Those moments when Alexander is sick are probably most difficult in trying to combine motherhood and working on my PhD. The sleepless nights, when he wakes up every hour and needs something from me are not only tough by themselves, but they make writing the day after close to impossible, because my brain refuses to function.

Well, it seems that I might have discovered a solution: instead of struggling to write the day after the night like that, I might well write at night (taking breaks to help Alexander when he wakes up) and recover during the day when there are usually more people who can help.

Don’t know if it’s sustainable, but at least this night it works :)

• Expecting: more kids and challenges
• Challenges on writing literature overview on business blogging (or another turn on researcher vs. blogger)
• Turning work into life

I’ve been thinking for a while on weblogs as boundary objects (and bloggers as boundary subjects :). I don’t think I’m 100% on classical definitions here, but don’t be angry – I need to play with the idea to see what comes out of it.

Also: you may want to read Denham on boundary objects here and here

My interest in blogging pretty much defined by the fact that weblogs cross boundaries – this is where the most of fun lies and the most of troubles occur. So, when conceptmapping some PhD thinking today I came up with this branch (I have to admit that this is not a generic case, but reference to my own research):

So, what shapes my own blogging practices (these are different angles of the same thing):

Contexts where blogging has to fit: my personal practices (e.g. those of dealing with information, technologies or time), practices of people around me (e.g. norms of communication) and practices of the organisation I work for (e.g. regarding confidentiality).

Communities I belong to (this overlaps with the previous category – have to think what to do with it). Those shape at least two aspects – themes that run through my blog and ways of doing things. Theme-wise I’m influenced by topical communities (e.g. KM vs. learning vs. technology), but there are also differences at the level of doing (e.g. researchers vs. practitioners).

Another way to look at blogging is it’s position on the edge between public and private – it has elements of control and safety of my own space and exposure of being in public.

Finally, research-wise my weblog is used in several ways: blogging is a way to participate in the communities I study, it’s an instrument for collecting and analyseing the data and it’s a publication medium. Normally those things would be separated (at least by time, space and audiences).

Semi-related earlier posts (the list is mainly for myself since suprisingly I don’t have a tag where those things would be collected):

• Third culture kids and research kunstkamera
• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: blogging as a person or as an employee
• AOIR: Not documenting, doing: blogging as research
• Edges
• Individual in a public space: learning from weblogs and cities
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• Blog networking, blogwalking and being a boundary subject
• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Personal ways of doing things in public
• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?
• A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/04.html#a1794; comments are here.

• Presentation: Highlights from my dissertation
• Weblog networking: two way awareness and different degrees of strength
• PhD

It’s feels strange realising how much my PhD research is influenced by experiences in domains that don’t have much to do with my focus. Since it’s so strong I tend to think that it’s true for other researchers as well and then feel even more strange not finding much traces of those “other domains” in their published work. This, in turn, reinforces my feeling that there is always some degree of “constructedness” in research published – and the more rigorous and logical it looks the more I suspect that the logic was reverse-engineered (no offence meant – this is how I feel even if logics says the opposite :)

Anyway, back to the originally intended topic of this post… Now, getting back into my PhD research and deeper into sorting out methods and methodologies, I realise that my recent reading of Third culture kids (context) provided me with a frame for thinking about my research next to insights of more personal nature.

Between other things the book stresses the influence of growing up between cultures for forming TCK personalities and the world outlook. While we are growing up, our identities are forming against particular cultural backgrounds – specific norms, values and practices are picked up, tried and tested, and, regardless of their “stickiness” in our lives form who we are (you don’t need to drink vodka to be Russian – in anyway your attitude regarding it would be heavily formed by observing those who do, knowing about effects of it, rituals and “safe” good practices of drinking as well as having to deal with the “outsiders” who think that it’s a bigger part of everyday life than it actually is ;). Background culture provides scaffolding by consistent stimulators and reactions. This consistency is important – it’s like a tree that always there for an ivy to crawl around or like a firm arm of your dance partner that is necessary to lead in a way that could be followed.

Growing up between cultures means that another life could be just one flight away, and then everything is changed – the way elders are treated, food is prepared and eaten or friendships are formed. Relocating while growing up means that there is sufficiently long time to absorb each culture, but not enough to be formed by any specific one… Those culture changes bring not only broad outlook on the world, flexibility and knowing exotic languages; they also turn someone into restless and rootless, someone who is always in transition, moving, but never settling, someone who doesn’t know who he is and where he belongs.

Reading the book made the difference clear to me – despite of a few years living abroad I grew up Russian and know where my roots are. In my case multicultural values and practices, although landing on a fertile ground of growing up in a family of mixed ethnic origins, are still just add-ons to the pretty stable core.

However, being mixed up and searching for own people is part of my life – in a totally different context. I feel as “third culture kid”, restless and rootless, research methodology wise.

I guess there are two reasons to it. First, it is doing research (and being enculturated methodology-wise) in a multidisciplinary research institute rather than being a part of a university group with clear set of norms, values and practices regarding research approaches. The second has something to do with weblogs.

Some time back we played with an idea of blogging as distributed apprenticeship, articulating own practices and learning from others often transcending time, distance and disciplinary boundaries. For me blogging has been exactly that – an opportunity to lurk and learn, going beyond expertise and practices available in my immediate surroundings.

Now it bites back. For me reading weblogs of researchers coming from contexts very different from my own brought a permanent exposure to “other” research cultures while I’m still trying to figure out what are the norms and practices of my own tribe (and what is my own tribe, by the way?). In this respect I feel like a kid who moves between different cultures while growing up. I know a lot about differences, fascinating local examples, needs to adapt and to speak the right language, but I don’t know where I belong and which values to stick to. I know that whatever research paradigm you are in the consistency is important, but sometimes I wonder if I can find it wondering in my own kunstkamera* with bits and pieces of research from other worlds…

* Here refers to Kunstkamera in St. Peterburg, founded as a collection of curiousities by Peter the Great and later turned into an ethnographic museum.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/14.html#a1738; comments are here.

• BlogWalk: artefacts and invisible audience
• Cross-cultural reading
• Ideal case of employee weblogs

Nancy White on something we discussed at CPsquare meeting last month:

There is insufficient experience and practice to slap labels around and make claims that completely ignore a key factor of online interaction technologies.

• They are designed for a group experience.
• They are almost always experienced by an individual in the isolation in interaction with their computer.

My experience is not your experience. Further more, it is hard to even describe OUR experience. We romanticize the concept of group interaction, but in truth, it is imperfect, online and offline. And online we don’t see the consequences as quickly nor are our communication antennae, trained for millennium to F2F communication, as attuned to online communication. I think we are getting better. I see changes. But I can’t see if you are smiling, frowning, curious or pissed off as you read this. And if I want to communicate and engage with you, that matters to me. (If I just want to spout and publish, well, you are out of luck!)

A simple example: smileys look different in all IM tools I use and I never know what is used on another side… It keeps me wondering how my ;) looks at your end…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/12.html#a1279; comments are here.

• Communities, shared spaces and weblog reading
• CPsquare foundations: themes and questions to explore
• Blogs as boundary objects