Mathemagenic

[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.

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For quite a while I’ve been on a conference abstinence track - not submitting papers and limiting attendance in order not to get distracted from the PhD writing.

That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful - it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is - somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life - reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.

I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):

• a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
• thinking about online places - their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them - and ways of studying (in) them
  • communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
  • experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
• learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
• different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
• blogs
  • blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
  • exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
  • crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
• researching fast changing fields - audiences and expectations (later:
  Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)

Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.

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Just finished and submitted :)

Efimova, L. (2008). Blending blogging into an academic text. Paper submitted IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge, workshop at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008.

Abstract. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it, and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Looking forward to the workshop - the list of the workshop participants and their papers is intriguing…

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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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Just because I thought about it while taking a break from writing on PIM and GTD - a quote from Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity by Etienne Wenger that explains in a very nice way the troubles I have with finding confidence while trying to bridge multiple research practices (bold is mine).

Uprootedness is an occupational hazard of brokering. Because communities of practices focus on their own enterprise, boundaries can lack the kind of negotiated understanding found at the core of practices about what constitutes competence. That makes it difficult to recognize or access the value of brokering. As a consequence, brokers sometimes interpret the uprootedness associated with brokering in personal terms of individual adequacy. Reinterpreting their experience in terms of the occupational hazards of brokering is useful both for them and for the communities involved. It can also allow brokers to recognize one another, seek companionship, and perhaps develop shared practices around the enterprise of brokering. [p.100]

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While working on the study of my personal blogging practices I went through my weblog archives. 1460 posts, more than half a million words (it was hard to believe when I saw the stats).

Reading old posts in an interesting experience, especially at a “convergence moment” when lots of old ideas find their place in the dissertation. At some moment I was pretty frustrated wondering on Twitter “if most of the things I want to say in my PhD are already in my weblog, what’s the added value of the dissertation?”

Well, writing a dissertation has an added value. This post is about it.

While weblog provides a space to grow ideas, it’s also a mess of fragments. They are connected through links and tags, but in many cases the higher level reasons of why certain bits appear and how are the relevant to a bigger whole remain unarticulated. Mainly because at the moment of writing it’s not clear how the fragments connect. Also, in many cases, the whole story is too long for a weblog post.

Connecting those fragments takes time, which is difficult to find between work and writing about new and fresh ideas. Usually I know vaguely about the connections; regular readers of the weblog probably have an idea too. For others, it’s just a bunch of interesting bits buried in the pile of half a million words.

It also takes extra work (e.g. a systematic data collection and analysis) to connect fragments in a story that provides stronger evidence than a collection of anecdotes.

Working on a dissertation provides a structure to address those issues: the need to connect fragments, push and discipline to collect evidence, time to work on converting all that into a bigger whole and a space to do it.

At this moment I smile reading my old post about not wanting to write a book - I’m pretty happy to have my dissertation as a legitimate excuse to turn “small pieces loosely joined” into a whole that does not easily fall apart. While reading weblog posts is still easier, I hope that reading the dissertation is more efficient for those interested in a bigger picture behind the fragments.

I still have my concerns about the long time it takes to write a book and lack of interactivity in the traditional process of doing so, but this is another story.

[Some related thoughts were also in a post by Jill about an added value of writing a book on things well covered in the weblog, but I couldn't find it back.]

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Back from Online Information. Hopefully I will find energy to post on all kinds of insights from it once I’m done with the introduction chapter that was patiently waiting for me. Only one thing before that - various conversations at the conference helped me to formulate what I want to do when I’m done with my PhD:

• studying specific cases of Web2.0* in companies (what people are actually doing with those tools and why)
• and then translating insights from those to
  • introduction/facilitation/governance strategies
  • technology requirements

Not that far from what I’m actually doing with blogging in my PhD research :)

*The main reason I want to study Web2.0 is that the values behind it and the change it brings at a workplace correspond well with what I believe in. Technologies will come and go, but some of the lessons they teach stay - it’s those that I’m curious to discover.

Technorati: OnlineInfo2007

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/07.html#a1963; comments are here.

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Something that has been in my “to blog” list for a while - the current reincarnation of my personal KM models, turned into a knowledge work framework.

The left part of the framework represents personal knowledge management activities that inform and support performing specific (content-related) tasks, which in turn provide direction and focus for PKM. The distinction between tasks and PKM could be clarified using one-person enterprise metaphor: tasks would represent its core business, while PKM - its overhead activities.

New ideas and insights are often developed in the social context, hence conversations are in the middle of the framework. This sector incorporates a spectrum between passively followed conversations to collaboration with others focused on performing specific tasks.

The lower sector represents the domain of relations, since effective knowledge development is enabled by trust and shared understanding between the people involved. For an individual, this means a need to establish and maintain a personal network, to keep track of contacts and conversations, and to make choices about which communities to join and which to ignore.

The top sector represents the domain of developing ideas that requires filtering vast amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas. In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role, so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails, and bookmark collections.

The scale from left to right represents a continuum between non-active awareness of a specific domain, its players and social norms and active, usually purpose-focused, tasks. As the focus increases from left to right, the number of specific ideas one can actively pursue, conversations to participate and close relations decreases. The scale reflects the process of legitimate peripheral participation, moving from being an outsider in a specific knowledge community to a more active position. Awareness, as a starting point of this process, comes through exposure to the ideas of others and lurking at the periphery (observing without active participation) in order to learn about professional language and social norms.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/03.html#a1961; comments are here.

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I’m almost finished with my methodology chapter. I haven’t been blogging much while writing it, but it contains quite a few things where I either would be extremely happy with the feedback or I believe that some other “methodologically challenged” researcher could benefit from (without waiting for the whole dissertation to be published).

So, I’m going to post those pieces online and link them from this post. You can also email me if you really want to read the whole methodology chapter before I incorporate the feedback from my supervisors :)

Chapter parts*

• Blogging practices
• Participation
• Quality criteria
• Quality verification strategies
• Matching quality criteria and verification strategies

*They are parts of the bigger whole, even if I tried to make them relatively readable in a stand-alone mode. These are also drafts…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/27.html#a1945; comments are here.

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Those are the two reasons I haven’t been blogging much…

Alexander was ill for the first time (not counting teething and running nose). I knew that it would be scary, but it’s even scarier when you are in the middle of it. REALLY sleepless nights, crying baby and us, worried about everything and not knowing how to help. Fortunately is over…

I’m working on the methodology chapter for my PhD, which is unforgiving. At times I do feel embarrassed about how much time and effort it takes before a reasonably good text is constructed. Unfortunately it’s not finished yet…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/09/23.html#a1943; comments are here.

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