by Stephen Downes
May 25, 2015
PhD: is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
Paul Jump,
Times Higher Education,
2015/05/25
If it were not for the requirement of a doctoral thesis, I would have a doctorate (that is literally what "All but Dissertation" means). So, yeah, I think it's obsolete. But maybe I'm a bit biased. Sure, I could have finished, I suppose, but I couldn't justify spending a year of my life writing something that would be read by four people. As Jeremy Farrar says, "An awful lot is going unused and unread. Is this really appropriate for the modern world? Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s." Or maybe the 1860s.
My website in a Dropbox
Dave Winer,
Liveblog,
2015/05/25
I'm not sure how this works exactly, but I've long been an aficionado of personal websites for everybody, so this idea - using some node.js code to create your own website on Dropbox - is a natural. Dave Winer writes, "The server is called PagePark. Of all my latest tools, it's my favorite. I love tweaking it, adding little shortcuts. Things that make it work really well for the kind of content I serve." See also.
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Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.