focus groups (thank you!) to work out how many groups there could be, and who might be in each group. I know there are currently too many groups, and that not everybody will be able to participate, but that’s a job for another day!
Organising data
(24/1/23)
Due to other commitments I haven’t been able to spend as much time on my dissertation as I wanted to, only managing 2 out of the 5 days of analysing results which I’d planned in the past three weeks. Having broken down (to some extent!) the answer to two of the qualitative questions I asked, I know I’ve already got loads of useful ideas for the framework, and plenty of things that would never have occured to me if I hadn’t done the survey. Very pleased to see it’s served its purpose 🙂
I decided to read each answer and use it to come up with headings. Every time I see a similar answer I add a ‘1’ to that column, so that I’ll be able to see which headings come up most frequently across each question. Some people have put all of their answers under the first question, or have grouped them differently to how I might have done, so I need to consider when it’s acceptable to recategorise them. I think this should be acceptable as the aim of the whole survey was to generate possible ideas for the framework, rather than to come up with definitive answers to any of the questions I asked. I’ve set up conditional formatting to change the colour of cells with answers in, and a calculation column to help me check how many separate ideas I’ve pulled out of each answer to give me a rough idea of whether I’ve covered everything. My mum is checking my classification, and yet again I’m really grateful for her help!
It looks something like this (very, very zoomed out!):
I started to colour code some of the headings to make it easier to find my way around.
(31/1/23)
It’s taken me about 2 hours to group potential focus group participants from the list of volunteers from the survey. I’ve decided to group by approximate levels of experience, and that has thankfully given me similar sized groups, and a good mix of backgrounds. I’ve updated the consent form, information sheet and debrief sheet and sent them all off to my supervisor to check. Now for more results analysis…
I’ve started to notice patterns in the results, and have therefore been reusing some of the headings I’ve based on the answers to previous questions. As I started the third question, it made sense to paste the colour-coded headings directly as these seem to be the ones which are recurring most often. I’ve also made a separate list of all the headings I’ve used so far to make it easier to find them when I want to reuse them, rather than producing original wording each time. This is what it looked like after analysing just one question:
(07/02/23)
I’ve started today by finalising the focus group ethics documentation based on feedback from my dissertation supervisor. I sent out the invites and have already had quite a few responses.
The other half of the day was about continuing to analyse data from the questionnaire. There’s so much of it! But I’m starting to see patterns, and there are so many seeds for potential descriptors in there for the framework. It’s fascinating.
I finished the third question, copied the answer headings to a descriptor overview spreadsheet, and decided to reorganise them. Sometimes I know there’s a heading connected to a particular topic, but even using CTRL + F I can’t always find it. I gave each heading a category, then regrouped them by these categories and colour-coded them again. I then transposed those headings back to the spreadsheet ready to analyse the fourth question (of six…still some way to go!)
(19/2/23)
The last couple of weeks haven’t been great for my dissertation, with a lot of other things going on, meaning I’m doing a bit of work at the weekend to at least get something done. I’m away from home and feeling motivated, so why not?
Tomorrow is the deadline for people to reply to me about participating in my focus groups, so I followed up with all of the people who haven’t replied yet. This was absolutely worthwhile, as I’ve had at least 10 replies today, including a couple of people who thought they’d replied to me but hadn’t 🙂
I also managed to do some more processing of answers from my questionnaire – it’s much faster now I have consistent categories, and I really wish I’d settled on them much earlier.
Focus groups
(7/3/23, 09:45)
Work on my dissertation for the past couple of weeks has been somewhat spotty, and has mostly consisted of following up on potential focus group participants. I ended up with all but 2 replies from the 59 invitations to participate which I originally sent out, and based on those who replied later I suspect those 2 invitations probably ended up in spam. 38 people have said yes across 6 groups, so even if some people pull out I should still be able to get quite varied input into this stage of my research.
I haven’t quite finished analysing all of the data from the questionnaire, but so far the last small section seems to be falling under the same headings as previous sections. This meant I was confident enough to turn those headings into slides for the focus groups to discuss. I sent out a preliminary email with some areas to consider: information about competence frameworks in general, what levels might work for my framework, and the headings on the slides.
I ran the first focus group yesterday, and have already realised that a lot of the loose categorisations I came up with to group the headings don’t make sense. They suggested a lot of ways to regroup the headings, which has made me think that the focus groups should be more iterative, rather than every group discussing the exact same set of data. I’ll run focus group 2 with the same set of data but looking at the slides in reverse so that the inevitable fatigue of looking at so many areas will hopefully kick in at a different point.
When thinking about how to write up this iterative idea, I’ve been sent a journal article which includes the sentence:
CPL potentially provides iterative adjustments for optimal approximations of intersubjective meaning-making, repeatedly testing and calibrating the research instruments, throughout the duration of measurement.
Murphey and Falout (2010: 818)
I’ve read this sentence multiple times, and even in the context of the whole article it’s pretty challenging to understand. It hurts my head somewhat!
(4/4/23)
March has been a whirlwind! I’ve spent the last month having some of the busiest weeks of my freelance career so far, while also fitting in 6 dissertation focus groups. Following on from my thoughts above, I decided to recreate my slides after each pair of focus groups. That meant focus groups 1 and 2 discussed the first set of slides, 3 and 4 discussed the second set, and 5 and 6 discussed the final set. At one point that involved me working until after 10pm to get the slides ready so that participants would have at least 24 hours to look at them before we met. I don’t normally work in the evenings now, so it was all pretty intense!
Having said that, it was completely worth it. I got so much useful information from the 32 participants (thank you!). The way the slides evolved through the discussions in the focus groups means I have a much clearer idea in my head now of what I think the categories should include, and while they’re still not perfect a lot of the categories make a lot more sense now than they did when I created them based on the 70% or so of the questionnaire results I’d managed to analyse before the first focus group. Some individual topics have also been clarified and/or refined for me, and I’ve also added more possible topics based on the discussions.
Today I watched the video of focus group 1 and realised just how much I missed (!) when taking live notes during the session. I’ve now sent those notes to the participants for them to sign off on what they discussed, ready for inclusion in my final dissertation.
I didn’t manage to have any dissertation time last week, and today I’ve only had 3 hours (including writing this) so I’ve fallen quite far behind my schedule. I was supposed to be compiling the first draft of the framework last week, this week and for a couple more weeks. However, I estimate that I’m at least 6 weeks away from being able to do that, not least because I need to write up more of the actual dissertation itself based on what I’ve done so far! Luckily I’ve still got 6 months until I need to hand it in, but I can’t keep losing dissertation days. Let’s see what happens!
Hiatus
(25/4/23)
The busy, busy period continues. I’ve spent 8 minutes on my dissertation today, including writing out this action plan with the next steps for my supervisor:
- Write up the focus group notes and send them to participants to approve.
- Summarise all of the focus group information within the dissertation, both the process of setting them up and the findings.
- Go back to the questionnaire and finish fully analysing those results.
- Summarise the questionnaire information within the dissertation – both set up and findings.
- Go back to the frameworks I analysed, finish doing that, and summarise the results.
- Send you my dissertation with all of the research part ‘completed’ for you to check.
- Go back to the background reading / literature review and tidy that up, including making it shorter, while also adding the (some of the many!) things I’ve come across since my first pass at it.
- Send that section to you for feedback.
- Compile the framework – I’ve already got lots of ideas, but want to go over everything again before I start properly.
- Write up my justification of my ideas.
- Send the framework and the justification to you for feedback.
- Present the framework in a webinar and ask for feedback (perhaps accompanied by a proper questionnaire to get quantitative results?)
- Write up the feedback from the webinar(/questionnaire?), plus a summary of possible changes to be made in a second version.
- Send that to you for feedback.
- Rewrite any/all sections which need to be done to fit the word limit.
- Submit the whole dissertation for marking.
- Go on holiday for a week 😉
Now I just need to find time to do all that!
Getting back down to it
(23/5/23 – 10am)
I’m way more excited than I probably should be that (shock horror!) I actually get to focus on my dissertation all day today. The last few weeks have been full of conference preparation and attendance, All The Marking, and a brief bout of COVID, but now I’ve finally emerged from the other end. Now to catch up on everything I was supposed to do…
My Google calendar tells me that my original plan was to be putting together the framework itself at the moment – I should be on day 87 of 90 of doing that, but I’m not close to starting yet. Let’s see how long it takes me to get to that stage!
(23/5/23 – 6pm)
Today felt very productive in the end. I was able to summarise notes from three of my focus groups and send them to participants to comment on. I couldn’t manage any more as I stopped being able to concentrate a couple of hours ago. Since then I’ve been adding to my appendices. I’ve put in all of the documentation for my focus groups and the interview I did, including sample emails of invitiation, the information sheets and consent forms, the debrief sheets, the schedule (a kind of ‘script’ for an interview), and various other samples of communication. I’ve also added screenshots of the Google Forms from all three drafts of my questionnaire, and started to collate the ‘easy’ bits of the questionnaire results: the profiling statistics like gender and languages spoken.
The main body of my dissertation runs to 24 pages and currently doesn’t contain much actual information, just a lot of headings and page breaks. The appendices are a somewhat crazy 240 pages, and I’m nowhere near the end of creating them!
I’ve downloaded a copy of the whole dissertation so far from Google Docs – I think I’m going to start doing that regularly now to make sure I’ve always got copies of it in a couple of places, just in case!
(6/6/23)
Today I’ve finished writing up the notes for the final focus group, and finished my first pass at the questionnaire data. This is what my two screens looked like while I was analysing the questionnaire data. The top screen had the raw data, organised by question. I had a Word document open to copy longer answers and delete the relevant information as I entered it into the spreadsheet. I did this by putting a ‘1’ into a cell in the relevant column, adding / editing columns as necessary.
The bottom screen had a list of the rough descriptors I’d come up with, organised into approximate categories a couple of months ago. As I updated descriptors, I edited this list. It was also much easier to scan or search this list to find a specific descriptor I needed, as you can see below with ‘weaknesses’. I could then find the relevant column in the main spreadsheet to add the ‘1’.
The next job is to collate all of the questionnaire findings into a single spreadsheet. I originally analysed them one question at a time and the descriptors evolved as I went along, meaning that the list has got longer and more organised question by question. There’s also a risk that I’ve logged one respondent as saying the same thing multiple times depending on how they answered the questions in the survey. I need to remove that duplication to be able to see how often each answer was given, respondent by respondent. That might take a while!
(25 minutes later)
Step 1: Add a ‘Question number’ column to the spreadsheet so I can easily re-sort everything later if I want to, and a ‘New column’ column (!) so I can show where descriptors need to move to. Add another column to number the descriptors because otherwise ‘F’ will appear later than ‘AA’ when you sort them later.
Step 2: Filter for descriptors from ‘Other’ (the last question I looked at) and ‘Language systems’ (the first question.
Step 3: Put the descriptors in alphabetical order.
Step 4: For any descriptors which are clearly the same, write the column from the ‘Other’ spreadsheet into the ‘New column’ column for the ‘Language systems’ spreadsheet. Add ‘0’ to the ‘New column’ column for the corresponding ‘Other’ descriptor so you can easily hide the ones I’ve already done later. Like so, where the right hand side shows the New column, and the one before shows the column letters from the original spreadsheet:
Step 5: Work through the remaining ones and try to match as many original descriptors to final descriptors as possible.
Step 6: Try not to cry when it gets super complicated and nothing seems to match 😉
Questionnaire and more questionnaire…
(13/6/23, 3pm)
This morning I met my supervisor and she agreed that it’s enough to analyse my data and create the framework from it, without needing to present it and get feedback on the first draft as well. That’s really useful as it gives me more time to play with to compile the framework, and more words to play with when describing my findings and justifying the framework. I still want to present it and get feedback, but now I can do that after the dissertation itself is complete.
I spent the rest of the day working on collating the questionnaire results so that they are in a more usable format. I spent 3.5 hours finishing what I started last week and described above, so that now all of the answers are on a single spreadsheet. Now I’m trying to make sure that the responses aren’t skewed so that if one person said the same thing multiple times it’s only recorded once. This is where spreadsheets, formulae, and conditional formatting are my friends.
At the bottom of the full answers spreadsheet I’ve added one numbered row per respondent. The number is copied into column C so I don’t end up with a circular formula if I decide to use the whole of column A in my formula. Then I’ve used this formula in all of the cells at the bottom of the column, copied once per respondent:
=SUMIF($A$2:$A$745,$C746,E$2:E$745)
What that does is look at the cell in column C to check which respondent I’m asking about, find the relevant rows by matching that respondent number with the same one in the top part of column A, then checks whether those rows have any data in the column I’m asking about, in this case column E. For respondent 1, there is 1 data point in column E, so I get a total of 1 in cell E746 where the formula is placed.
I’ve then got conditional formatting set up, so that if the answer is ‘0’ I get a blank cell (white text in a white cell), if it’s ‘1’ I get a green box, and if it’s more than 1 I get a red box. That shows me where I need to check for possible duplication within the same person’s answers. For example:
I can then filter by respondent number to check the answers and remove any duplication. For example, respondent 6 has two answers in column F, so I need to check their specific answers to see whether they are actually duplicated. That’s my job for the rest of today.
(13/6/23, 5:30pm)
Done 🙂 That worked nicely, and now I know how many people mentioned each descriptor without having any duplication in their answers. I’ve copied those numbers to another tab in the giant spreadsheet. Next time I sit down to do my dissertation I need to see whether the possible descriptors taken from the answers of only a handful of respondents need to be separate descriptors at all, or whether they can be removed. That would be helpful as I currently have 2002 data points and 130 possible descriptors.
Back to frameworks
(27/6/23)
Today I re-read everything I’d written in my analysis of frameworks before, then analysed three extra ones. I ran out of time before, and didn’t manage to do these ones. Interesting to see how I look at them differently now I’ve thought so much more about my own framework!
(11/7/23)
I was away for work last week, and this morning I couldn’t get on the internet while I was at the hospital for my regular medication, so I only managed half a day today. I analysed two more frameworks, and started on the last one I plan to look at, which will bring me to a total of 13 frameworks from all over the world and from a range of different domains.
(18/7/23)
I started today by reading two articles from the latest issue of ELT Journal – I’m really enjoying having access to journals through my university login! They were Miso Kim on Decolonizing ELT materials: a sociomaterial orientation and Suresh Canagarajah on Decolonization as pedagogy: a praxis of ‘becoming’ in ELT. The first article gave me a couple of ideas for possible descriptors in my framework, and the second gave me some background to understand the first one, though I think I’d need to read it a few more times to fully understand it!
I analysed my final existing framework – and discovered at least one more I could analyse in the process, but I really need to draw the line somewhere.
I then went back and re-read everything I’ve written in the body of my dissertation so far. I tidied up some of the wording, and looked at three more books on competency frameworks, as I’d previously only referenced one of the four I have.
(20/7/23)
It was nice to be able to do a couple of hours on a Thursday this week, not just on a Tuesday. I worked my way through re-reading more of my literature review, and realised about 1500 words I wrote before are probably irrelevant. I’ve added a comment to ask my supervisor to comfirm this before I delete it or write anything else there.
I tidied up what I’d written about the ethics of my research and the semi-structured interview I conducted, then wrote up the section on the methodology of analysing other competency frameworks.
Making progress!
(1/8/23)
Today has been an excellent dissertation day, and I feel like I’ve achieved a lot. I’ve written about 3000 words of actual dissertation (!) I summarised the results of my analysis of competency frameworks and the implications for my framework and detailed the methods and summarised the results for my needs analysis questionnaire.
(3/8/23)
This morning I’ve been able to finish writing up my research results, summarising my method and findings for the focus groups. I’ve tidied up my dissertation document and sent it off for feedback to my supervisor – I’m feeling quite good about what I’ve achieved, but there’s definitely work to be done, especially to the literature review where I went off on a bit of a tangent! I’ve got 11420 words so far, out of 15000 in total, so it feels like an achievable target to get the whole thing finished within the word count.
Since I scrapped the idea for a webinar and a follow-up questionnaire to get feedback on the framework, by master schedule has become a bit pointless. It mostly only exists now to show me how many ‘dissertation days’ I have left until my deadline, as according to my original plans the full framework should have been completed by 9th May – I haven’t even started it yet!
It’s also useful for monitoring my current word count, though my calculations don’t quite match the total word count when I check the whole assignment.
I’m feeling good about my progress so far!
It’s framework time!
(10/8/23, 9:30am)
The day has finally arrived: I’ve now got everything I need (I hope!) to actually start compiling my framework.
(4:10pm)
I’ve got a first draft of the framework. I started off trying to do it on pieces of paper that I could move around, but very quickly decided that would be too much writing. Instead I created a spreadsheet. I copied all of the descriptors from the slides for the final focus group onto a single sheet, including the category names which the focus groups had seemed to agree on:
- Visual design
- Activity design
- Learning design (possibly combined with Category 3)
- Content
- Technical writing skills
- Creative writing skills (possibly combined with Category 5; potentially ambiguous – the creativity of the materials writer or the ability to do creative writing?)
- Learner experience (of activities)
- Understanding the learner and learning context
- Sequencing materials
- Understanding the classroom
- Assessment
- Teacher’s notes
- Theoretical background
- Professional skills
- (Not a clear category – could be combined with Category 14)
- Characteristics of a materials writer (though these may not have a place in a competency framework)
- Language awareness
Next I created a series of new sheets, one per category. I used a mix of category names from before and ones which felt right to me. In the order in which they came to me, these are the 15 categories I now have:
- Working with publishers
- Creating teacher’s notes
- Language awareness
- Professional relationships
- Understanding how you work
- Theoretical background
- Digital skills
- Writing skills
- Layout
- Assessment
- Understanding learners
- Meeting learners’ needs
- Sequencing materials
- Activity design
- Providing variety and balance
As I went along, I copied descriptors from the focus groups list and edited them for clarity and consistency. I decided to start all of the descriptors with an -ing verb, to finish the sentence ‘Writing effective materials for language learning means…’
Here’s an example of the descriptors I have for ‘Meeting learners’ needs’, currently the longest category:
As you can see, I have various notes to myself as I consider how the framework might be streamlined.
As I created the descriptors, I realised that I can’t see how to break any of the descriptors down into different levels, so the framework will serve more as a ticklist of areas to develop in than a series of levels to progress through. I’m currently not completely convinced that it’s possible to demonstrate competency in every area I’ve listed as a descriptor.
At this point, I think I need to step away and let the descriptors sit for a few days, then come back to them with fresh eyes. I’ll go back through the questionnaire and focus group results and my analyses of other frameworks to see if there’s anything which I’ve missed. After that I’ll go through the long list of reading matter I’ve collected which could potentially inform the framework, and see if there’s anything I could add.
During that process, I also need to decide what order the categories should appear in, and what order the descriptors should be in within each category. Plenty to keep me busy!
(22/8/23, 10:50am)
I’ve got feedback from my dissertation supervisor on everything I’ve written so far, apart from the framework itself which wasn’t part of what I submitted. I’ve had a quick look through, and am pleased to see that I seem to be largely on track. As expected, there are some parts which I need to remove or tidy up – there are always things that make sense when you write them, but don’t make sense to other readers (one reason why it’s important to have editors and to pilot materials you create!) I’m going to put that on hold though, and keep working on my framework today.
I’ve started by looking back through the descriptors from 2 weeks ago and tidying them up a bit. For example, ‘Meeting learners’ needs’ now looks like this, with some loose grouping:
(22/8/23, 5pm)
I’ve worked through about 400 of the 650 questionnaire responses I received. In the process, I’ve moved around and reworded a few descriptors as well as adding a few new ones. Some of these changes were prompted by the responses, others by ideas that occured to me to clarify some of the competences.
(24/8/23)
It’s just occured to me that rather than including levels in the framework itself, framework users could give themselves a rating from 0-4 for each descriptor to help them decide which areas to focus on for their development.
(1:50pm)
I’ve just finished going through all of the questionnaire responses – I hope I did them all justice, as at times my mind was wandering and I was going cross-eyed. It’s a lot of information to process! I did take regular short breaks, but still…
Responding to feedback
(29/8/23)
Today’s focus was responding to my supervisor’s feedback. I rewrote some of the literature review to get rid of the focus on the professionalisation of materials writing – watch out for a blogpost version of it at some point in the future. I did all of the minor edits, and a few of the more major ones, but with an hour of my working day left I couldn’t concentrate any more. I decided to use this time to reorganise the interview transcript to make it more user-friendly and update the timestamps for the interview I did months ago – a time-consuming task that needs to be done at some point. Unfortunately Google Docs won’t do it automatically for me, unlike Microsoft Word!
Clarifying coding
(31/8/23)
I only managed 90 minutes of dissertation this Thursday, as I’ve got marking deadlines and my next Take Your Time Delta cohort are about to start – lots of applications and admin to get through, which is a good problem to have! I started learning about types of data coding and realising that my initial ‘figure it out as you go along’ approach needs to have proper terminology applied to it if it’s going to be clear to people reading my dissertation. I also tidied up the section describing the design and distribution of the questionnaire, including adding more references to survey design theory.
Wishes and regrets
(5/9/23)
Today I’ve spent a long time reading parts of three books I probably should have looked at a long time ago:
- Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers by Judith Bell and Stephen Waters (buy on Amazon)
- Developing a questionnaire by Bill Gillham (buy on Amazon)
- Research Methods for Education by Peter Newby (buy on Amazon)
They’re all available on the Chichester e-Library via VLE Books, a source I’ve been somewhat neglecting but need to explore further. If you want your own copies, there are Amazon affiliate links in brackets above.
Reading the books and looking again at my data made me realise that I probably should have piloted my questionnaire much more intensively to make the data analysis stage more effective. On the plus side, my survey rationale now includes references to a wider range of literature, and I’m more aware of survey design issues if I ever do something like this again in the future (hmm!)
I’ve also realised today that I probably should have held off on running the focus groups until I was much further through the data analysis of the questionnaire results and perhaps had also started to create a framework. That would have allowed me to use the focus groups to refine what was in my framework and clarify doubts, potentially getting a lot more out of them by reducing the amount of data I took into them and focussing the discussion questions a lot more.
What does the literature say?
(7/9/23)
Today I’ve been taking advantage of the University of Chichester VLE Books access to ebooks, and working my way through The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching to find out what they say makes effective materials, and by extension what materials writers need to know. I’ve read/skimmed the first half of the book, and there’s still plenty to look through. I’ve written about 600 words about it so far, and that’s without looking at any other books! I expect I’ll have to get rid of some of that at some point…
(12/9/23, 2:30pm)
I’ve spent three hours today reading relevant sections of The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldana [Amazon affiliate link] I bought a paper copy of it last week when I saw it referenced multiple times in a talk by the NILE MA coordinator, but couldn’t find it in the ebooks library. I’ll ask for it to be added, but as there are only 6 weeks to my deadline I needed it faster! I’d definitely recommend this book if you’re doing any kind of coding. It is a very readable, accessible introduction to coding qualitative data, one which I wish I’d found about 8 months ago. I’m going to rewrite the methodology sections of my results analysis based on what I learnt. For example, now I know that I used in vivo coding (quotes from the voices of the questionnaire respondents) to generate my intial codes, then I put them into categories. If I have time before I submit my dissertation, I might recode my data properly using the ideas from the book. Unfortunately I need to prioritise other things right now, like making sure the framework is in a user-friendly form and creating a justification for how I have structured it. Before I do that though, I’m going to keep working through the literature to see what it says about the skills a materials writer needs. That’s my job for the rest of today, after the results analysis rewriter.
(14/9/23)
I carried on working through the Routledge handbook today, and realised quite quickly that I was ending up with a long list of points from the book which would give me one or two thousand words of dissertation with no chance to really analyse it. I decided to change my approach. I copied my framework and added relevant references I found next to each descriptor, adding or editing descriptors slightly where necessary. This is one example for the activity design category:
(21/9/23)
On Tuesday and for most of today (Thursday) I’ve continued with this process, and I have to say I’m going a bit cross-eyed at this point! I decided to stop an hour before the end of the day, and instead take another look at my appendices to see what I can streamline. When I looked at the competency frameworks originally I included lots of excerpts in the appendices, but I’ve now realised they don’t really add anything to my framework, not least becaue there’s already a sample section from each framework. I’ve reread the excerpts in case they inspire any other editing in my descriptors, and then deleted them. This has made my document 31 pages shorter!
My framework looks pretty!
(26/9/23)
The wording of the framework isn’t 100% ready yet, but since I have 29 days until I have to submit the dissertation, I thought it was probably about time that my dissertation supervisor could see a version of the framework to give me feedback on it. I spent the afternoon creating a document version of the framework, including 6 possible use cases to demonstrate how the framework could be used by different people or groups. It’s got colour-coding for each section to hopefully make it a bit easier to navigate.
I think this is what I have left to do:
- Write a full first draft of the rationale for the design of the framework so my supervisor can comment on it – I’ve started picking away at it, but there’s not much there yet
- Finish updating the literature review (+ ask for feedback)
- Update the focus groups method and summary of results (+ ask for feedback)
- Update the section describing my analysis of existing frameworks (+ ask for feedback)
- Respond to any remaining feedback
- Finish adding references from the literature to the table (the literature review may change slightly as a result, but I think it’s better to do this last as it’s something of a rabbit hole!)
- Add all the appendix / table / figure numbers to the dissertation
- Check it all
- Submit it!
- Go on holiday 🙂
By my reckoning I have about 6 full working days to do this in, though some weekend days may be added if necessary!
(28/9/23)
Today I compiled a rationale for my framework design and sent it to my supervisor to check. I also spent an hour at the end of the day continuing to add to my references.
My current word count is 16,329 words with at least 837 for tables (which don’t count) out of a possible 16,500 – 15,000 words + 10%. I definitely need to tidy up some sections though so hoping I can stay within that word count without having to do too much painful cutting!
The end is in sight
(10/10/23 11:40)
Two weeks to go until my dissertation is due, and I’m starting to reach the slightly panicked stage of wondering whether it will all be done in time. Due to travel last week I didn’t manage to do any of it at all, so now I have 4 full and 2 partial days (including today) timetabled in to finish it, and I need to send the whole thing to my supervisor by the end of this week to get feedback on a full draft. I’m going to do as much as I can for the rest of today and on Thursday and send it to her after that.
(10/10/23 19:00)
I’ve managed to update all parts of the assignment which had feedback on them (I hope!), including making the section about analysing existing frameworks much clearer by adding in more images from frameworks and tables summarising key information. It’s very helpful that they’re not in the word count!
I also went through the framework and changed all of the gerunds starting the descriptors (Understanding, Aligning, etc.) to can-do statements (Can understand, Can align, etc.). I think this makes it clearer and easier to understand. Doing this prompted me to reword some of the descriptors which made them more actionable. Three people have read my framework so far, so I was also able to update some areas which they found potentially confusing. In the process I have managed to get rid of the two sections which were labelled ??? as I realised that the descirptors could be better placed in other parts of the framework. Every time I read it again, something changes!
(12/10/23)
6 hours 45 minutes of work on my dissertation today, and I’ve just sent an (almost) full final draft to my dissertation supervisor for feedback. I still need to do a bit more on the literature review and go back over focus group results to see if I’ve missed anything in the framework, but the end is definitely in sight. Today I added numbers to dissertation sections and appendices, captioned all of the figures and tables, removed a load of comments and yellow highlighting from my dissertation, added finishing touches to the framework document including finishing the glossary, and added screenshots of the framework to the document. It looks much closer to finished now than it did this morning! 🙂
(17/10/23)
I was very pleased to get feedback on my draft today and realise I only needed to spend about an hour responding to it, as things are coming together nicely and my work is generally clear. I clarified a couple of points, then started looking back through my focus group summaries to add references to what they said to my table of descriptors, literature and references to my research.
Almost there!
(Fri 20/10/23)
My deadline is Tuesday 24th October, so not long left now! Yesterday I spent nine and a half hours on my dissertation, mostly adding references from the literature and my survey results to form Appendix 6 of my final dissertation, in which I back up every descriptor based on my research. It’s quite a rabbit hole, but an interesting process because I’m still making some tweaks to the framework based on what I’m finding, including adding and removing descriptors and rewording them.
I’ve got a couple of hours today to do some more of that, and I’ll probably have to work at the weekend.
(Sat 21/10/23, 16:00)
I managed 3 hours on Friday, and I’ve now spent 8.5 hours on it today, including finding some really useful sources last minute. Kind of glad I didn’t find some of these earlier though as I think I would have tied myself in knots trying to include all of the skills other people mentioned, whereas at this point I can see how they fit into the framework I’ve created. I’ve just finished copying and pasting all the references into Appendix 6 of my dissertation. There are 4 descriptors with no references from the literature, so I’ve put out a call on social media to see if anybody can help me fill those gaps.
(16:30)
I’ve added the proper cover sheet for the dissertation, and changed the line spacing from 1.3 to 1.5 – thankfully by modifying the ‘Normal’ style I could change it in one place and it updated throughout my document.
I’ve turned all of my tables into images, as the words from them don’t count in the final word count (such a useful tip from my supervisor!) My word limit is 15,000 words, which means I can have up to 16,500 words in total (up to 10% over). How happy was I when I saw that I’ve got 15,997 words! 🙂
(17:00)
I’ve added my bibliography from Zotero, which is pretty magic. So glad I spent time finding a bibliography tool at the beginning! Tomorrow I need to check that references which are lettered, e.g. 2022a, 2022b, are consistent throughout my dissertation, and add screenshots of the updated version of my framework. That’s it for today though as we’re off to a Clive Carroll concert this evening 🙂 (and I think (9h45m of work is quite enough for a Saturday!)
(Sun 22/10/2023, 10:30)
3 hours again so far this morning… I’ve added references from the last couple of books I had on my desk. I realised that Zotero has some small flaws: in APA, it only adds date accessed/retrieved for documents, not for web links (where they’re generally more important!); it doesn’t put chapter titles, blog post titles or journal article titles in apostrophes (though as I write this I’ve just double-checked with APAstyle.org and it looks like they don’t actually need them any more – that was a waste of 20 minutes…); it doesn’t include the name of a podcast / YouTube channel in some entries; and some of the entries aren’t quite in the right date order when one author has written multiple things. I’m cursing John Hughes for producing so much useful information about materials writing in such a short period of time 🙂
(12:15)
In an attempt to find sources for the last couple of references I need for descriptors, I thought I would try an AI tool which a Delta Module 3 candidate recommended to me. I asked the question I thought would find me references to literature, but it didn’t help. While there are the roots of a potentially useful essay outline (5 ideas that seem logical), all the ideas come from two sources, neither of which mention group dynamics at all, and it’s pretty repetitive. The tool isn’t there yet… Think I’ll just have to give up on finding references for those two areas. But happily my request on LinkedIn last night netted two links to references for the other two descriptors (lots of twos there…I started with four descriptors with no references, and now I’m halfway there!)
(12:35)
Arghhh! All the last-minute things. Thankfully I noticed in time that I need to update the case studies in my frameworks to reflect the final descriptors before I submitted it!
(12:45)
Rather than taking slow screenshots of each page of my framework to add to the final dissertation, I realised that I can save it as a pdf, then convert the pdf to images. I can then drag and drop each image into the correct place in the dissertation document. So much faster than the first time I tried it!
(14:40)
I had a brief break for lunch, but apart from that I’ve been going since 7am today again. However, it was worth it. I’ve just finished my final read-through, and now it’s ready to send to the two lovely ladies who have volunteered to proofread it. I’m pretty confident that it’s all ready to go now.
Woohoo!
(Monday 23/10/2023, 10:20am)
After a final hour updating my dissertation and framework based on comments from the proofreaders (thank you Lottie and Emma!), I have just emailed the final dissertation to my supervisor. That means I’m officially done.
To celebrate, Paul and I are going to Athens for a long holiday a couple of days from now. So glad I had that to look forward to, especially after the weekend/week with all the work. This is what my time tracker told me this morning about my hours Monday-Sunday last week:
If you made it through to the end of this post, well done 🙂 It’s been a long journey, and one I’ve enjoyed far more than I expected to at the beginning. I’ll definitely be sharing and talking about the framework in the future, and hopefully sharing the dissertation itself too once I’ve had feedback on it. But for now, it’s time to get back to some normal work before the relaxation of a long holiday 🙂
Sandy Millin 