Dissertation Weekly Progress Report - Coursework Example

Summary of Activities for the Week In order to arrive at a dissertation structure, I did some internet search of the possible presentation or appearance of a dissertation structure. My research for alternative ways of presenting the dissertation structure took me about one (1) hour..As I was thinking about the better alternative to clarify the contents of my dissertation, I chose the dissertation structure, wrote some contents after each major part, and spent me two (2 ) hours. Then I worked on the project specification and found that it was possible for me to do a simultaneous Literature Review and drafting of the contents for the different parts of the project specification.

For Chapter 2- Outline of Project Environment, I found Sideridis and Patrikakis (2010) as the reference for one characteristic of democracy. This took up one (1) hour to find and to be utilized in actually drafting contents.I also found Paivarinta & Saebo (2008) which discussed another quality of democracy which enlightened me some more. It takes time to discover new information worth adding. Some books don’t show all pages. This took me another one (1) hour to find and write about.An additional insight about democracy was also discovered in Clark (2002).

This took me another one (1) hour of reading, understanding, and summarizing for inclusion in the contents.Search for some information about Oman was easier Thus for Chapter 2, the source (Ashrafi and Murtaza, 2008), and for Chapter 3-The Problem to be Solved, the Majlis A’Shura (2010) took only minutes to reach. What consumed my time was the composition of more contents using those references. Combined, I utilized another one (1) hour for this.To elaborate on the contents of Chapter 4-Breakdown of Task, some intense thinking was necessary, especially when it came to composing the draft contents of various tasks, There are many tasks involved.

They had to be organized in their presentation. All these processes of thinking, organizing, and composing the contents of several pages took me two (2) hours.Attending to the drafting of Chapter 5- Project Deliverables and Chapter 6- Requirements made me think even further ahead about what might be the desirable outcome of the dissertation, aside from research work and literature reviews. The primary data is supposed to serve a purpose to confirm or negate the hypothesis. If findings affirm, then the project should deliver a recommended website and proposed structural framework showing how it should improve participation of the people in E-Government.

But how this should look like still depends on discoveries. These thoughts consumed my mind for more than one (1) hour. Speaking of primary data gathering, Chapter 7- Legal, Ethical, Professional, and Social Issues, I decided to draft the contents of these as well since I was thinking of what Oman officials needed and how I was going to extract those information. The MPs are VIPs. They must be very busy. Pondering on these and writing the draft of the contents of this chapter took me another one (1) hour.

Chapter 8-Facilities and Resources and Chapter 9-Project Plan required imagination based on the desired results identified in Chapters 5 and 6. No literature review was needed for this. It needed something more practical. The composition of these two parts took more than one (1) hour.Towards the end of my accounting and weekly reporting, I noticed that my project specification outline did not exactly match my Literature Review file. There was no part for the literature review in the project specification.

But I saw many other results of my research within the Literature Review file. These include Lansford (2007) and Tilly (2007) both of which have some discussions about the concept of democracy. There was also Woolfe and Rawcliffe (2007) who mentioned a limitation of democracy, and Kubicek and Westholm (2003) who define E-democracy. I had also jotted down Council of Europe (2009), The Scottish Parliament (2012), Seaton (2005), Parliament of Canada (2012) and the OECD (2012) for their observations about E-democracy.

So what I did was to transform my notes into a draft of these Literature Review. All these took me three (3) hours.By next week, I plan to Organize and complete the major headings with their anticipated subheadings. This will require some forward thinking, given the fact that I have not yet gathered much information from more sources of literatures. At least two (2) hours will be needed to allow me to focus on what to look for. My other plan is to start attending to the primary research by creating the set of questionnaires and communicating to respondents who can answer the questionnaires.

But this will just be a dry run to see how the potential respondents might respond. This might take eight (8) hours of trying to get the respondents to reply or finding out how to make them reply.If there will still be time available, I will be looking for relevant books, journals, articles that talk about the principles, concepts, theories of E-government, E-democracy, preferably those with presentation of theoretical frameworks. This will need many hours, at least 3 hours so I can find theoretical frameworks and have an idea about what my theoretical framework should look like.

All these will take maybe another eight (8) hours.