Last night at 11:55pm, I submitted my Masters thesis to my supervisor to begin the external review process. While there is still a chance that some work will need to be done as it moves through review, a sense of completion is beginning to settle in on me as I realize that, for the first time in almost a year, I am looking at a weekend that doesn’t include work on my thesis.

Well, that isn’t entirely true.

One of the things I am planning on doing is publish the thesis here on my site in something other than a PDF document. I want it open for comments and, with any luck, prompt some interesting discussion. And, quite frankly, this part actually scares the bejebsus out of me. But I do see the thesis as a start, and not the end, of the process of learning for me. Putting it out there to get feedback from my peers is where the real learning happens, and I hope others will find it interesting enough to contribute to the discussion and (gulp) pick it apart where it needs to be picked apart, and add support to where they agree. Ultimately, like anyone who has poured a lot of work into something, I want and hope that it will be useful to someone else, and to find that someone else, it needs to be out in the open and not locked away in some digital repository (although it will be there, too).

How I was going to do this wasn’t exactly clear because it had seemed like a far, far away in time project. Today – not so far away. I did have it in my head to use WordPress and the digress.it framework, which allows paragraph by paragraph commenting. Then, last night after I had clicked submit and was still too buzzed to hop into bed, I think I found the recipe on how to publish an academic paper using WordPress and digress.it, posted by Joss Winn. So, if all goes well, in the very near future this idea will become a reality.

But first, I have a very important matter that needs attending to this weekend.

Bohemia by Paulo Brabo. Used under Creative Common license.