Moving Leadership at Play online
Friday, November 11, 2011 at 11:06AM I've been talking about moving my dissertation online for a number of months. I even cleared it with my participants a while back, and a few of them were rather excited by the prospect. At this point I still haven't gotten past creating a page on this site (currently hidden) where I will begin the work of editing the text to improve the parts I don't like, and reformatting it for online readability.
While there are certainly technical barriers that attend retooling nearly 400 pages of dissertation work for an online format, the truth is the bigger barriers that have held me back are the emotional ones. I've been somewhat hesitant to dive back into the text of Leadership at Play because on some level I'm not quite sure what I'll find there. I have this (largely) irrational fear that it'll be far worse than I could possibly imagine despite the fact that it's been received quite well by virtually everyone who's read it to date. There's also the part about Chapter 2 (the lit. review which I know is the weakest link in the text), and the issue about whether or not I actually want to stay on Squarespace, but these issues are really trivial. After all, I want to rework Chapter 2. That's a big part of my reason for doing this in the first place. As for a "permanent" online home for my blog and the diss, one benefit of this process will be a nicely chunked and edited plain text version of the document that should be much easier to port between locations if needed.
So I can't just keep making excuses to myself about getting the thing online. I have to do it. After all, I've stated that I'm going to do it on Twitter and hence I've made sort of contract with the internet. While making contracts with the internet might be ill advised (we know what kind of people occupy the internet after all), it does provide a form of accountability. Hence, I'm going to push myself on this and to get the ball rolling I'm posting .pdfs of two of my chapters to the blog right now.
Attached to this post are chapters 1 and 5 from Leadership at Play. The first chapter is the introduction, while the fifth is part one of my findings. Chapter 1 is fairly short (19 pages) while chapter 5 is quite a bit heftier (72 pages). I should also mention that there are really important things that come in between these two chapters (like an explanation of my methods and description of my sample) that would help in making 5 more sensible. However, I was at least fairly pleased with both of these chapters at the time that I submitted them, and I think the data in chapter 5 is pretty exciting. Most importantly it's time to get some portion of this thing out there in the world (beyond the bounds of the UMI dissertation database), especially since the book chapter I've written based on some of this work seems to be hung up in some sort of editorial limbo.
Sometime between now and the end of 2011, I'll begin the more onerous task of actually creating the web based version of this thing.
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