Notes for my talk about blog research and research blogs at NERDI.
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.
Before that blogging and researching blogs were somewhat separate, but I couldn’t avoid collision, getting into a situation where two roles conflicted.
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
Tags: blog research, blogging as research, citedCh3Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/21.html#a1590; comments are here.
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