And it’s begun. I am now a graduate student pursuing a Doctorate of Education through the University of Hong Kong. My research interest is in using corpus-based methods to compare the feedback decisions of L1 and L2 assessors with Generative AI models to determine to what extent LLM’s can improve structural, institutional, and personal biases that emerge from an individual’s language background. Questions I’m interested in exploring along the way: Can AI improve impartiality in assessment feedback? How will LLMs change how humans write or conduct language assessments? Who will be affected by these changes? What are the downsides? To what extent can AI English become the new lingua franca?

Six years ago I began looking into joining a doctorate program, but for a variety of personal reasons, I chose not to proceed with one and took up some moderate blogging instead. I’m no longer a young man, and I’ve not even been consistent with my blogging over these past six years. However, my interests in language, technology, and questions regarding the relationship of these to understanding our humanity remain as piqued as ever. With the start of this EdD, I now get to explore these interests in a more structured way.

Now that I’ve started, I also feel the pressure to further develop my writing skills, something we’ve been exhorted to do as graduate students. Writing helps us think better (I agree), and if anything writing regularly is necessary to simply complete the dissertation. With these two realities in mind, I wanted to operationalize parts of this process in a way that works for me. Hence the recommitment to writing on this blog, and the theme of this blog post.

That I’m a little nervous is somewhat of an understatement. I am already aware that my anxiety increases the less I write. I’m also aware of what one professor said on the first class of Issues in Education: “You can’t improve what you’ve written if you haven’t written anything”. Not writing contributes to that vicious, paradoxical cycle of doubt fueling greater levels of perfectionism that in turn leads to more reluctance to just write and provide material with which to improve on. I have explored this struggle in a previous post – How to avoid the pitfalls of perfectionism in learning with the 80% rule – but 80% is not exactly a high bar for academic writing. I feel that the analytic and writing expectations of a doctoral degree are considerably higher.

One personality tic that has proved to be a struggle with writing in the past and which will need further taming if I am to be successful in my program is my remaining stubbornly a Romantic with an (ir)rational faith in organicism where I desire “To see a World in a Grain of Sand“, namely the interconnectedness of all things. Poetry at its best nears capturing this tension. Religious experiences – such as Buddhist enlightenment, Christ’s atonement, or mysticism in general – also try to capture it. Of course I won’t fully capture it in my writing on this blog or in my EdD, but it is important for me to try and harmonize these tensions. Again, paradoxically, managing these two divergent tensions – sums up my own struggle to submit to the rigours and conventions of academia. The romantic in me resists committing Wordsworth’s offence of “murdering to dissect” in his screed against formal education in “The Tables Have Turned”. Can I remain true to my values while pursuing an EdD, or am I merely looking for justifications of my potentially arrested development?

Whether it’s merely my aesthetic that requires I see the interconnectedness of all things, or whether I am not skilled enough in articulating reality in my efforts to avoid “murdering”, I will choose to let my blog posts absorb and process these tensions. In fact, as I review the topics of the posts I wrote, I see the seeds of my now academic interest in language and AI. I see examples of good writing but also considerable clunk. Just over six years ago I was surprised by the rapid process that Google had made in improving its translation software. And here we are in the second half of 2024 where I can, and will, use ChatGPT to translate my articles into Chinese. In seconds. My reflections on the nature of mistakes in my own students’ writing is again apparent in both the literature and my present experience of being the only native English speaker in my EdD programme (that I’m aware of) and yet whose classmates and professors I admire for the precision of their writing. Who needs style?

A motivating factor for researchers is usually some personal interest and this interest has often been shaped by experience. This certainly explains my personal and professional journey but I am always pleased to discover scholars who also have taken a roundabout way to get to where they are now. One of these researchers is Gary Ockey, who pursued his PhD after a significant period teaching English as a second language and being involved with second language listening assessment. Steve Graham is a leading scholar in the science of writing and has published prolifically with “just” an EdD background. Perhaps opportunity lies ahead for me to improve at both. On the one hand, become both a more articulate blog and academic writer. On the other hand become less haunted by perfectionism and more confident that I can create value in sharing organicist connections in the ways that are important to me, but that are less stylistically or aesthetically important in academic writing. Perhaps even mystically, as Blake did, sieving experience through multi-modal poems, or eclectically like Atwood.

I’ve heard it said many times that pursuing a PhD improves the candidate’s writing skills. I’d be happy with that. Post-middle-aged me can surely benefit. But I’m also hoping that my academic writing skills can improve as well. And so this reinvigorated blog can serve as an arena for me to do the following:

• avoid the solipsistic audience-less drivel I feel I often produce in my private writing
• prompt me to write more usefully with the accountability that an audience provides but with the freedom to experiment along the way
• further develop the connections made in the past years and to bulk these out with formal connections to the literature

I recently read the Jesuit scholar Walter Ong’s incredible Orality and Literacy, a book I regret not having read earlier. Ong examines the impact that writing has had on the mind, and specifically, the literacy that emerged after the development of the printing press in the West. Apart from admiring how he writes with such breadth and depth and thoughtfulness, I was extremely pleased to see many of my thoughts on the talk that I gave at 21st Century Learning Conference – Language: The Ultimate Technology – present in a sub-section called “Writing is a Technology”. He reminded me how fascinating language is, how it others, and also how it can define us. The emergence of the equally paradigm-shifting ChatGPT and other Generative AI large language models Ostler’s prediction of machine translation tools filling the gaps to replace English as the last lingua franca has perhaps arrived. What a time to start an EdD!

In conclusion, my blog can become a semi-structured, moderately accountable sandbox to freely develop my writing skills and articulate my insights in ways that I can justify to my Romantic, perfectionist self as I embark on this new EdD journey. How academic is that!