Thursday, May 23, 2013

Discerning Knowers On The Eternal Cloud.

I’ve previously mentioned the existence of my honours thesis (here, here and here) and the possibility that I might place it in the eternal cloud known as the internet. Well I've finally gotten around to doing just that and you can find Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims: here.  To get an idea of what it's all about, the abstract is as follows:
The thesis is centred on how University students perceive the legitimacy of knowledge claims.  Contemporary sociological theory is often concerned with the transformations associated with the emergent “knowledge economy” and “knowledge society”. In view of this, University students’ perception of knowledge claims is of practical concern due to their future role as knowledge-workers and potential members of the power elite.  To address these issues, elements of Social Realism, Legitimation Code Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics have been drawn on to conceptualize language, knowledge claims and the organizing principles of their contextual use.  The main conclusion drawn in this research is that University students have a nuanced understanding of the forms knowledge claims that can be legitimately employed in divergent contexts; thereby positioning themselves with respect to the context and negatively evaluating types of knowledge claims inappropriately employed.
The citation for the thesis in a bibliography should look something like this:

Toll, M.,  (2012), Discerning Knowers: An exploratory study of university students’ perceptions of knowledge claims, Honours thesis, Dept of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Sydney, Australia.