Journal — Buildspace — journal entry
Holy smokes
March 2025. What I typed, more or less exactly, in the hour after my committee told me what I had done.
So can I just put PhD on my email signature now? I don't have to have the word candidate. I don't actually walk for six weeks, and I still have to submit to ProQuest with one revision. Basically they want me to streamline it so that I'm actually stating that I'm introducing a new measurable framework.
That is what I typed, and then a few minutes later:
Holy smokes. I invented a new measurable framework.
I am leaving both of those in the record as they were, because I want the journal to have at least one entry that sounds like the day it happened rather than like the summary of the day.
The committee's one revision was the best note I got in five years, because it was a note about confidence, not content. The framework was already in the dissertation. Movement, characters, safety. The three dimensions were there, the Buildspace evidence was there, the Jacobs and Pask and Duneier lineage was there. What they wanted was for the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion to say plainly that this was a new thing, the first framework to put Jacobs's street and Pask's interaction of actors together for digital community learning, and that it could be measured. I had written it as if I were reporting on something that already existed. They wanted me to claim it.
The word measurable is doing real work in that sentence and I want to define it the way I mean it. It does not mean I have a score. It means each dimension is a question you can go and answer with observation. Where can a person go next in this community? Who are the recognizable public roles, and how did they get that way? Under what conditions can someone share unfinished work here? Those are questions with evidence behind them, not vibes.
My life's about to change.
I typed that too. I was right, although not in the direction I would have guessed. The next thing I built was not a book. It was a phone in a freezer bag. That story is further down the page.
One more detail, because it is mine and this is my journal. I passed my qualifying exams on September 8, 2022, walked out of the room, and learned the Queen had died a few minutes before. I have always felt a kinship with her. I do not know what to do with that except record it.