Mathemagenic

Notes for my talk about blog research and research blogs at NERDI.

• Slides (.pdf) - there is not that much there, mainly drawings :)
• Podcasts (thanks to Mark!)
• part one (13,9MB)
• part two (11,8MB)

I wasn't sure where to start the talk when I realised that it's exactly 3 years since I started blogging. So, my main question is:

What my weblog did to my research in those three years?

I started from using my blog as an online scrapbook, collecting ideas, links and quotes in one place where I could easily find things back.

• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog (after two month of blogging)
• It takes courage to blog (after three month)

Than I discovered that there is more to it – a growing community of people with similar interests and rewarding dialogues.

• Why blogging 2 
• Weblog networks as social ecosystems (black and orange diagrams explaining how I think it works)
• Some stories illustrating social connections
  • Weblog networking: recognised by a question
  • Blogging and paper writing - on getting help with reviewing a paper from my community

Over time I also realised that weblog can also be a looking glass to study knowledge work (this is where weblogs came into my PhD research).

• BlogTalk paper: final version and a bit of reflection - background story
• 7 pages description of my PhD research - end 2003 - beginning 2004; with weblogs added to the mix
• Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case - paper which first results

It was when I finished that paper when I realised that while my insights were inspired by the answers I've got in the study, "connecting the dots" came not from the data, but from personal experiences of blogging. I started to look for ways to accommodate for that in my research, turning blogging into an ethnographic space.

• PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory

Before that blogging and researching blogs were somewhat separate, but I couldn't avoid collision, getting into a situation where two roles conflicted.

• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence

In a search for a solution I started to think on conditions where blogging and researching would live peacefully together. What if and how blogging could be a research instrument?

• Two papers, me in between - on discovering authoethnography
• Weblog as a research notebook (3): my own experiences - on fieldnotes
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography

This is where I am now (and I probably should write another post about it :).

I don't know what my weblog will do to my research next few years. I hope that it will be kind enough to let me finish my PhD before turning more things upside down :)

Re: other things that we have discussed:

• Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?
• Blogging as creating space for important
• BlogTalk paper: personal characteristics that support blogging 
• BlogTalk paper: job characteristics that support blogging
• My papers that could be interesting
  • Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks
  • Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
  • An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations (2) (weblog conversations vs. forum conversations)
  • Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices (follow-up with more analysis)
  • Our BlogTalk paper: Shared conceptualisations in weblogs

More:

• Why do academics blog? (references to blog posts, papers and other collections)
• What I told the tenure committee
• Flipping the Question:"Why DON'T Academics Blog?"
• What do bloggers blog about, actually?
• Scholblog network
• del.icio.us/mathemagenic/researcherBlog (my collection of links on research blogs)

Papers:

• Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool
• Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research