thinkPhD

Someone shared a some information about page number formatting in MS Word with the nculearner forum. I took a look at the website and there are a number of helpful documents and tutorials available.

The page on page numbering has lots of helpful hints and tips! One of the documents is “Word’s numbering explained” (highly recommended reading) and “How to control page numbering in a Word document (super highly recommended reading). We students get so tied up in constructing and formatting our papers, that we often lose sight of CONTENT MANAGEMENT. Even my students at the University of Phoenix get nervous when those three little letters are mentioned: APA. I believe that we spend too much time focusing on formatting and not focusing on style and content, the true meat-and-potatoes of any paper.

My solution is pretty simple: learn all the tips and shortcuts you can about formatting so that you spend less time on these types of insipid activities. Every student-scholar should spend simply MINUTES on formatting and HOURS on research and writing. Unfortunately, it always seems it is the other way around. I receive more questions on formatting the Reference page in APA than I do on locating and using those same references!

Bookmark The Word MVP Site and others like it so that you can focus on what is fundamental to your assignments; research and ultimately….

LEARNING.

I finished up the 6th of 13 assignments in Activity 6 this evening. The title is “Applying and Interpreting Bivariate Statistics: Tests of Differences.” Activity 7 is “Applying and Interpreting Bivariate Statistics: Tests of Association.” Each of these are worth 10 points. I cannot upload #6 until Dr. M returns #5. I expect he will return it today because he has had #5 since 02/16 and today is the 21st. Mentors are to return assignments within 5 days.

Activity #7 is answer questions 2-8 and 14 on pp. 566-569 of the Zikmund text. These 8 questions are statistics-related, as have been most of the assignments in this class. I have gotten pretty good at using MS Word’s Microsoft Equation object to add the equations to my paper!

Stats is not my best subject, but so far in this class, I am doing fine. However, I feel like I work the problems very slowly and double-triple-quadruple check myself when I really do not need to. It’s odd how your psyche lies…”you can’t do these problems”…”you are going to miss this one”… “you are dumb in this subject”….I wish I could turn off that little nagging voice!

I haven’t written much lately about my PhD journey because I have been very busy with a class I am teaching at the University of Phoenix. I am reworking all of my lesson plans for this class, COM/285 Business Communications. The teaching materials in this class are slim to none, which means that the instructor can either bore the students to tears or spice up the class with activities. I prefer the later.

Today I was working on grading papers (and since this is a WRITING class, obviously they have to WRITE) and lesson plans. Most of the students have been in three to five or more classes already, yet I find that few are careful about plagiarizing. This course has been around for a while so it is pretty easy to find canned and free essays on the Internet for download. Well, if I can find them, so can the students.

And they do. Unfortunately.

The University has a alert system by which we can record an academic violation such as plagiarism or when a student falls behind in their work. This is a great system and our campus follows up with every student. Our concern is to identify issues early while they are correctible.

I did not work on any of my NCU papers today, but I will tomorrow. I am working on assignment 6 in RSH9103QNB.