Process: Refining my research proposal

I had the first round of feedback from my mentors and peers on an early draft of my research proposal.

The most critical feedback that I received was that my proposal lacked a description or justification of the value of blogs as an educational tool. This came across in questions such as:

• What makes blogs valuable?
• What makes blogs different from existing tools in online education?

I agree with this evaluation. I think that if I had somehow included the pros and cons of blogs from my previous blog entries in that document, this would have answered those questions. However, I was aware of the two-page limit for the eventual prospectus and opted to exclude them. After some effort, I modified the proposal to take the form of a prospectus that included a summary of the advantages of blogs.

However, I still think that this prospectus lacks a theoretical framework of the perceived usefulness of blogs compared to existing educational tools such as web pages, synchronous chats, or asynchronous threaded discussion forums. I will work on that next and make another entry in the near future.