Mathemagenic

In case you are reviewing the chapter on blogging PhD ideas - below is the part missing in the discussion section of the draft (as a bonus you can see how the post from yesterday turned into something more academic :)

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While study of a single blogger is not representative for all knowledge workers who blog, the findings presented in this chapter correspond to personal accounts of other bloggers discussing uses of their weblogs for organising own thinking (Doctorow, 2002; Halavais, 2006; Mortensen & Walker, 2002; Pollard, 2003), publications discussing how weblogs could be used that way (Edmonds, Blustein, & Turnbull, 2004; Paquet, 2002; Peña-López, 2007; Todoroki, Konishi, & Inoue, 2006) or how contextual factors shape blogging in an organisational environment (Walker, 2006). Studies of work-related blogging suggest that weblogs serve as a ‘trigger to elicit passion for knowledge’ (Kaiser, Müller-Seitz, Lopes, & Pina e Cunha, 2007) and are used as a reference archive to support working on a document (Carter, 2005) by knowledge workers in other settings, however they do not provide an in-depth view of the activities behind those uses.

The literature on personal information management allows comparing the findings to existing research at a more granular level. The synergies between using weblog to collect and organising ideas and uses of those in supporting specific tasks are similar to those described by Erickson (Erickson, 1996) in the case of personal electronic notebook. The possibility of a feedback in a case of a weblog provides an additional motivation to contribute, however, writing in public also results in limitations on what could be written that do not exist in a case of a personal tool.

Although at the first sight using weblog as an online knowledge base calls for comparison with digital collections created by other tools, I find more parallels with the studies that look at information represented by the paper artefacts on desks and in personal archives (Bondarenko & Janssen, 2005; Kaye et al., 2006; Kidd, 1994; Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001).

For example, the type of information included into my weblog and the role it plays in developing ideas echoes the discussion of the role of the paper on the desks to support knowledge work in the study by Kidd (1994). According to this study, spatial layout of papers in the office serves as a holding pattern for the ideas that knowledge workers “cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use”, as a primitive language that reflects models of the world still being constructed, as contextual cues to recover the state of their thought after an interruption and as demonstrable output of the progress (Kidd, 1994, pp. 187-188).

Not being tied to specific tasks and bounded by expectations and format of a bigger document, my weblog allows including dormant information and capturing ideas under construction. Flexible categorisation provides a way to replicate the spatial arrangement of documents on a desk: chronological archives, tags and links allow “piling” entries together and indicating relations between parts of emergent mental structures. While contextual cues around a weblog post do not support returning to an interrupted task in a way as the layout of papers on a desk does, they play similar role helping to recover a state of mind at the moment of writing the post, which is useful when returning to an idea that has been “parked” for a while.

Finally, the public nature of weblog gives others an idea of the work in progress similar to the papers on one’s office desk. In that respect, a weblog bears more similarity to one’s office room than to one’s digital spaces: as a personal space that others could visit as guests, weblog serves social functions of sharing resources, building a legacy and impression management similar to the paper archives (Kaye et al., 2006).

While existing publications and feedback on this study from other bloggers suggest that more bloggers use their weblogs to organise and develop their thinking, more research is needed to explore frequencies of those uses and the conditions stimulating them. In that respect, the view of blogging as an experience of flow states (Kaiser et al., 2007) provides an intriguing starting point.

A particularly interesting research direction would be exploring connections between a task at hand and specific blogging episodes: how much and in what cases blogging is used to “park ideas” and when it directly contributes to one’s work on the task. Since those connections are too infrequent for an observation and difficult to reconstruct from memory or content of a weblog post, the best results are likely to be acquired in a diary study (for example, by inviting a blogger to fill in post-specific questionnaire immediately after publishing a post, as in Carter, 2005).

The connection between the functionalities of weblog technologies and their uses for personal information management needs further examination. The similarity between the roles of weblog to support my work and those of paper collections in other studies indicate a need to explore the affordances of weblog technologies from PIM perspective and possibilities of learning from blogging when designing other tools. Finally, the potential for learning from information accumulated in one’s weblog calls for a development of tools allowing to explore patterns in those traces that aimed at bloggers themselves (supporting what Pousman, Stasko, & Mateas, 2007, call casual information visualisation).

References

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Thanks to a colleague I went rereading the paper I now automatically cite in my PhD work - Alison Kidd’s The marks are on the knowledge worker. Between other things she talks about the importance of the spatial layout and materials for knowledge workers, discussing a number of roles that the mess of papers plays.

What I find striking is the parallel between those roles of the paper spatial arrangement and my uses of the weblog.

As a holding pattern

It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such a as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12]. Filing is uncomfortable for the because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate (p.187)

Weblog provides as much structure as I want to. Posts that are easy to categorise get “filed” into specific tags and categories, but the rest is just “piled” in the chronological archives with fuzzy or no tags and may be some linking. What is nice compared to the paper that a post can sit in multiple piles (and files) for the same time (see Whittaker & Hirschberg, 2001, for more on piling and filing).

As a primitive language

It also seems that knowledge workers may use pieces of paper or the marks on them as a material correlate of a model of the world which they are in the process of constructing in their heads. (pp.187-188)

All those “thinking in progress” posts, fuzzy tags and linking often represent bigger emergent structures that are not ready to be articulated as a whole.

As contextual cues

The layout of physical materials on their desk gives them powerful and immediate contextual cues to recover a complex set of threads [...] (p.188)

With weblog is different: these cues (context in the text, links and tags) are not those to recover a  state of mind before before an interruption, but rather at the moment of writing the post. However, it plays similar function, allowing to get back to a task at hand at a particular moment.

As demonstrable output

Piles of papers on desks are also important as tangible objects to which workers can point to show others how much progress they have made. (p.188)

Well, this should work if you can get those who evaluate your work to read your weblog :) But in any case, for everyone else it does show the thinking in progress (see also Kaye et al, 2006 on the roles that archives play).

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Some quotes that are not likely to be included in the Methodology chapter of my PhD, but pretty much explain how I think about methodological choices:

…the validity of scientific claims is always relative to the paradigm within which they are judged; they are never simply a reflection of some independent domain of reality (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1994, p. 12)

…methods rest on philosophical presuppositions. These remain embedded in them, even if they are not taught or discussed or attended to explicitly. (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2006, p. 370)

No context is value-free. Academic disciplines promote particular ways of observing, dissecting, measuring, interpreting, and otherwise making sense of the phenomena under investigation. One’s decisions may emerge within or resistant to these disciplinary structures. One’s decisions also derive from one’s research goals, which are seldom acknowledged in research reports but which meaningfully affect the design, process, and outcome of a study. (Markham, 2006)

…all research is a practical activity requiring the exercise of judgement in context; it is not a matter of simply following methodological rules (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1994, p. 23)

References

• Hammersley, M. & Atkinson, P. (1994). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. (2nd ed.) Routledge.
• Markham, A. N. (2006). Ethics as method, methods as ethics: A case for reflexivity in qualitative ICT research. Journal of Information Ethics, 15(2), 37-54.
• Yanow, D. & Schwartz-Shea, P. (2006). Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. M.E. Sharpe.

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Referrer logs bring me to the post on high-stakes reflection (mirrors, maps and masks) by Jen:

One of the things I found really fascinating in the e-portfolio literature was Barrett and Carney’s idea of ‘conflicting’ or ‘competing’ paradigms: ‘positivist’ (product-driven, performative, externally assessed, based on externally defined outcomes), vs ‘constructivist’ (process-driven, reflective, learner constructed outcomes) (2005, p7-8). These are also sometimes described as ‘map’ and ‘mirror’ portfolios. [...]

Then I became interested in the extent to which the tension between these ‘conflicting’ paradigms might in fact be an intrinsic part of professional reflective practices. [...]

To describe this, along with ‘map’ and ‘mirror’, I have added a third category: portfolio as ‘mask’. I’ve been working on this metaphor a bit over the past few months and am delighted by its richness - so far I’ve identified at least 6 (overlapping) genres of mask: protection, disguise, performance, memory, transformation, punishment.

This post, together with the one detailing the six mask genres, provides metaphors to think on some of the comments I’ve got on the PhD chapter that looks at blogging PhD ideas. Part of the struggle I had while working on it was drawing the boundaries between the different perspectives I use to look at blogging ideas, (knowledge base / process / context). Although the metaphors do not easily fit onto what I have written (they are also more appropriate for someone looking at blogging from the outside), but they do provide an input for reflecting on it.

The mask metaphor (read the post on six genres) is an interesting one to look at the blogging in the context of my PhD research. Here a quick look on the genres in respect to my weblog research-wise (reordered):

• Memory (trace in the second post) - literally, to keep traces of my thinking.
• Performance / disguise - presenting myself through writing, intentionally and not.
• Punishment - being shaped by the mask, the traces I leave via blogging and the image that others construct of me.
• Transformation - what happens with the ideas as they have been blogged and with my own identity as I go through the process (re: Kamler&Thomson, 2005).
• Protection - the choices I made in bringing blogging back into the dissertation as an instrument to address methodological challenges (a bit here, but more in the paper I’m supposed to write instead of this post). [Update: finished paper - Blending blogging into an academic text]

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Please let me know if you are interested to review a draft of my dissertation chapter focused on analysing my practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas. I’m still not happy with it, but could definitely do with a feedback from those brave souls who do not mind commenting on work in progress.

[I'll be travelling the coming week, so it might take a few days to reply.]

The study

The focus of this study is on how weblogs support one specific aspect of knowledge work - developing ideas (see the diagram on the right to see which parts of the knowledge work framework are covered). Although I share the belief that knowledge is socially constructed, here I look at this process from a personal perspective, using my own example to explore how a weblog could be used to aid individual contributions to the collective whole. To do so I reconstruct my personal blogging practices from three perspectives:

First I focus on exploring how blogging supports managing ideas as a permanent “overhead” practice of building one’s own knowledge: I use insights from the personal information management research as a lens to explore my practices of using weblog as a personal knowledge base.

Then I look at the “activation-awareness” scale of the framework in respect to ideas: the process of turning fuzzy early insights into a specific product. In that respect I analyse my practices of using weblog at different stages of developing PhD ideas and dissertation writing as a core task (the issues of using weblog as a research instrument are covered in more detail in another chapter).

Finally, I explore the contextual factors that influence the development of those blogging practices by examining what issues arise as a result of blogging being situated at an intersection of personal, social and organisational contexts.

Chapter outline

• Useful lenses: PIM, GTD and advice on writing
  • Personal information management
  • Personal productivity: getting things done
  • Writing
  • Summary
• Research approach
  • Case
  • Methods
  • Quality criteria
  • Writing conventions
• Results: weblog as a personal knowledge base
  • Creating items to form a collection
  • Organisation of items
  • Maintenance of the collection
  • Retrieval of items for reuse
  • Summary
• Results: from fuzzy feelings to finished results
  • An example: thinking about weblog research ethics
  • Awareness and articulation
  • Sense-making
  • Turning into products
  • Summary
• Results: personal blogging practices in a context
  • Integrating with work
  • Broken blogging routines
  • Myself vs. others
  • Attribution and ownership
  • Summary
• Discussion

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