Crazy Time

Despite my best intentions here we are nearly a month on from the last post! I would love to report that I have made a lot of progress but that is sadly not the case. This is due to all the other events that suddenly have to take priority in life. So two weeks ago my precious weekend time was taken up with getting a report written up for work and last weekend I was away first at a wedding in Leeds and then travelling to Paris for a research workshop.

The workshop was quite stimulating. As 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights the focus was on access and rights to education. I presented a paper on disability and distance education students which I had had accepted for a special edition of OPEN Praxis earlier this year. This resulted from a joint call for papers made by 6 international journals so I was pleased both to have mine accepted and then to be invited to present it in the UNESCO building in Paris. As with all conferences it was good to catch up with friends and make new contacts, and it was good to spend a leisurely lunch chatting with Corinne who is also taking the EdD course at IOE.

I wish I could report that this weekend will allow progress however this will be limited as I have students coming in to Reading today at the start of their course.

On the plus side I ended up with 28 responses to the last questionnaire. Not as many as I had hoped for but enough to complete the longitudinal survey. Also I have (very belatedly) discovered that Jonathan Gershuny (see earlier post about his book) has set up the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford. I have made contact and hope to meet with them soon to exchange ideas on analysing data.

As I said in my last post I am getting more and more concious that the year is nearing an end and I am still a way off starting the writing. I have now arranged a meeting with Andrew, my supervisor, at which I hope to agree where the focus should be for the thesis report as I have too much data for 45,000 words. I have also broached the idea of a sabbatical from work which hopefully will find support.

More in a week or so before I take a week's holiday in Egypt.