Mathemagenic

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).

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Last night I had an impulsive wish to try out my wedding dress. Next to the pleasure of realising that it still fits, the experience brought lots of thoughts and feelings.

Of course, it brought the memories of the day (actually days, since we celebrated twice, in Russia and in the Netherlands) and the strong feelings behind it as we did a little dance in a living room.

However, as soon as I put the dress I also remembered that I actually planned to wear parts of it on more occasions, but never looked around to find matching pieces to turn it into something that doesn’t resemble the original look and never looked for an opportunity to wear a new combination. Which is pity, since I loved the dress and the idea of wearing it more than once.

As my mind started to work in that direction, I found that I already had the matching pieces (so I tried a combination immediately) and the occasion (so I discussed it with Robert and even thought of a matching outfit for him).

And then, of course, I saw a parallel to the PhD chapter that I’m currently working on and a discussion how the past, captured in my weblog comes back to live, gets combined with other bits and becomes part of the future…

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As a result of having less time to blog and increasing stress levels my blogging routines went broken:

Then I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

The social filtering mechanisms of weblogs and content delivery by RSS feeds are usually praised for their efficiency in allowing keeping up with many information sources, in my case a weblog-induced information overload became a reality. There are a few reasons for it:

Growing network. A relatively small circle of early-adopters writing about knowledge management and learning exploded over time, as more smart people started to blog.

Multidisciplinary blogging. My blogging reflects my interests in bridging multidisciplinary boundaries, so while I started mainly on KM and learning, it eventually turned into “personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance” and lots of other topics. Over time this got me into a contact with a diverse group of other bloggers.

RSS overload. There were periods of 1000+ subscribers to my RSS feed, but even without trying to keep up with all of them my weblog reading list grew to more than 200 weblogs and was a challenge to keep up.

Need to converge. Expansion of my weblog network and growing amount of potentially useful information coming through it came at the moment where my dissertation ideas started to converge. At that moment reducing information intake and the degree of engagement with others was essential for processing emerging insights and integrating them into a bigger whole. Reducing time spent reading other weblogs reflected at micro-level the suggestion to “stop reading and start writing” often given to PhD students struggling to incorporate recent publications in their work.

While the withdrawal from frequent and engaged blogging was a reflection of my personal and work circumstances at that period, the main challenge was adjusting my (blog-related) information processing strategies and habits. I can imagine that at a better moment I would be able to do it, but then I was simply trying to keep up and eventually gave up: I just stopped reading blogs systematically.

In turn, writing suffered:

• Since I wasn’t reading others, writing was stimulated mainly by my own thinking and work. Although I can’t check it fast, I can imagine that the amount of outgoing links dropped dramatically.
• I wasn’t seriously following on the feedback of others on what I wrote, so potential conversations died at birth. I can also imagine that for others it was less interesting to link and to comment to someone who wasn’t very responsive.
• At the end writing wasn’t much about engaging, but more about just putting things “out there”.

When Radio stopped working in January 2008, it was easy to take an extended break from blogging (additionally motivated by the fact that it was a natural point to “freeze” weblog archive to analyse it for my dissertation).

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Trying to get back to “normal” blogging now it’s interesting to look back and to reflect on what happened with my blogging routines over last couple of years. The graph below provides an overview of a number of weblog posts I wrote per month between June 2002 and December 2007 with an indication of corresponding events in my life.

Little palm trees represent summer holidays (not necessary in some tropical location :). Winter holidays are not that obvious, but usually there is a drop in January (not in December, since Russian Christmas/NY holidays are 1-10 January and I tend to synchronise those with my family and friends in Russia).

Fire represents period of my weblog server being offline for 2 weeks after the fire that damaged the network at University of Twente (I lived on campus then and my weblog was running on my home machine).

“Relation” and “baby” - since I’ve got other things to do in my free time instead of blogging. My maternity leave in Jan-Apr 2007 is clearly visible.

“Project management” and “Microsoft”: not that important by themselves, but more as an indicator of my stress levels. In that period I was juggling coordination of an EU project, 10 weeks internship in US and personal uncertainties that came from the perspective of not returning to Russia as I had always planned.

Although all those things are important as factors behind the dropping frequency of writing, their influence is indirect. What I think is the real issue behind not blogging is broken information processing routines, especially those related to reading weblogs - those deserve a separate post…

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About a year ago I looked for Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers) - I wanted to find a relatively objective way to judge how much of my weblog writing ends up in the dissertation.

Between other things I experimented with generating and comparing tagclouds from texts that were supposed to correspond to each other. I tried several tools, but ended up with tagCrowd since it allowed using generic and custom-made lists of stop words.

As an experiment I used text of five dissertation chapters (draft versions as of April 17, 2008) and the text of blog posts coded as corresponding to those chapters to generate a visualisation of most frequent words in each case. After removing stop words (general English plus those from my own list that I was stupid enough not to save) 65 most frequent words are visualised.

For example, two tagclouds below are those from the blogposts related to the Microsoft study and the draft chapter with the results of it.

In total I had 5 pairs of visualisations. I then mixed them and asked five people familiar with my research (supervisors and collaborators) and eight students (taking a class with Anjo) to find matching pairs. The results are below.

Some comments:

• I guess there is a connection between PhD chapters and blogposts :)
• The high score for the methodology chapter is explained by its qualitative difference from the rest of the dissertation.
• The low score for this chapter is explained by the fact that the coding of weblog entries in relation to chapters was done prior to writing it. As a results it included many “might be relevant” posts, while for other chapters the focus was more clear. In addition, the draft version of the chapter used to generate the visualisation was the first draft, while in other cases those were revised several times.

It was nice to see that although many of the visualisations looked similar (with blogging and weblog being big ;) it was actually possible to match the pairs. But the nicest thing was simply making all those pictures, laying them on the floor and thinking that I actually had some version of 5 chapters out of the 7 :)

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I figured out fast that with Alexander blogging is difficult: it’s either doing it at work or at those precious moments when he is asleep or taken care by Robert. Last few days it’s even more difficult - although I have a few half-written posts, getting them online seems to be impossible.

The explanation is simple - Robert is fishing in a guys-only company in Sweden, so our little guy keeps me away from blogging (and nots of other things too :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/06.html#a1929; comments are here.

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One more on writing, from Gabriela (emphasis added, I just loved this nesting):

A lot of people have blogged about reboot - I gave up the idea because I wanted to focus on what was going on. A Romanian writer said once: “you either live, or write”, which might seem a bit odd to a blogger. We’re living while we’re writing - or is it vice versa? writing while we’re living? Anyhow, this time there were so many better bloggers around, that I felt like letting go!

Also: Real-time conference blogging: reporting vs. reflecting

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/20.html#a1913; comments are here.

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I’m playing with an idea of comparing (parts of) my weblog with some of my published papers (and with the dissertation as a whole when I’m done). So far I’m interested in two things:

• how much of the text is reused
• how conceptually close two texts (weblog and a paper) are

Thought of a couple of ways to do so:

• One way would be to use all kinds of weblog analysis tool from Anjo. One of the difficulties there would be to figure out how to find similarities between weblog text, which is relatively self-contained microcontent pieces, and linear “build upon previousely said” academic papers.
• Another option would be to use some plagiarism detection tools. Only wonder if you can configure those to compare target paper with a specific weblog, rather than with “everything published”.

Any ideas?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/12.html#a1909; comments are here.

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My weblog is not that personal. Although being personal (confessional?) style-wise, I don’t feel comfortable writing too much about my private life: this is something left to other spaces and other channels (friends-only Flickr photos, secret wedding blog, emails, Skype, f2f…). Still, major changes in my life find some way here, since for me personal and professional are not easily separated.

Some of the personal events are truly life-changing, so it’s hard to stay the same person as you have been before once you go through them and your writing can’t stay the same. Since I started blogging I has been wondering what would happen with my blogging once I get kids – will I turn into a mommy-blogger? will I start another weblog for it? will I keep that part of my life out of the web?

I still don’t know, but I guess I will find out soon. My own shapes are changing, so I guess the shape of this space will change as well. In both cases I know that the change is coming, but I may only guess where it would lead me :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14.html#a1853; comments are here.

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I often catch myself with an uneasy feeling when people talk (write) nicely about my weblog and treat me as an expert as a result of what I write here. Of course, it feels nice and rewarding, but it’s uneasy: sometimes while writing another “struggling with PhD” or “raw thinking in progress” post I really wonder why I still have all those smart people subscribing to my feed.

It’s difficult issue to talk about: I don’t want to get compliments or try to be too modest or something like that. It’s not that I think that my ideas are worth nothing or that I have nothing interesting to say - I don’t think I’m a novice in the areas I write about, but there is something uneasy in putting my own self-image next to how (I think based on the feedback I get) others perceive me.

Last week, while talking about those things between all other topics with Stephanie and Jill I’ve got one step further, realising that I actually wrote about it before and that I have conceptual categories to think about it. When I worked with Andrea on a book chapter (will post a version online very soon) co-constructing a story of our relationship we discovered exactly the same asymmetry of perceptions:

At the beginning of the relationship Andrea’s comments were carefully shaped, indicating respect of Lilia’s position (’a proper researcher’, not a ‘mere student’), experience in blogging and assumed expertise. For Lilia this degree of ‘being treated as an expert’ felt strange.

Reflecting on this difference we found it useful to distinguish between writing as knowing and writing as learning.

Our experiences with written (especially academic) texts taught us to perceive them as a representation of authority and expertise of their authors: writing on a topic as an indicator of confident knowledge about it. For Andrea reading Lilia’s blog posts about online research shaped an image of her as an expert on the topic; Lilia had the same (but not explicitly expressed) respect for Andrea’s knowledge of ethnography.

However, our own self-images did not correspond to these perceptions: we were still exploring the respective fields using weblogs to documenting those learning experiences. Blogging as learning, very formative, uncertain and in-progress was perceived as blogging as knowing – summative and confident.

For me my weblog is a learning diary - things that appear here are pretty much thinking in progress and me-who-writes-this-weblog is a struggling PhD researcher, who has more questions than answers. It seems that me-whom-people-imagine-while-reading is a bit more of an knowledgeable expert, confident enough to present even unfinished ideas to the world. Of course, I’m a bit of both - in offline world I would adopt different roles (identities?) while discussing specific difficulties of data analysis with my mentor or while presenting finished piece of research at a conference.

It’s just uneasy and interesting to look how the way (I think) I present myself in my weblog is different from how (I think) others perceive me while reading it - I haven’t experienced much of it offline…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/28.html#a1822; comments are here.

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