[When I talked about it with Bev in Copenhagen I realised it might be worth writing down]

I started my PhD research with an idealistic target to create something that people would read and find useful. As I worked on it the “people” turned into bloggers, my peers on the quest of figuring out where weblogs fit in knowledge-intensive environments. They were the audience that I wanted to reach with my work.

I didn’t realise that doing PhD research is extremely slow comparing to the fun of playing with new ideas in my professional community. As I moved beyond the early studies into doing research and writing about it, I felt more and more being behind. There were a few “objective” reasons to stop reading other blogs, but also  an emotional one next to them: reading about new ideas people in my network were playing with made me feel working on “yesterday’s news”. It also made clear that my work wasn’t that interesting for my imagined audience, so I was losing my main motivation to do it.

I struggled with it for a while. As I eventually figured out the problem was in my own expectations and I had the answers in the first paper I wrote on weblogs that I mechanically copy-pasted into the introduction chapter of my dissertation. I wanted to study blogging to get an understanding of where it fits for the “pragmatists” who come after “enthusiastic early adopters”, yet it’s early adopters I imagined as my audience.

That changed everything. As I realised that I’m not writing for my “early adopter” peers, but for people who were only getting into blogging, it suddently made more sense.

• OneNote for recording and coding qualitative data (+ more on tagging metaphor for flags)
• Making choices
• On definitions: personal perspective at work

Between PhDs at work we have a saying, quoting our former director, professor Chris Vissers: “PhD is about developing your judgment”. It even part of our family jokes, since Robert and me got into dating just after his PhD party (so, after a couple of years working next door to my office he finally had his judgment right :)

I always felt Chris was right, but over last month I had an opportunity to experience it.

Over last couple of years I’d frequently fall into “low dips of the PhD research” – loosing motivation, believe in my topic, confidence that what I want to do with my PhD research would actually be accepted methodology-wise…

My post about a year ago is pretty much about it:

Today, discussing some of my methodological struggles with a visiting professor I’ve heard once again “if you believe it should be like that just do it like that”. I’ve heard it so many times during my research, but today I looked at it differently – as far as I’m my own source of doubts the process of looking for confirmations from others will last endlessly.

The world is so multifaceted that there always be places of not fitting in, always a space for an improvement. If you write for a feedback there is always a chance of unhappy readers.

I knew it all the way along, but I didn’t really felt that way. I felt lost, struggling with too many fields to comply and methodological boundaries that couldn’t stretch. It also didn’t help that my interests didn’t align well with the expertise of my PhD supervisors, so although I’ve got general support of what I’m doing and a lot of good criticism, I didn’t have as much “thinking along” collaboration as I needed then.

Suddenly things changed. I finally realised that the boundaries I imagined were in my own head and it was only up to me to deal with them. Something flipped inside and I found lost confidence. Then I’ve got in the flow…

I’m trying to figure out what have triggered those changes.

First, I guess, I just became ready to accept them, something to do with my “PhD maturity”, “developing judgement” topic-wise and methodology-wise.

Then, the time off played a role. Once I sorted out shifted priorities and realised that I’m not prepared to became a full-time mom, I knew that if I spent time away from Alexander I should spend it well and make the most out of it. I also realised, during an informal dinner with one of my supervisors, discussing something completely different, that despite all the criticism that I was getting, he actually believed that I was doing a good scientific work.

Or may be I just had my dose of PhD struggling and scientific gods decided that it’s time to stop that and just get work done.

I don’t know, but I’m pretty happy with it :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/07/02.html#a1919; comments are here.

• Methodology chapter: blogging practices
• Archaeology and ethnography in weblog research (2)
• KM Europe: summary

This is the topic that surfaces again and again: heated discussions about ‘pushing’ people into self-organised learning with Sebastian Fiedler, recurring “personal KM is about taking responsibility” with Ton Zijlstra, one more “parallel thinking” line discovered with David Gurteen last week… And finally this line from an article on adult learning pointed by Cindy Hoong:

Efforts to lure people to new educational technologies and to promote a culture of life-long learning resemble a case of preaching to the converted, according to a new UK study.

Familiar?

Why there is such a high degree of autodidacts or self-employed people between bloggers I know?

Do we put put the cart before the horse providing people with great methods and tools when they don’t have a need for them? Not surprising that methods and tools stick only with those already converted.

I don’t know how to put these things together in a coherent text, but I can make a bulleted list:

• There is no “sponsor” for my research on PKM as there is no “sponsor” for life-long learning. Organisations want agility from their people, but they care more about today’s and tomorrow’s profits than about employability of their employees in 20 years.
• The change is up to an individual.
• Change starts from a need more often than from an opportunity (= unless you are an early adopter having good tools is not enough to change way of doing things).
• Change is painful and unless there are visible threats not many people would go out of their comfort zone.
• If you want people to take responsibility for their own lives you have to respect their choices. Including the one about not taking responsibility :)

Coming down to personal KM:

• Taking responsibility for one’s own life (or work :) is a main challenge for personal KM: it’s both rewarding and risky (more).
• It’s not about methods and tools, but about attitude change. Attitude change is difficult and there are many ethical issues around (more).

Fun of playing with forces of middlespace :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/01.html#a1407; comments are here.

• KM Europe: Dorothy Leonard
• Blogs to improve writing
• Time to reflect: my uses of weblog

Compare and contrast :)

Guardian Unlimited: Why blogs could be bad for business by Neil McIntosh

While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought.

“Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one.

There are plenty of areas of business where people are judged on their knowledge, and the competitive edge – and thus the safety of everyone’s jobs – is the thickness of a single good idea. Share it all on a weblog, with competitors or (worse) an office rival? You must be kidding.

Robert Scoble, very passonately, about “why do you weblog instead of doing something to get rich?”

So, why do this if not for money? Well, I started doing this mostly for myself. I am a news junkie. A community junkie. A computer junkie. I wanted a way to keep track of the sites I visited that I found interesting. I wanted a way to keep track of people I find interesting. I wanted a way for me to talk to the world about my point of view. I wanted a way to change the way corporations talk with their customers.

[..."weblogs and Miscrosoft vision" and more...]

But, no, there’s lots of people out there who think there just is no value in having a conversation with customers. Don’t worry. There were people in the 1970s who thought the idea of a personal computer was wacky. I know that people asked Steve Wozniak “why don’t you do something with your time that has a chance of making you rich?”

I think we all know the answer. I’d rather change the world, thank you very much.

I agree with Neil McIntosh that weblog use in companies depends on their culture or, I would put it more specific, on having a critical mass of individuals that can change it. He is right that bloggers tend to be “knowledge-sharing is power” people (e.g. personal characteristics that support blogging). But the question is: if people believing in the cluetrain manifesto are anomaly or early signs of changing balance between businesses and their customers?

And it also comes to more fundamental question: do you believe you can change the world?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/05.html#a782; comments are here.

• Legitimised theft: le sandwich corse de clotilde
• Finding time for blogging
• Citing from internet

The question that came into my mind: what happens with your ideas that you posted to a weblog inside certain boundaries (e.g corporate blog or course blog) after you leave these boundaries. Both Martin and Sebastian suggest that it should be your property and you have to be able to take it with you as your own learning resource. Ideally, I would say the same, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen easily in practice.

Companies and educational institutions are recognising that they could benefit from aggregating ideas produced by people (e.g. course assignments from previous courses could be reused in a new course). An individual knowledge worker, from other hand, wants to have access to his own thought, may be throughout his whole life. This is not interesting for a company (it’s competitive advantage!) and it should be ideal educational institution to take care of it (at the end no any educational institution is responsible to your own life-long learning).

In one paper knowledge workers were addressed as investors bringing their knowledge for corporate use. This is good metaphor, but unlike real investors knowledge workers can not take their investment back. Even worse, if you leave treads of your knowledge work in corporate context they are likely to belong to a company (often copyrighted), so they in fact risk loosing some of their investments.

In a long-term this could be a problem to weblogs adoption in a corporate context: I’m more motivated to write something down if I know that it stays with me and I can come back to it than if it’s locked in a corporate knowledge management system or e-learning system (see more about motivation to post in order to keep track of your learning – Why I blog more than use discussion tools).

This is also somehow related with the discussion on institutional versus personal speech by Ross Mayfield.

Later: some directions for solutions could be found by operationalising ideas of Andrius Kulikauskas on copyright.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/23.html#a619; comments are here.

• Reasons for not sharing knowledge
• Bibliography conventions when writing on weblogs
• BlogTalk 2.0: Mark

I guess Sylvie is right and I need some frequencies next to the answer to make it more clear. I’ll add them later, to the full paper version.

Please, note that these are not the responses (you can find them by following the link), but categories I use to group them.

Responses to the Question 10. Why did you start your weblog? What motivated you?

Those characteristics that mentioned by both bloggers and would be bloggers are marked with *

• Curiosity, interest in experimentation*
• Examples of other people/ other weblogs, encouragement from other bloggers*
• Improving own thinking and learning (by articulation)*
• Organising ideas and references (keeping research notes, organising bookmarks, moving knowledge-sharing/ communication activities from other tools to a weblog) *
• Need for an expression and audience, publishing ideas, bringing ideas to others*
• Interest in communication and sharing*
• As add-on to /emerged from a homepage
• To share life with friends/family (especially being in another city/country), sharing emotions (feeling in love, assault by a stranger)
• Exploring opportunities for a professional use of weblogs (business, teaching, KM) *
• Getting hands-on experience in order to understand weblogs (research, software development, business)
• Demonstrating/promoting weblogs to someone else (clients, national audience)
• Previous (paper) diary/notetaking experiences
• War: to show alternatives for news sources
• Because it’s easy

Would be bloggers only

• Getting connected with people with similar interests
• Improving own thinking as result of a feedback

Responses to the Question 11. [Bloggers only] What other added values of blogging did you discovers after starting it (if any)?

Regular bloggers

• Finding identity, gaining exposure and credibility in the field
• Improving knowledge and skills: related to technologies, writing, discipline and being organised, ability to pose questions, ability to distinguish between public and private
• Serendipity, feedback and dialogue contributing to idea evaluation and development
• Networking and building relations, finding people with similar interest, finding friends, finding a community
• Conversations and knowledge sharing
• Audience and exposure, easy/cheap/fast way to promote/push ideas
• Fun, joy, addiction
• Depth
• Time saving

People, trying out a weblog

• Other webloggers as a great source
• Easy of publishing
• News aggregator as a tool to access other weblogs
• Following up students
• “the rather poor reciprocity, the endless circularity and rehashing/repetition, the low level of dialog”

My conclusions in brief

Blogging is still about early adopters (I perceive “curiosity and experimentation” as a motivation to start a weblog as a sign of an early adopter).

Many important values of blogging emerge only after starting it. Especially those related to the dialogue and building relations with others. Is “blogging = easy webpublishing” slogan a good way to promote weblogs?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/01.html#a571; comments are here.

• BlogTalks book
• Better tools and educative marketing
• Beyond ‘blogs = easy webpublishing’

Dina Mehta, Why do i Blog – 2:

“The blank page gives us the right to dream.” — Gaston Bachelard

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/01.html#a568; comments are here.

• The role of chocolate in PhD research
• Knowledge sharing and rewards
• I’m not a potato :)

Denham Grey continues the discussion on motivation to blog

May be another way to see the blog vs. web conference distinction. I find ‘blogging for feedback’ to be a quaint paradox. If you wish to have deep reflection and strong feedback, would you not gladly accept the containment of a conference / conversation? Do you not need a space where there is an established turn-taking rhythm?, a place where you have an identity, a history of reciprocity, a context and knowledge of the audience?

Blogging seems closer to broadcasting: ‘hello world’ , here are my thoughts, reply if you must otherwise move along, I get my biggest rewards from just organizing my thinking!

Somehow this approach seems to bypass the magic of dialog, the power of engagement, the synergy of connecting and reflecting. There is greater value I believe in ‘thinking’ together, than in publishing alone.

Probably I can’t explain it yet, but for me “the magic of dialog, the power of engagement, the synergy of connecting and reflecting” of blogging is stronger than the same feelings of on-line conferences I visit (face-to-face conversations are out of scope). I guess my main problem with those conferences is that there I don’t have established “identity, a history of reciprocity, a context and knowledge of the audience” and joining in on the way costs too much.

I feel that somehow blogs provide better context for deep reflective discussions. I find it difficult to explain, but probably Spike Hall explains it better. Somehow he extracts things that I can hardly make explicit :)

There’s lots more to think about here. For example, the idea of context that Lilia has named is deeper than the social, interpersonal context I referred to above. The kind of contextual analysis she describes could allow the really good respondent to find the intended idea even when only partially expressed in the message itself. Hmmmm!!!

My guess would be to look at blogs as digital apprenticeship tools: somehow regular reading of someone’s blog gives you (at least me!) better context than participating in on-line discussion.

I know that you have the blog, but this is not a true blog: you don’t have RSS feed, so other bloggers can’t read you regularly and engage in a conversation, so you see mainly the “publishing” side of it. I also guess that most likely you don’t use news aggregator, so you miss the experience of day-to-day following of someone’s thoughts.

I would say that regular reading (you invite others with RSS and you read them with news aggregator) is essential for understanding the conversational power of blogging.

You could give it a try, starting simple Blogger (or better Radio) blog on “Critical look on blogs as conversation environment” (I would love to see your other thoughts too!). Your ideas are worth reading by more bloggers, but I’m afraid the only way to engage them in a conversation is to start blogging :)))

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/11.html#a459; comments are here.

• Blogs, dialogue and identity building
• Citing from internet
• I’m not a potato :)

E-mail brings an invitation from Kevin Kruse to join e-Learning Guru. I didn’t have much time to browse the site, but there are a couple of topic that I’d like to check later:

• resources on marketing e-learning (scroll) – I would add the report on e-learning motivation study (pdf)
• an overview on the ARCS model of learner motivation (I somehow missed it in my “training design” education :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/11.html#a458; comments are here.

• Links: knowledge sharing and e-learning localisation
• Digital portfolio day
• Course as a playground for KM instruments

As a follow-up thinking to why I blog more than use discussion tools: why I blog more than write scientific papers (or why I’m more motivated to blog :)

Because I get timely and so-needed feedback on my ideas.

It’s also something to do with my intrinsic motivation to write and to get feedback rather than formal performance appraisal thing – “published so many papers”. Probably if I become well-known and widely published scientist I will enjoy writing papers more. But not now :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/10.html#a455; comments are here.

• Weblogs in business: following the culture or changing it?
• e-Learning Curu
• Don’t tell me how to blog