Sunday, December 27, 2009

I am reading the book PROC SQL Beyond the Basics Using SAS.

I have read three chapters in this book now and would like to read the fourth this evening. This book is about writing computer code for use in SAS programs.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Saturday, December 12, 2009

I read one paper in my master bibliography on an e-book reader and started a second paper this way last night.

As I began to work with a master bibliography in a table in a spreadsheet, I added a "status" column. In the workshop for managing information in research projects, the concept of using a master bibliography with a spreadsheet style table was suggested along with the suggestion of adding columns such as a status column. The table starts as a tab delimited file export from a RefWorks folder. Any bibliographic software could be used. You can add any number of columns to this file when open in a spreadsheet and a status column was one suggested. I chose to have a few values possible for status and one was "get" for literature documents I had found in name only ( citation), rather than the full document. This meant I needed to download the papers or borrow the books and had not done this yet. Other status column values I used included "read" and "partial" reflecting statuses after I started reading the documents. I began to search out and download documents in my master bibliography that were still "get" status documents and have found about five of the online journal articles and have them now in pdf.

As I started this a few weeks ago I bought an e-book reader with the anticipation that I could read my school work on this e-reader.

This e-reader method of reading worked so far. I read a paper with a catchy titled that is directly on topic with my thesis. The paper is

McQuade, Eamonn, et al. "Will you miss me when I'm gone? : A study of the potential loss of company knowledge and expertise as employees retire." Journal of European Industrial Training 31, 9. 2007. 758-768.

The second paper I am reading as an e-book is about defining the Knowledge Intensive Firm (KIF). As my thesis title includes this classification of firms, this paper is also very important. I hope this paper will continue to have the quality, it seems to have at the moment, from what I have read. The citation for this paper is:

Starbuck,William H. "Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms" Journal of Management Studies 29, 6, 1992.

Friday, December 04, 2009

My organization of reading notes is a little confused but really I am returning to a subject.

I wanted to research some topics related to disabilities and the Internet and found the book:
Goggin, Gerard and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disabilities: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
I realised after reading the preface that I have read this book before or at least the preface. It was written by two activists affecting the Internet use and other technologies use by disabled persons in Australia. It does a good job at looking at the social construction of disability and in a big way this was my introduction to this topic. I should review this a little because I also have to understand a bit better the concept of social construction because the social construction of gender is a concept I come across quite a bit these days when studying the Internet and gender as well as in feminist studies.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

I have 150 minutes study to complete to keep to my pace of thirty minutes a day on my thesis.

Simply stated I add thirty minutes every day to my thesis work schedule. This is pushing me deeper into the work, this time based structure.

I have three goals at the moment for study in the short term.

I would like to read more of the papers on my master bibliography list today. I would also like to search my RefWorks collection for knowledge transfer and knowledge gain. Then the last of these three goals will be to make some notes based on the suggested methods and structure for writing the literature review that I learned at the first writing tutorial centre workshop I attended two and a half weeks ago.

I am starting to use a Master Bibliography.

I started a master bibliography for my thesis. I used a short list and added to it only papers concerned directly with retirement and knowledge loss in companies or with knowledge transfer. I edited out most of the skill component research because my methods from artificial intelligence will not support skill modeling in the simulation. I also included few general knowledge management titles and fewer books on this topic generally. Argote is still in the list and I used her work as spring board to find two more papers and then found an updated version of one of these.

The master bibliography is allowing me to move forward and download copies of the literature and actually start to read the papers. I now need to start using a system like this blog to record my notes and fabricate my literature review. I have some training now on both this master bibliography technique and using RefWorks to build this file. So far after less than one week this is working and giving good results and things are progressing nicely and specifically with real gains.