We had the first of our regular bi-weekly Thursday meetings. We discussed the feedback I had provided. I didn't get the sense that the student had had the time to internalize two dozen papers in the last week, but that's not surprising. He responded that my questions about his research question had been useful, and in particular, helping to clarify the meaning of one of the concepts he was unsure about.
We then discussed filling in some details of the upcoming meeting schedule. For the next meeting, the student would provide an empirical context piece about the commercial context of his work. For the meeting after that, he will figure out on paper which parts of the background theory he would like to use. My co-supervisor wanted to get a sense of the student's academic writing ability, and said as much.
My co-supervisor suggested that the student would get a lot out of my list of assorted reference from work since 2007. I shared my concern that the references I provided were generic (since the only details I have about the practical project were that it involved integrating or building middleware on open source and non-open source APIs), and encouraged the student to also look for literature on his own. I understand my co-supervisor's desire (that we discussed after the meeting) to try to keep the thesis work focused even if the commercial part of the work derails. I just hope that she, and whomever else will be reading the thesis in the department will have enough STS background to appraciate what the student would write if he fully embraced the Rogers, Schumpeter, Latour, etc. that were on my list!
Also, we discussed language credits. The student asked if he would get extra marks for writing in English. My co-supervisor responded no, I responded yes, in that I would show him how to edit in English, which would be a useful professional skill to have. My co-supervisor (for whom English is her fourth language after Finnish, Swedish, and German) said she would also gain from that act. We left it to the student to decide.
My co-supervisor shared some tips about how to note important things in papers to gather important points into the thesis outline. I mentioned similar techniques for PDFs. I had some thoughts about effective paper reading (not two paragraphs at a time when spare moments arise) but didn't have the reference handy.
I asked the student about his note-taking style, and in particular, why he had not been taking notes during our meetings. He mentioned that he does keep a notebook at his work site. (I don't know if the Finnish science education system teaches the importance of science notebooks.) My co-supervisor used the opportunity to point out the importance of keeping good notes for constructive/design research and to develop ideas. We discussed the difference between universities and technical schools. We're the ones that are supposed to draw from, and contribute to, broader "scientific" discussions and not just technical solutions. The student agreed to start keeping an academic research notebook.
I also asked about informed consent and permissions from the commercial stakeholders to the research. The client that the student's firm appearently has no interest in the student's academic work; the student's firm did. It was unclear how or if informed consent would be obtained by all stakeholders, but it's generally accepted in this part of the world that formal informed consent is not required for interview and participatory work in which the researcher has a substantial practical role. The student will investigate.
On Friday, the department chief emphasized that he wanted an additional 75 MScs to graduate by December, in order to gain some leverage with the faculty and university administration. That's approximately one MSc per FTE in the department which is aggressive but not unrealistic. I've told my co-supervisor that I could co-supervise an additional student if the workload would be comparable to the first.
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