New Year, New Challenges, New Chances, New Plans :-)
A happy, and curious, and enhancing, and exciting 2016 to all of you! I hope it will bring – beside many other things – the opportunity to meet many of you in person again, somewhere around the world, to exchange questions and ideas and maybe even some solutions on learning processes in global online academic learning. I look so much forward to it.
Personally this year brings two crucial challenges and changes and chances for me: End of march I will leave the distance university in Hagen – something that I thought would not happen before having finished my doctoral thesis, maybe even not then. Well, “real life” is what happens while you are constructing plans :-); new professorships can bring about strange stuff policy and arguments … but I am optimistic and curious about new opportunities, and ways, and doors that open when others close.
My doctoral thesis or PhD will become first priority this year, as in Germany there are (amongst others…) some strange politic and rules for people working at universities before having finished their thesis. You have only six years, after this six years no university is allowed to give a time-limited work-contract (and others do barely exist…) before your PhD or Doctoral Thesis is finished. And as I started to work at the distance university directly after having had my B.A. and – during my M.A. – had two hard years which were almost lost for scientific work due to a threatening and exhausting stalking problem, now there remain only maximum narrow two years at German Universities before having my Dr. or PhD.
On the other hand I recognize more and more that – in the context of my research interests (changed learning processes in the context of academic learning and digitalization and heterogeneity) – the really exciting and fascinating and interdisciplinary research does not yet really take place in Hagen and – with some exceptions – not even in Germany. Too many fights between institutions, politic, disciplines are more about terminology than about the processes behind those, and hinder research to become really global and interdisziplinary. So maybe this is just the right time to become free(er) in research and work to be able to look beyond one’s own nose 🙂 and to go beyond narrow boarders and restrictions.
My year ended with a heavy influenza but as soon as I am recovered again and able to concentrate and read and write I will be busy with following up my plans. First there is lot of literature, in paper and of course online, to catch up with the state of art of my theme. I love to bring loose ends together, to find connections and fuse ideas and theories and models to arrive at emergence. This kind of research will probably be the main work of the next months.
Before I write about this process I will finish the publication of my Master-Thesis here on my Weblog. Going along with this work I will try to submit some papers and articles for journals as for example the next LTEC/KMO in Hagen. I really, really hope to able to participate and help regardless of not being employee of the distance university at this time. Other conferences abroad would be great and important too, but this will depend on my future professional perspectives and means.
No matter what happens I will go on learning, doing research and following up my plans and ideas. I am happy and proud that so many of you have been and will go on to be part of this process!