Ho hum. Memories of my school days are flooding back to me. I never got into trouble for misbehaving or physically breaking any rules. What I did get into trouble for, was being a vocal square peg in a round hole. For marching to a different drummer, for thinking outside the box.

I hadn’t expected to find myself back in this situation at postgraduate level, and yet, here I am!

I struggled to get approval to submit a paper on Connectivism recently, because there is little or no peer reviewed writing on it in any of the recognised journals. I’m obviously not built for this world, because my immediate response is “So what?” I don’t understand why someone else needs to have written about something before I can write about it!

During a lecture (essentially) on the art of getting published last night, emphasis was placed on citing appropriate references in appropriate journals, to which I responded with the retort that this presupposes that someone has already written on the same subject, meaning you are prevented from doing anything new. The Prof responded with “I defy you to come up with anything completely new.” I understood from what he had to say that originality is the provinceof the doctoral student, whereas criticality is the province of the masters’ student. I am only too aware of my limitations as an orignal thinker, but I resent the assumptions and the ceilings that appear to be set in place, simply because one doesn’t have the right letters behind one’s name. How flimsy is that?!

At another point he also cautioned us to be patient. In the social science journals, there is apparently a 2-3 year delay between acceptance of an article and its actual publication in the journal.

Since one of my driving interests is the use of the affordances of technology in learning, I can’t be sticking around for two years – by that time the technology will be obsolete, Web 2.0 will have been superseded by Web 3.0 and maybe even web 4.0. Things seldom stand still long enough for a significant body of writing appear in any of the “respected journals”.

I guess I will just have to accept that I am not going to get published in any “respected journals”. I  will stick to publishing on this blog and this one and possibly explore some professional journals if it seems appropriate further down the line.

But it leaves me with a huge question mark around my dissertation. How can I possibly write about something that matters to me if I’m restricted to a topic with an adequacy of been-there-done-that from recognised luminaries?

What an exciting initiative this is! I wonder what the viability of this is in terms of cost implications, though – there are enough kids in the UK with no computer at home. But if that barrier can be overcome, well the sky’s the limit.