a musing space; a performance in progress

How to end a thesis

2012-01-30T08:13:00.006+13:00

With a full stop, you get to your 85000 words says Bruno Latour and you put a full stop at it.
A good thesis is a finished one.

mmmm dont think the academy is quite ready for that, but there is a surprizing lack of detail of how to end a thesis. At least there is in regard to completed ones. Lots of advice I have on how to walk away from one, which i am thankful is not my need.
(But of these my favourite is in the movie The Big Chill, Where William Hurt says as Nick: "I could have. I chose not to. I'm not hung up on this completion thing."

And there is a beautiful cartoon by leunig on letting go

And instead of finishing it and then letting go, i have , perhaps, procrastinated in looking at famous last lines:
Frankly my dear I dont give a damn.
( Not quite the last line, Rhett's last words to Tara in Gone with the Wind. )
(But I do give a damn so this one's not realy for me)

‘I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.’ From Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
(now this is another reason i want to end the thesis, this has been on my reading list for a while).

Oscar Wilde's life ended with
"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
(and i include this because so much house maintenance has been neglected)

And from tips on writing dissertations and thesis I get;
La Bégueule (1772); The perfect is the enemy of the good
(the primary goal being to get a Ph.D. , not apparently to change the world, or get a booker prize for writing)

And then I turned to my favourite authors in the research i have undertaken, predominantly those of Actor-network theory to look for their closing words.
(particularly because telling the story is a performance in its own right)

Annmarie Mol in The Logic of care:
So let us care instead. The world - or so the logic of care reminds us - is not something we may look at and judge from the outside. Instead, we are caught up and participate in it, body and all. Chronically, until the day we die.

Bruno Latour in Pandora's hope:
To retrieve the Hope that is lodged there, at the bottom, we need a new and rather convoluted contrivance. I have had a go at it. maybe we will succeed with next attempt.
(truly ascerbic wit. But no, I'm not planning on writing another one of these)

John Law in After method. Mess in social science research
We need quite other metaphors for imagining our worlds and our responsibilities to those worlds...Forms of crafting. Processes of weaving...Metaphors for the stutter and the stop. Metaphors for quiet and more generous versions of method.

Bruno Latour in Reassembling the social
Is it absurd to want to retool our disciplines to become sensitive again to the noise they make and to try to find a place them?

Bruno Latour in Aramis
The last words from the Professor, rather than the last words of the book)
...Listen to him, he's learnt nothing. But in five years i'll come along and study it for you, your Prometheus...they'll be asking me for another postmortem study..."

Annemarie Mol in The body multiple
This study does not try to chase away doubt but seeks instead to raise it. Without a final conclusion one may still be partial: open endings do not imply immobilization.

Sherry Turkle in Evocative objects
Our theories tell us stories about our lives. As we begin to live with objects that challenge the boundaries between the born and created and between humans and everything else, we will need to tell ourselves different stories.

And from other thesis I have read:
From Ingrid Mewburn (of thesiswhisperer blog fame)
However this ANT turn does ask us to be more responsive and attentive to what is going on as we act: if we are ‘doing reals’ we are also ‘doing goods’ – or ‘doing bads’. But I think it’s worthwhile to pursue understanding design studios this way because it means there’s enormous potential here for those who want to make change because, as John Law puts it, ‘reality is not destiny'

From Ray Meldrum, who finishes his citing Dreyfuss on design for people saying:
His final words are telling:
Perhaps A.A. Milne was really addressing us rather than children when he wrote: ‘Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of this head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way to come down stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.’ (p.230)
Stopping the bumping and exploring another way to come down (or go up) neatly describes the becoming of this thesis.

From Patricia Thomson (of patter blog fame)
"Doing justice' is about everyday acts that add up, in the end, to making some difference. That is what this story says.
What this story cannot say is...
It cannot say how it is that ....
It cannot say what it is that schools and social policy might need to to do in order to 'do justice'.
That story requires more in the telling than a literary turn. What is needed to tell that story is a sociology of education that is unafraid of the economic, unafraid to put not only policy and difference but also the class back in the classroom.
it is to that project that I perhaps can claim to have made some contribution.

So what I have learned? (About finishing, that is)
1. first you have to not want to be attached to the thesis any more. It took me ages to get to this, but tired of having my summers in the company of my laptop. And I tired of a front door that needs painting, and a garden that resorts to the judicial use of poison rather than gardening...and so it goes on .... there are after all many other things to do with a life.
2. it really helps if you stay on topic, even if the path taken meandered, it really does look better to come from there to here with a trajectory explained.
3. eloquence, clarity, and conviction, matter to a reader

AND dont ask. No its not finished yet!

But if you want to add your fav finishing lines, please feel free :)

On techno-bunny bliss

2011-12-13T16:00:00.008+13:00

I live in fear of ever meeting my favourite writer, I might not live up to her expectation.
And she might not live up to mine, but i am in phd writer love.

I cannot forget the moment as a phd student when my mouth fell open at reading an academic journal from 1988 that said "And like the god trick, this eye f#cks the world of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.
(Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3), 575-599. p581)

And now i find this same author cited on twitter and I just had to go chasing down another rabbit hole to find the article that referred to "not some kind of techno-bunny bliss".

Ahhh the eloquence, fluffy dolphin syndrome has nothing on techno-bunny bliss.

And now I have a rebuttal to Latour's thinly veiled reference to Haraway
with "Bruno Latour’s complaint about the stupidity of critical theorists is just doing critique once again."

Nonetheless she also states:
Bruno and I are in relentless alignment, even as we give each other indigestion about some of the ways we do it. I think we love each other’s work because that is what matters.
(To think of the world through connections)

And some more clarity on why a perspectives or relativistic position is not being argued in my thesis:
This is not a relativist position. This is not about things being merely constructed in a relative sense. This is about those objects that we non-optionally are. Our systems are probabilistic information entities. It is not that this is the only thing that we or anyone else is. It is not an exhaustive description but it is a non-optional constitution of objects, of knowledge in operation. It is not about having an implant, it is not about liking it. This is not some kind of blissed-out techno- bunny joy in information. It is a statement that we had better get it – this is a worlding operation. Never the only worlding operation going on, but one that we had better inhabit as more than a victim. We had better get it that domination is not the only thing going on here. We had better get it that this is a zone where we had better be the movers and the shakers, or we will be just victims.

And a final note:
"women thinkers are made to seem derivative of male philosophers, who are often their contemporaries – made to be derivative and the same, when we are neither."

I found the article i wanted and more,
Nicholas Gane, interview with Donna Haraway.
Gane, N. (2006). When we have never been human, what is to be done?: Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture, Society., 23, 135-158.

many thanks to @bonstewart on twitter for providing the retweet that got me t/here.

my phone just does its own thing without me

2011-12-06T08:48:00.001+13:00

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/carrier_iq_it_s_totally_rational_to_worry_that_our_phones_are_tracking_everything_we_do_.html

Ok so its its not so much watching me as telling mobile network operators where its been to....

If my thesis was ... a writing retreat exercise

2011-12-06T08:12:00.006+13:00

The writing retreat I am on had a small exercise i thought i would share because it prompted some unusual thinking for me about my thesis.
Here's the exercise as shared by Gilly Bolton to Barbara Grant,
(And it starts a lot like a Youthline feedback exercise i use in personal development groups so dont know why i had never applied it to my work in progress, but there you go- it takes intersections with others sometimes to see things can be done differently)

If your thesis was a colour what colour would it be?

If your thesis was a piece of fruit what fruit would it be?

If your thesis was a piece of music what music would it be?

Share it with a friend, you might also say why.

Then write a 15 minute letter to a novice, or a researcher switching to your field as to what your piece of writing is about and why it is hugely important.

Then 10 minutes, imagine and write what you think that novice would say back to you.

What i got out of this:
I thought my thesis was blue and changed my mind: it was more vibrant than that. So its purple. Not in the sense that chaos is purple, and regalness never crossed my mind. Just that it is not cool, its vibrant, but its also easy going so there is no red yellow or orange there.

Fruit, was a strawberry because of the tang, but then i dropped this for a passionfruit, multiple bits going onn inside.

The music i had always thought would be a symphony. But its not.
Its Mike Oldfields Tubular Bells , 1981 ish so feels a little dated, (not my thesis, just the music) But what Tubular bells does is a controlled demonstration of multiple instruments, these instruments do not come into the network but can be discerned as they enter and their interactions are formed in association. Its not totally like an actor-network as the instruments themselves exit again unaltered, but what i want to convey is the music of two instruments or more is different to any of these individually. In terms of the thesis, it is about not being able to replicate the whole symphony, but to have a controlled entry through the writer that discerns just what is being shaped, identifying the traces.

http://youtu.be/xPEt5OTR6Vc

The other exercise was a surprise- i received back a succinct understanding on how come ANT doesnt do perspectives but is about multiple realities....a bit coloured by the previous exercise but in tubular bells the instruments and their activities are all positioned, the bell doesnt have a perspective on me, it doesnt know i exist, the triangles, or whatever do nor have a perspective on the bells.... what they hold is position and they act from this in their own reality, and our realities differ, our hinterlands differ, our possibilities differ, what we enact differs. Our relaities sometimes interact, sometimes align and sometimes collide, but this is not usually noticed untill we discover contradictions and contestations.

pencil meme "best education allegory ever"

2011-12-04T05:54:00.004+13:00

a twittering gone viral pencilchat#

The Goldilocks moment, not too hard , not too soft

2011-11-26T09:22:00.004+13:00

John Dron 23 November in Change11 mooc
http://change.mooc.ca/files/audio/change11_23Nov2011.mp3

What are technologies anyway?
Dron starts with eg of screwdriver or is it a paint-tin opener, or a stirrer or a backscratcher…its not a single technology

We have a tendency to think of it as one thing, but really its many; there are
an infinite number of possible ways it can be used

This is a very ANT (actor-network theory) conversation. To consider that we and they (others including things) are made in association. And reminds me of Latour talking about what a gun is; a weapon or an item of beauty to a collector.
As well as reminding me of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler on what makes a woman...

And then he put a thought provoking question forward:
Do people learn better with screwdrivers or without them?
This is a nice way to introduce the implausability of the common question:
do students learn better with pencils, elearning, classroom, moocs….

And I would suggest a better ANt like question, what happens when these approaches are used rather than the dichotomies of good or bad.

There are limits though
More than one less than many as Annmarie mol would have said

Further definition of technology is useful in considering therefore the orchestration of phenomena for particular use,
It becomes different technology when used for different things
Its about organizing things in the world.

A soft technology, many have had this idea, but how and why a thhing is used a particular way and the limits on possibility, that is, the orchestration of a phenomenon

Pedagogies as technologies

Multiple blurred and overlapping meanings

Technologies don’t have to be embodied in the thing, but the ways in which we use it, organized, a thing that is in our heads
Very ant like again; for we are shaped and shaping in association. Akrich would have talked of this in terms of what is inscribed into an object

Soft is enacted
Hard technology is in bits bytes atoms physical stuff
Not embodied is an important aspect
Latourian take on this is that we are all socio-technical hybrids and Donna Haraway would have us named Cyborg, but Dron doesnt go this far.

We implemented this and they learned better as a result
But its really about an orchestration of things
Not that online better than face to face, its just the way it is done

All technological assemblies constituted in relation to other things around them. Eg a computer keyboard as a particular bunch of things in order to get some result

Soft technologies an active orchestration by individual people, something without meaning until we start using them. Knitting needles no purpose untill applied.
Now there's a technology that has many uses licit and otherwise, ....but would also have been interesting to consider technologies as more immersed with us and us in them...I am reminded of Sherry Turkle's evocative objects, things we think with.
In contrast knitting machines are hard, the usability constrained, embodied
A continuum nothing wholly hard or soft

Not just about machines, eg legal system is a hard human system
Its not about soft or hard software etc its about created in limited ways
(this is similar to psychology of hard and soft architecture)

The thing about hard technologies, they make some things easier possible, eg refrigerator. To cool food is difficult with a soft technology eg shifting into shade or fanning…
Reducing scope of possibility to make things easier we harden technologies in order to be more simple, regular, reliable

Hard technologies are brittle, stifle creativity, and that’s the point as choices are not needed,
(He made a reference here to "see a city is not a tree" but I am unclear as to why)

Soft gives flexibility, creativity, but a soft technology is hard to use, but you are having to orchestrate those possibilities to make them happen.
(Okay, the use of hard for difficult needs to be considered as it begins to get confusing)

Soft technologies need people, they are nothing without people, whereas a fridge will trundle on by itself, automated.

“We shape our buildings and after the buildings then shape us” (Winston Churchill)
But it’s a lot more iterative than this suggests, he comes back to this later in q and a’s

Hard and soft not good or bad of themselves…fridge not good or bad, pre made web design versus the slowness involved if i had to start from scratch with coding is so slow, I want things to be easier, the big question then becomes how hard or soft in any situation

Moocs too soft for most people, an lms such as blackboard too hard for many…but also complexity: whose good or bad, used by different people, teacher as an authoring tool, or for the student as a learning tool…
Intent and use and what’s the orchestrating intent matters,
The pedagogies pulling at each other, acting together and in tension, a tug of way, technologies that fight with us
Technologies that don’t fit together well are also easily done eg lecture driven classroom and add a discussion forum and then assess the discussion forum…doesn’t add up. We need to design so the assembled work together, it is really easy to make deeply incompatible combinations thoughtlessly.
that is, an electronic system and a pedagogy may be in conflict
Important to assemble them effectively

Hard technologies limit the range, they structure our spaces, we will bend our pedagogies easier than change a hard technology

Facebook kind of hard, everything about it channels in a particular direction
the softer things we want to do being filtered through a hard technology
kind of how a university works, the beaurocracy of learning objectives
This is what i've been trying to do how we shape those technologies and the balance between hard and soft at a particular time, I really don’t want to have to design a lms and would much rather have the one I want than one that doesn’t, balance of constraints with movement

Not too hard not too soft on a given moment, in a given application of technology being adapted to purpose: the Goldilocks moment

eg twitter, how we should be building egs of not too hard not too soft just right
It's about building assemblies that are just right, the assembly makes it possible, just to assemble is how to do it, different ways, to make a hard technology softer easiest way is to add on to it eg blackboard here's mcqs you have to choose….but automated…so solution is to allow some kind of dialogue to happen that it can then be changed overridden by the teacher on the basis of the student's sound argument...so we add to to make softer, so softer when we aggregate.
(Seems an incongruity with knitting machine versus knitting needles where that aggragation made it harder...so some assemblies I would say soften, and some harden. Latour would talk of the adding chains of connection that strengthen, this understanding might also be applied to what hardens. Again a very ANt/ Latourian argument presented yet ANt was never mentioned.)

eg initially twitter didn’t begin with @ or # and the smart people in twitter then automated it, and made the system softer, it did not limit it, but added to

So softer increased use, so it became hyperlinked….auto ...adding to doesn’t always make harder.
(I can also feel a Macluhan moment coming on where we addd and add and then there is a flipping pint where the new technology obsolesces)
We harden eg when I say I’ll give u some feedback, ill give you some feedback to a learning outcome, I'll grade it…each step a little harder. So it's important to see pedagogies also as harder or softer.
And all technologies grow on a past

It becomes important then to think about what kinds of systems support aggregation so its about malleability
A key thing in aggregation, does it make it softer hardier, easier more difficult, more or less open for possibilities and fitness for purpose as well as adaptabilities...
eg electrical plug adaptor that’s multi use across the world
to make technologies not too hard or too soft

The elephant in the room is its not the technology as much as the passion, artistry in order to make those technologies do wonderful things, to get to those points we need to be I would say thoughtful

This was a very actor-network congruent presentation

In Q&A
Cites Ursula Franklin, wholistic technologies that expand vs prescriptive technologies
Thinking of things as technologies gets us away from the kneejerk all technology bad, restrictive technologies terrible…they are not

To follow up, further reading: Dron has allso written a paper called any colour you like so long as it’s blackboard

How to make the just right Goldilocks moment, eg grsshapper in a mook, enabling aggregation, harness when its needed, useful to have technologies that can be hardened or softened by those using it.
Might just be the policies around the use that need softening...might be us that need to soften rather than the techy. Again I am reminded of Latour and also Peter Sloterdikt in how to make digital spaces suit our human needs, but this has given me a way in to lever that conversation in my thesis
A guided path option, with choices that soften or harden,
To be harder when we need them and softer when we don’t, having smaller optional hard pieces eg drop downs…but problem is can end up with millions of small pieces and it becomes difficult again…

Yes there are some good ideas in this for the thesis, both philosophically, and for the handling of current pragmatic difficulties associated with the practice I have investigated (use of SMS messaging for youth counselling).
Great presentation.

refs for where i am coming from
Franklin, U. (1999). The real world of technology (Revised ed.). Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press.
Latour, B., & Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Networks and spheres: Two ways to reinterpret globalization. Presentation to the Graduate School of Design [Video webcast]: Harvard University. Retrieved from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. London, England: Duke University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Spheres theory: Talking to myself about the poetics of space. Harvard Design Magazine, 30, 126-137.

2011-11-18T19:20:00.000+13:00

The art of writing

2011-11-15T23:36:00.009+13:00

Here's the evidence of thesis writing being a distributed activity. The image portrayed is a graph created of movements on my mouse captured in 23 minutes of writing my thesis summary. The free software comes form iograph.
Writing is a distributed activity: the movements of the mouse attest to this. In is finger tapping movements on a key pad, as well as the lighting of pixels on a screen,and captured as a pdf file, or printed as ink on the page.
And the electricity, and plastic and metal gadgetry that is the laptop...
In addition text being distributed is also evident in that we, you as the reader and myself as the writer, have a shared meaning as to what these alphabet symbols mean and how on being strung together particular recognizable configurations are read as words, and in sentences particular meanings can be made.
And this occurs to the extent that Cooren writes of the spoken word as puzzling in that we assume the centrality of a speaker when myriad beings are involved and demonstrates that when we speak, many other voices are speaking as well.

In thesis writing there is also the distribution that involves myself as a student, a supervisor, and myriad other beings in a chain from here to there involving the institution I am enrolled at.
And a library and world wide web of readings that informs what i write of...and the twittersphere that introduced me to iograph.
And the research undertaken that prompted my thinking about how different communication and computer technologies alter how we see the world, and how we are seen, how we are shaped as well as shaping.

The textual format that can be traced not only in current time but which can also be traced downstream to the evolution of writing, and upstream with where such writing might lead with meanings made and paths then taken.

From something so little as a scribble of a graph i can make meaning... if I am willing to.
In arguing the textual form as distributed, this is also an example of actor-network theory at play, there are myriad beings involved, human and otherwise, and they are often silenced.
Such distribution is not only geographical but also 'folds time' or as Michel Serres (1995, cited in Latour, translated by & Venn, 2002 ) describes it, grasping a ‘garland of time’ as Michel Serres (1995)
Or I might have used the Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of a thousand plateaus and reference to rhizomatic ways of learning (discussed last week by Dave Cormier in chage11#) except they didnt go so far as naming the technological so strongly in an ecological systems approach, nor giving voice to so many other actors.
The forward by Latour on Cooren's book that discusses discourse as a distributed activity also contributed to this post.

Current discussions in #change11 seem annoyed by the metaphors that make theorizing accessible to some and less so to others. What is made more or less strong, whose realities are being voiced, whose could or should be, are also ANT issues.
That rhizomes or garlands make it clearer for me, someone brought up more in a garden than in an academic house, is something I'm grateful for.

Refs
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London, England: University of Minnesota Press.
Latour, B. (2010). Who is making the dummy speak? In F. Cooren (Ed.), Action and agency in dialogue: passion, incarnation and ventriloquism (pp. xiii-). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamin.

The art of change #Change11

2011-11-05T07:58:00.014+13:00

I'm going to take Nancy White's invocation of weaving together theorizing with a less wordy response and look at the social artistry as a reflection on change.

Changes can be mapped in the symbolic representations of rebranding for example.
When places I have worked have sought to throw out the old, the attachment to visual representations seemed especially hard.

Its also in the things that move from the margins and unaccepted spaces and into the exotic, and high brow spaces of the arts.
I have just obtained a copy of artist Nik Davez social-linguistice art: a translation of Roland Barthes The pleasure of the text into txtese: d PlsUR ov d txt
This beautiful rendition on the pleasure of reading and writing states:

it iz d rythm of wot iz red & wot iz & not red dat crE8z d plSUR of d gr8 nar8ivz

and so it is with change, what is done and not done, what is in the spaces, what is pushed through, and as Neil postman asks of technology,what does it undo as much as what it does...

"change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything."

and so change gets conveyed visually.
And in reflections on what happens with change and seeing allegorical representations, especially where things might otherwise be unacceptable. Patti Lather's the ache of wings comes to mind on her writing and reflections of researching women living with aids.

And in the stimulation to think about not only affecting change, but also in patterns of resistance (in ant change is always about resistance). The spiders of Nina Katchadourian dont like or appreciate the help extended. Well intentioned others; a reminder that change always involves alternate possibilities, and moral bias that may conflict with others realities.

But more than any other musings is Latour he talks (2002) of technology as catching a garland in time, past and present being brought together...and technology as the art of the curve.
Im being loose with my connections here...but if technology is as Ursula Franklin suggests the way we do things round here, then change and technology might be loosely the same thing :)

A bodacious curvaceous approach. Thanks Nancy.

Refs
Franklin, U. (1999). The real world of technology (Revised ed.). Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press.
Lather, P. (1997). Creating a multilayered text: Women, AIDS, and Angels. In W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 233-258). New York, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press.
Latour, B. (2002). Morality and technology. The end of the means. Theory, Culture & Society, 19(5/6), 247–260.
Postman, N. (1998). Five things we need to know about technological change. Retrieved from http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/neil-postman--five-things.html

Managed change an oxymoron; managing change and technology in Higher ed #change11

2011-10-23T10:11:00.006+13:00

My summation and response to
Tony Bates 16 Oct 2011 recording

There is/ or is there - a general failure to manage technology well in our institutions?
Tony Bates asks if change needs to come inside or does it need to come from outside to transform the HE sector
I think his questions would be better instead of asking does it come from here or there to have a more ant informed analysis: Where does change come from, or just what is going on here?
The question below the surface will always be about whether this is for good or bad also...should money be spent if we cannot even say what it costs to do this...
An obviously situated question which is of course going to have as an answer "it depends"
Perhaps Mols question shift from can we prove, to can we improve would have been a good one.
And this does tend to be his approach as the talk continues
A diversion: use of death by bullet point in his slides could be enhanced please here's an oldie but goodie by Seth Godin on really bad ppt http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/really_bad_powe.html

Regarding if its from the inside or outside, the audience answered with:
Educators not always good at leading change (Jenny)
Faculty, HE or academics, with no will to change
Needs to disturb the inertia

Technology major change in HE has been massification
Lots of students not high flyers: in HE we are not teaching an upper 5 0r 10% of elite students, we are having to teach therefore rather than just having the students learn and therefore we need to consider how delivery occurs

The techy web 2 gives learner much more control
Whether inside of institution or not
Going to campus hasn’t changed much
Institutions needs a fundamental rethink

Techy management in 6 unis spain and italy, and another 6 case studies
And online strategic plans form 36 institutions, carried out over several yrs

There were very different approaches,
Also some common features- but overall more common than different

Crude analysis-
How many profs students use lms
Lecture capturing
Wifi
Enhance classroom teaching was what unis identified as a third strand
The classroom teaching good: we want the techy to make it better,
Core techy using were lms
Conclusion, institutions conservative but adding cost with no added learning benefit
As there is a large increase in cost with putting in techy

Leadership and planning, success marked by:
Senior management team speaking from same page, the impt of techy as core for future, shared vision
Measurable strategic goals
Egs:
Increase flexible delivery, anytime, anyplace
Development of 21 c skills, ability to imbed it skills in relevant subject area (in my uni eg having skills for searching, working in wikis)
Improving cost effectiveness not said anywhere, yet up to 40% of budget going this way

Need for planning at several levels, particularly at programme level, he believes this most important level as students often come in as dependent level, but that they should be able to leave as more independent, and this can only occur at the programme level not from on high and not at individual lecturer level

Projects that fail: they run out of steam and or dependent on one person
Committees tend to be advisory not able to be employed
Learning tech units, building larger and larger as faculty don’t have the pedagological skills to know what to do
Individual instructors piecemeal approach, programme level not coherent

Best practices
Often worked to have a high level committee with sub committees
(how this was studied, who was asked??? Im going to assume students were not asked, seemed a lot of policy analysis and a lot of being told what goes on rather than seeing what goes on. Again, an ant observational approach could have enhanced the data capture)
Often cannot implement without infrastructure
Clear mandates for committees and resources to make things happen
Formal channels of communication
All in all as Tony does identify this is an industrial model (for a non industrial context on a non industrial topic! Such irony)

A lot of innovation never beyond small scale mobilisations, person dependent
Exploration+ resourcing+ pilot+evaluate+evaluate +spread but most institutions did not have a strategy of this

Governance decision making all over the place
IT structure, core decisions having major impact without academic inputneed clear lines of decision making, mandate oriented

He argues for a diffusion of innovation approach throughout the institution.
(Hmmmm, top down, managerial, with direct and control overtones, as he said before, an industrial model, but maybe forgivable given institutions are still in a way back way of operating...)
With core decisions at programme and he says increasingly by students (but has not said how)
Formal quality assurance processes surprisingly the unis that had these were often not best at integrating IT
Better ones, programme level working up with media designers,

Really interesting Q:
What’s the cost, more or less expensive for an online course vs a classroom one.
What we know is we don’t know!

2 main costs:
Instructor time
How much instructor support

Ways to control costs
Redesign, transfer work to students
Eg students collect data, wk collaboratively
(my own eg is students use of peerwise, writing their own exam, giving feedback to each other)

What would be better also:
Preservice training = none did this. Teacher training often assumed, yet having a phd as basis for entry to academia has an emphasis on research not teaching.
No one taught to teach is the general culture (made worse by positively discriminating toward research and against teaching)

A Socratic myth, 6 bright rich students, one Socratic expert all under a linden tree
It simply doesn’t exist
We haven’t moved from idyllic, it cannot be

Problems:
We don’t have a good reward system for teaching
Lack of training as they only have the model they had as students themselves
Lack of admin knowledge
All creating systemic barriers to change

(like the way he keeps going into discussion with the 30 or so people present in this online session)

Ideas from the audience:
Kahn model, still it doesn’t alter for students to be participatory
Opportunities for making learning informal but accreditation restricts this
Use video much more
Global accreditation system
Flipping the lecture- use capture, then ask students to come in after, but doesn’t really change the model
Look at what students need to do on campus that is critical, and what they could do online

Interest area of Stephen Downes: How this sort of advice might work outside of an institutional context, eg for a mooc? Where there is distributed learning rather than an institutionalised focus.

Tony's response: Some people don’t need or want accreditation as lifelong learners, I wouldn’t be on it if I didn’t think it was useful for my learning
But many need the accreditation, and therefore a portfolio rather than a transcript but employers don’t recognize the importance of that

Huge investment in current accreditation processes
Most unis would not support mooc as a business plan

And then it stopped working, the mp3 I mean, just as Jenny was asking a question.

My overall feeling, ANT would be a better approach to the concerns, it really needed some empirically based observation versus the information told from a management centred data collect.
Ant approach could disrupt the power of a management centric approach, and perhaps inform ways that things might be otherwise, from any level in such a network.
Noting the systemic barriers provides opportunity to also chip away at the shape of things, because these barriers take work in being sustained, and that such chipping away can also occur anywhere in the network, not just from the top.

Managed change an oxymoron: we never know where it will take us.
The changes keep happening faster than we can ever catch up.
http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/philosophy/60-second-adventures-thought-0
The best we can hope for is to mediate the damage as we move toward hopes and avoid fears.

To be or to have

2011-10-16T17:47:00.003+13:00

From Graham Harman (2007). The importance of Bruno Latour for philosophy. Cultural Studies Review, 13(1), 31-49.

Latour’s metaphysics is utterly democratic. Atoms and quarks are real actors in the cosmos, but so are Fidel Castro, Houdini, and unicorns. We cannot declare a priori that certain actors are more real than others; all we can say is that some are stronger than others. But this strength is never measured solely in the currency of human struggles for dominance, since animals, stars and brute subatomic matter are engaged in the struggle for reality no less than are Machiavellian cabals. (p.35)

Fact or fiction, real or unreal, and perhaps also good or bad; there is no difference except in as much as there is power in being aligned powerfully.

What I learn from technology - Distributed agency #Change11

2011-10-05T11:03:00.006+13:00

I started responding to Jeffrey Keefers post at Silence and Voice that was prompted by Alison Littlejohn's paper for #changes 11 and would have said in response to the conversation occurring turning Alison's response on its head: can individual learning ever really exist? Things have to intersect dont they for new things to occur? But in such intersections, what other collateral realities are being done?

My pre-identified area interest in #change11 is to learn of the non-human actors, having committed to being an ANT groupie, and so following my own learning agenda- but having been touched y a collective learning forum of this mooc - i go off like Alice down another bunny hole...

Media literacies suggest the need for understanding that media has influence (McLuhan, Meyrowitz), and in education, teaching and learning understanding CCTs is to understand that they are more than tools (Turkle, Bigum and Rowan, Lanksheare, Bennet, Nespor)

Knowing what a techy does or can do lets me respond with more or less trust in the process.
Knowing of computer generated images means i make a judgement call on the veracity of what is projected. If i dont know how the techy has influence i dont make this call.
Manipulating the influence of the techy i can 'trick' others into believing things more or less. Used to be i could produce a word processed doc and my boss would be in awe- such days have passed :) But formality can appear persuasive.
In watching the Blair witch project, reality is conveyed by deliberately downplaying the polished product.
And so i would argue yes the technologies demand new knowledge, for they shape us.

The meme as discussed by Susan Blackmore http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ_9-Qx5Hz4 suggests a cultural evolution has occurred, and the meme of technology is that it requires humans to breed....that which is imitated, and spread, a meme not an idea but that which is copied, imitated and altered as it transfers from person to person, why do they spread? because such meme ideas are selfish information that will spread if it can. So what is in the environment that makes breeding of new ideas more and less possible.
Is getting a new replicator dangerous- to carry an idea, getting a new carrier of knowledge is dangerous? Does google or other network engines shape what i have access to? yes.)

In teaching and learning, and in health, if i seriously take a web 2.0 approach, then i need to consider the influence of working in a participatory culture, wont that shift my expectation of not only what i learn...but how? Would it not also influence what assessments might be involved if assessment drives learning?

Is it dangerous to a planet to be so technologically shaped? Arguably it has done some horrid things to education. Globalised learning that can deny the import of local content. Testing of knowledge by MCQ tests because the machine can mark this. Teaching by ppt because it can be disseminated to the masses...
That my colleague can be made redundant because i can be teleconferenced out to four sites concurrently...

And for my own studies, what happens when the techy shapes the counselling, well it also shapes the roles as well as identities of those in the network. Passive actors are shown as much more active than commonly construed. If agency is seen as a distributed activity, how then also might this lead to altered conceptions of empowerment and of emancipation; to altered conceptualisations of what it is to learn collectively...

I dont have time for witty ness right now, nor for tidying up the blog today, this one's just another rough scribble
I have a conf paper that demands my attention, a deadline to meet.

On being found by Schrödinger's Cat

2011-10-02T11:36:00.008+13:00

Schrödinger's Cat >^.^<
No cats were harmed in the making of this blog.
Nor apparently in the following video....or at least not in my current universe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IOYyCHGWJq4#!
Thanks to loadedphysics for this great rendition on youtube

The most commonly held interpretation of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen interpretation[5] In the Copenhagen interpretation, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place.... so looking makes it so >^.^<

In another galaxy far far away... the many-worlds interpretation holds both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. Multiple realities/ distributed realities with no capacity to coexist. Just needs a timelord to travel between them...

Alternately: The relational interpretation makes no fundamental distinction between the human experimenter, the cat, or the apparatus, or between animate and inanimate systems. The cat observes the human, and not till the box is opened do the realities collide. The relational interpretation allows that different observers give different accounts of the same series of events. More than this though; for they live different accounts (or not as the case may be).
Distributed realities but with potential to talk between them.

And so yes, reality is multiple but does not have to be conceived of in the far far away type renditions.
And in the collateral realities of scientific research how come the cat is the one in the box?
How come the experiment is not about happy cat getting a cheezeburger rather than a bomb or radiation poisoning?
Where was the ethics panel and what were they thinking?
If the same experiment might even have been imagined in a way less harming to cats wouldn't that have been a better idea?
And why stop there? The box also has a position played out but not voiced in the typical scenario.
I note that blogger would not let the cat >^.^< appear in the subject line. Sometimes the technologies talk to each other and dont converse with the actors that those of us who are human centric tend to orient toward.

Live with Michael Apple

2011-09-27T12:07:00.004+13:00

Live with Michael Apple
26 September 2011

[ these are my rough notes of his talk]

The state is not weak. He takes a pen and says this is the resource, if its this long…but neoliberals want half the pen taken away and put into private schools. This is not choice at an individual personal level for all.
Not everyone has choice equally. In my working life I can choose when I start stop. The other “Michael apple who also loves his son, but cannot drive across town get the child to the preferred school, pay in time and resource to get there…

Markets privilege the economically advantaged
They also privilege the male body, safety is not as even for girls, women, gay people

When you think of choice, as democracy it is a fiction.

A slippery sycophant of a word denying difference, denying gender, race, age,

Who has choice

His favourite quote surprises even himself, it is not Marx but Adam smith
Takes 500 poor people for every rich person
When god gave out genes white men at the front…
Front and back of line,

Who?
Cannot dismantle the masters house using the masters tools
Eg statistics

Decisions on whats good or bad, they have to teach the same thing or the measure don’t work, if they tech difft things get a regression to the median whether it works or not…if it raises test scores its good, neo conservatists love this

But in Canada, what is agreed on, what we agree on is we are differently positioned, what is common is the question
Rather than evacuating the curriculum lets deal do it

Cultural literacy…if a us/American kids..
What is common is disagreements, what is common ins the process of deliberation
We must have kids ask whose glasses am I putting on, whose knowledge s this
False consensus
What is common is that this nation is in motion

1st nation people, some stopped sasquatacwan, china,
policy smallpox vaccination, genocide
stolen people from africa dying before they got to montreal, Jamaica, new york they died
alice walker poetry (I think)
I will kill myself there is no I

Whose common is that, an African survivor
Politics that does not deal with the politics of voice
A changing population
With teachers who say this is not working daily
That destroys bodily understanding
Is not a curriculum at all it is an imposition
That lies of teachers, real children

Authoritarian populists, fundamentalists, increasing in Alberta is home schooled
And their curriculum bought on the web and says things like islam is the religion of the devil
And they believe teachers are worshippers of the devil
A final gp
Mohammed, sacred is his name, jesus, moses, people spiritual but do not believe in a man in the sky and to be honest I must work with the impoverished
The only way to restore order through the imposition of the religious

Go to stereotypes
A gp of people who enslave others

I think we have to speak out, it is something we should not ignore

New managerialists
If it moves in classes measure it and if it doesn’t measure it for it might

Performance pay is now the law in USA
Country of china has now also performance paid

If we can find good smart loyal teachers who improve good smart kids we will give them more money

Every nation who has implemented performance pay for teachers, has used it to fire teachers, not to pay them more

particularly, it devalues the wages of teachers who are working with disadvantage
Please vote against this

Its over why do u have to vote
I don’t have to say anything else
The smartest teachers in the worlds
In media
Don’t take the risk
Really nice people but you don’t have a clue of what is a good school but we will tell you

Two things for a strategy of interruption
1. the north must learn from the sth, Brazil a History of economic crisis
with influence of frère and Apple, teachers given more money because they had to work harder in a situation of 90% of children drop out in primary
that statistic now reversed.
Places with fewer resources than the north, with respect have to become our teachers as well
Places where kids can use the metaphor of putting on glasses to see whose knowledge it is that they are consuming, and to question this.

This becomes seriously crucial everytime I go to brazil I get stupider- I don’t know things- I watch to learn as coteachers and please be my teacher

2. simpler act- we in this room must become secretaries in everyschool teachers do unbeliebvable things yet press do not talk of this, teaching causes questing society u r teaching race gender…and we do not have the patience or money for this, you are creating unemployment, when the media say its all crummy lets attack it, it takes huge work to find what is being done well,
of all the books I have been involved in
best description of teaching I have ever heard; Gregory: I didn’t have time to pee, the best description of teaching I have ever heard in my life
a book called democratic schools, and asked by teachers to say…
and I understand this without quotes from Foucault, im feeling worn down, you must be my secretary I don’t have time to write it, but you must tape me, rewrite, make my successes known because I don’t have time to
democratic skills on 5 schools translated…

in the face of the blames and having to go out every day to change peoples lives there are things going on of which we must be immensely proud and our task is to keep alive the practice of the victory

There was a time in teachers lives in Boston in which there was a victory, you will be evaluated…a 19yr old young women on 6 months teacher ed said no. Let us say yes to keep Emma’s memory alive in our own bodies.

Liberals and the left have given me nothing but rhetoric but neoliberals will give me money, so there is no homogeneity, there are parts of poorer communities who accept therefore a neo liberal agenda. Caution needed in homogenizing groups.

Identity politcs no common ground,
Neoliberal would not be powerful without aspects of good sense…what is it about people’s lives that cause people to say this is broken, for some oppressed groups it is rediscovering who I am in a society deeply racist

If black or first nation person combination of class and race
And so identity

My solution to find a common agenda
A right to say, whether neo lib or otherwise there is a powerful sense of what is going wrongin whats behind the argument

Victories for some gps not others,
Im about controversies..

supervision pp phdchatters 7 spt 2011

2011-09-23T23:11:00.001+12:00

supervision pp phdchatters 7 spt 2011, originally uploaded by ai1sa.

what #phdchat ters talk of when they talk of supervision

mooc #change11

2011-09-19T23:25:00.002+12:00

Ive some nervousness about this mooc having been in three previous moocs...

What i have learned from previous moocs:

1. I need to keep myself contained, moocs will take as much as you/i give them
and at this point in my studies and working life, i need to be setting my own boundaries.

2. Distributed learning- who and where is exciting and challenging, can work, but might be a tad too serendipitous. Because of this I'm really up front with my selfish/narrow area of interest.
BTW thats actor-network theory, how we are shaped as well as shaping when mediated through technologies

3. Change theorizing is a passion of mine grown out of discovering thwarted meglomaniacal tendencies (my own).
So Im very interested in seeing change in Machiavellian terms, or in a whirlwind model (Bruno Latour), or as messy (John Law)
And reject any top down or bottom up analysis.
Will entertain a thousand plateaus type approaches, rhizomatic descriptions are great, as are baroque folds, imho
Am willing to consider eco-system approaches (so long as they dont go too cosmic on me)
I just love the vibrancy that encompasses every actor in the network as well as the objects and practices that might be studied.

4. I set limits not only on my own area of interest but will also set limits here. This is a personal blog, its for my learning primarily, feel free to visit and to post, but dont write more than me- if you need a soapbox get your own blog and make a link :)

Enough for today; 30 mins on any day is the limit i am self imposing as ive a phd that is not writing itself.
But if you are interested in ANT, or in assemblages, baroque folds, or distributed agency and identity these are all areas that I love to engage on, so please do say hi!

On being distributed

2011-09-01T08:00:00.005+12:00

Seth Godin tells a story of Keith Richards telling a story of Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger
http://t.co/NP3mCCA

And it just goes to show that realities differ...

As told by Seth:
After a night of drinking, Mick saw Charlie asleep and yelled, "Is that my drummer? Why don't you get your arse down here?"
Richards continues, "Charlie got dressed in a Savile Row suit, tie, shoes, shaved, came down, grabbed him and went boom! Don't ever call me "your drummer" again. You're my ... singer."
No drummer, no stones.

Now if the drums had voice...
If we were a bit less androcentric...
If an ANT analysis was being undertaken, we might also have it said ...

You are nothing without me, you bang around as much as you like, but without drums you are no drummer

No drums, no drummer, no drummer, no Stones.

We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us (Marshall McLuhan)
Identity is made in association

silent protest - civil dosobedience

2011-08-21T12:26:00.006+12:00

Pity but i couldnt get the photo from todays sunday star times, consequently there's mirror image reversal going on
A silent protest for the Ministry of educations lack of consultation on national standards.

mulling the phd; not procrastinating

2011-08-19T08:22:00.006+12:00

I recall years ago reading a nice little magazine article (in the days when i still read magazines...obviously pre thesis)
It talked of it being a good thing your teenager was bored.
It then very quickly reframed boredom into having a thinking space.
Its the moments of not doing, that give time for contemplation.

So when Im spring cleaning in the middle of winter, replacing the curtains, vacuuming the ceiling, its because the ideas are fermenting. Just like a nice cider, it requires a little bit of time to bubble...

There's the possibility that
1. I do not want it to end.
I dont. I like being a student. And I like having this intensely selfish undertaking of depth. I want to graduate at the same time as two colleagues....I want to go to a conference next year that i could only attend with uni funding for a phd student...
However even if i finish next week, its still going to be the status of a student for a while so those arent very real excuses.

2. I havent yet found the cure for cancer *sigh* I havent yet scaled Mt Everest! I'm a perfectionist who want the best possible, that would be a problem, but unlikely. Dont think Ive ever been one before so its not likely. However i do not like failing, and i do not like aiming for mediocrity, I havent got anything worthy of a nobel prize, nor a booker prize, nor even an Australasian thesis prize. Its not a bodice ripping good yarn (yet).
My friend Heather would say just put on your ordinary...
apparently ball gown and bustier not required.
And Bruno Latour says a good thesis is a finished one.
Many dont....mine will. I know this.

3. I havent suffered enough.
I havent. I dont hate it. At times this is too easy...maybe i have enough now but it doesnt look hard enough.
My little contributions to knowledge do not feel grand.
Sure ive studied something no one else has. Its new in the world. Others might want to know more of it.
And ive a tiny inkling that with distributed agency is distributed responsibility so there's a tiny bit of newness for a theory
And the methodology supports some brave new world stuff on the research processes of working with young people and with sensitive research.
Are my molehills big enough to constitute "new knowledge"
As with no.2....might just need to pull my head in and be satisfied with being a modest witness, a modest contributor....even some of my fav authors are this. They do not come across as earth shattering, so i too should stop trying to shatter the earth.

4. If i finished i would have to play with the big girls and boys in academia contesting funding...
I dont have to. I could publish the smaller things. I can hold it together when its short bursts on a theme.

5. My angst, confusion, curiousity are sated. Having satisfied my curiousity, its boring to retrospectively write the story of my thinking for others...especially if its only going to have a minute audience *sigh*
And i have already fed back to my site of study...and was well received...but is still owe them and the participants of this, completion.
Also there's the scope for what i talk of to be useful for others...and i know it wont be if its not finished.

6. I have writers block. Except i dont. I can write this. What i have are thoughts still growing: mulling. Rereading and editing makes the direction for conclusions a little more cohesive. I keep a rough doc of conclusions in progress: i write them as they bubble... a vat of mulling thoughts to draw on.

7. Twittering has been useful. This weeks twitter #phdchat provided an opportunity to consider what are the hallmarks a a phd's unique contribution to knowledge. The earth does not need more shattering a modest contribution will suffice. (thankyou Jeffrey)

There is uniqueness in what i have studied. There is also uniqueness with how i have gone about this. There is a glimmer of possibility in provoking further thought on the philosophical underpinnings of my methodology. And there is the application of working with sensitive research in a way that is respectful.

The feedback received to date suggests also that what is contributed is useful in affirming and nurturing nascent practice. Such practice being valued when considered in terms of having voice and being heard.

I have not left the world or what i studied, in a worse state than i found it :)

Sometimes i have looked at fabric and thought that it would have been better left uncoloured ... i have also looked at what is written and sometimes think that editing down to the blank page would have been desirable.

I look at what i have written and believe i have improved upon the blank page.

Earlier in my studies- a year ago exactly, I was immobilised with fear of how what i study might be misrepresented, used to rationalize horrid practices. My conclusions will include this, or at least the vat of thoughts shall. I cannot control where what i write of might lead, but i am still alive, i can still respond, I continue even when he phd is done. There is accountability/responsibility and distributed agency that points to this. I just dont quite know how to write of it (yet). But its firming up, congealing, clotting.

Distributed agency, some messy thoughts

2011-07-20T08:20:00.011+12:00

To be dispersed, scattered, shared around, fractional, partial, apportioned...
What does it mean to have agency distributed?

To make changes involves a networked world...inside of which what i want to have happen pushes and pulls on others and vv...as a consequence, what actually happens is a result of contingent relationships and may or may not be what i wanted, or you wanted, but something inbetween...points of tension. May even be what neither of us wanted or expected...and the effects of these contingent relationships, of push and pull (sometimes politely referred to as negotiations and sometimes much less pretty than such a term implies) are sometimes not immediate but way down the track .... I could trace the Guttenburg press and mass literacy to twitter...
In this network of involvement are not just people but things also...widespread literacy needed cheaper ways of making paper, and means for making ink...

The outcome of this tussle, of push, pull, of people as well as things, is something that happens because of a distribution of agency, of things with capacity for altering what is, things of force.

(At this point philosophically it would be good and proper to acknowledge my thinking having been shaped through my reading of Latour, John Law, Lucy Suchman, Annemare Mol).

Where i take this a bit further is to consider then that responsibility and accountability are just as distributed.
Our individuation being a creation of habit rather than of actuality; again a form of thinking that is normative- distributed.

Here are some textual musings from others on our mutual involvements:

Latour writes of the hidden masses of myriad beings
McLuhan tells us the medium is the message
Mol's conceptual analysis: being more than one and less than many in the body multiple
Pickering's mangle of practice
Turkle invites us to think of the things we think with, evocative objects
Lucy Suchman (bother the person who recalled her book on me, but that just goes to show the push and pull)...
Kaen Barad "agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world."
John Seely Brown; the power of pull - pdf of his keynote http://web.nmc.org/files/2010-summer-conference
(and the effects of blogging this then had me search for his work some more, finding an article on why the virtual matters...)

And some visual considerations:

The experience of distributed learning on a mooc by Gordon Lockhart http://gbl55.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/cck11-man-this-mooc-is-something-else/

The internet of things Courtesy of Cisco ISBG

Need to do some tidying up of this post, attributions as well....
I'd never have got here without my enrollment in a Phd and the people therein,
And the making of a phd is also distributed: the attributions and acknowledgements go nowhere far enough in recognition of this...
but also I could not have got to this without a computer...many more attributions could/should be made...mobile phones...the use of sms...the use of twitter, this blog...
But my time is a bit partial right now also...

#phdchat for a visual representation this site will do a graphic of twitterings http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/twitter/friendviz.html?q=phdchat%23
And for further food for thought, nurturing ideas comes from such places...distribution in a very organic way... some Latour and Sloterdijk on spheres as well as networks, where the tensions on spheres also produce some things that might be nurtured, in a world that may or may not be ready...tensions might or might not establish such space...

This is "rough as"
"jagged even"
a smoothing out comes later, tracing backwards allows for this, moving forwards less so...
a trajectory is so much easier to trace afterwards.

So its now a day later...and i add some more...and then a month later prompted through a tweet i think i should tidy it further...
so back to what does it mean to be distributed...to have agency distributed...what i can or cant make happen...
in what Law might name a hinterland of possibility....one you just entered...your touching this thread spreads the points of tension further....distributed.
And so i continue to mull it over....and you might too now...

how are the tensions caught up that make some things more or less possible,
the resources available,
the sense of "freedom from" and "to do"...
who has push and pull,
what or who is seduced and/or betrayed ,
what promises are made, dreams sold? Who are the purveyors, whose interests served?

What does it mean to be distributed?
of what materially,
and of what i can or cant do because of it- herein lies agency,
but perhaps also responsibility.

Not in the sense of blame as much as it is about
the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something to continue to work with something
a moral obligation
of being accountable

A responsibility to act moving forward?
vs accountability to justify what happened in a past without knowledge of the future....had i known i would have...?

I fear i could do a further decade on this and still be dwelling on such questions
:) could be a lifetimes work such questions!

How did a telephone insinuate itself into your life?

2011-07-11T07:29:00.006+12:00

When i was pretty young I remember our house getting a phone.

It was a black wall mounted model and I remember there being a telephoneman that established its presence. I remember needing to remember my phone number, it was to be as important as remembering my name and my address. I wrote it on the wall in pencil in case i would forget...it was 82029...i think i wrote it on the skirting board in pencil with the twos going backwards, i think i may have been 4. It may have been about 1963.

It was placed in the hallway near the front of the house. As if to acknowledge its intrusive nature, it needed a space of its own such conversations could occur in a non intrusive way.
Or perhaps it was near the front of the house as acknowledgment of it being a point of entry for strangers.
Im struggling to remember where others in my neighbourhood had their phones, but my recall is that they were all in hallways.
They were answered with such formality, the number was recited, or the formal statement of who one was talking to; "Mr McLaren speaking" as my father would say.

I also remember shouted conversations where plans had to be negotiated between people in different parts of the house, or someone being told to 'hang on'.

It was at least 15 years before my family's phone intruded into the living space of the kitchen and a little ways later before a second phone entered into a bedroom.

I note in saying this that ownership of the phone shifted, it became 'familial'. No longer attached to the house, but more to the household. It was no longer an appendage of the house, but a shift occurred in seeing it as a possession of the family.

Being a child of the 60's and 70's i recall the staying home and waiting for a phone call...
I also recall 'being prepared' included having money for a phone call and at Guides there would be inspections for what was in our pockets...seemed string and phone money were requisits...not quite sure what I'd do with the string...
But I'd ring home to say i was ready to be picked up from the red phone box on the corner...I'd make a call and when someone at home answered, i'd need to press button A to talk, or if no-one answered press button B and the money would come back...

It was in the 1990s I remember ringing my brother in Aus and being surprized by his saying he was at a neighbour's pool party talking to me on a cordless phone...am pretty sure my jealousy had more to do with the pool but also surprize at the range for a phone.

It was late in the 1990s when my partner got a mobile phone, a weighty thing by todays standards, but so much more portable than a 'landline' of the times....several renditions later before it could be worn unobtrusively, but nonetheless an excuse for the posturing of here's mine, placing ti on a table. Not they rang so often, but a status symbol of importance: im needed anywhere anytime. A yuppie thing.

Several renditions later, a discrete object that was to be on the person of every member of the household...or at least on any member of the household old enough to go out by themselves. It became a way the youngest members could go out more safely
More recently it became my way of paying for parking, my address book, my torch, my watch, my alarm clock, my appointment diary...its as close as my handbag and it goes most everywhere with me.

The phone boxes have modernized somewhat, but Im now always surprized when i see someone in one.
And the landline home phone fixture seems to be going the same way.

What i would like to know is where were phones were positioned when you were growing up?
Please tell me the stories of phones entering into your life.

Here's how music positioned phones in changing cultural contexts...

The one hour PhD, and other variations

2011-07-03T10:35:00.010+12:00

Having spent 5 years on this so far, and a yet to be edited down to 100,000 word thesis, I feel more than well enough qualified to consider, and to write on, the one hour PhD.
My credentials include:
PhD in txt speak (160 characters)
A PhD in a tweet (140 characters)
A PhD haiku (roughly three lines and 17 syllables)
The three minute thesis
A PhD in plain English (for the intelligent "aunty")
The lolcat thesis
And an origami exercise in thesis writing relating to worldmaking

And now I have a new diversion: the one hour PhD.
This one's based on how to read a book in an hour, a useful consideration given I'm entering into my final year of my study (I hope) and have suddenly found books I wish I had read at least 4 years ago...
This however is not about the reading of a book in an hour, nor for those hopeful is it about the writing of a thesis in an hour.
I write of how to present the thesis such that it could be absorbed, if not "read", in an hour. A useful consideration for editing the product of several years of study. It's also a way of putting a smile on the face of a reader, its about a sell job- they are getting nothing less than what was promised and hopefully a whole lot more.

So a rubric to edit to:
1. The title, 10 words. If a word search was going to pick this up in a data base would it have done so?
2. The introduction, 10-15 pages saying what you-and-the-reader are getting into, and what you-and-the-reader will get out of it.
3. Outline the book. Is it evident in the table of contents? Do the chapter titles as well as headings and the first level of subheadings (if any) provide a map to the thesis argument? Alternately it can be a perfunctory outline of what a reader can anticipate of the order.
4. Check opening and closing sections of every chapter. Do these provide enough info to understand the main points. Would a cut and paste of these *and nothing else* make sense in progressing the argument?
5. Does the conclusion progress from the introduction? If the intro and conclusions were bookends, are they balanced; do they match? If it takes the reader somewhere else, has this been explained? What of the argument or journey is highlighted? How does this contribute to new knowledge? What does it contribute to practitioners, to the theory underpinning the study, to future researchers?

And then there's the bits in between...but that's the subject of the other 5-6 years of study time...and for that you actually have to write the book :)
...and read it.

All seems so clear when i put it like this...makes me wonder what i have spent so many more hours on...but then there's the thinking time...and the writing that makes it enticing, a pleasure to write and to read...

A phd in a haiku. Taming a meandering river

2011-05-13T07:54:00.002+12:00

Could you write your phd in a haiku?
Over at dissertation haiku the invitation is to post your dissertation in haiku format
I found this a bit more evocative than the pragmatics of the 160 character text rendition I wrote.
And surprisingly it awakened me to really consider what it is I'm studying. And hence to clarify why it is I keep going off track; its because i have two things (at least) happening simultaneously.

Haiku 1.
Regarding the study:

Enactments of change
Whats thought? whats done?
Reality multiplies

Haiku 2.
Regarding the site of study:

silent and invisible
still i talk, and you listen
whats with that?

Haiku
A very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:
The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru).
This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas
And a kireji or 'cutting word' between them. A kind of verbal punctuation mark signalling the moment of separation and this colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.
Traditional haiku consist of 17 syllables on
In three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.
Any one of the three phrases may end with the kireji.

(Although I have described haiku as based on 17 syllables, this is inaccurate as syllables and on are not the same, but close enough for my purposes)

phd procatsination: lolcat tells it like it iz

2011-04-20T08:14:00.013+12:00

Here is my lolcat thesis conclusion

And here's the story of my progress on the thesis, though the lolcats here are not my own, my story resonates with what is told in these pictures.
I am all over the place but dont know it
The topic is teaching issues of heart and soul using IT (information technologies)
And Im searching for a place to hang it,
I settle on a uni, one outside of NZ, write a proposal, thats all over the place, huge, but enthusiastic.
I get a supervisor appointed and we establish some shared interests , we both like Macs, we both read some of the same people, we both know some of the same people (NZers are known for only having 2-3 degrees of separation)
I read for a year. I get used to endnote. It does not get used to me.
I get familiar with technology. Some of it gets familiar right back. (i find i get adverts tailor made to my searchings...i get stalked by cyberbots and cheap marketeers on my blog...and just now there's an option for turning the blog into a book...dont think the coherence would stack up for the markers, but its a thought...)

I'm on bebo, facebook, twitter...
I write a plan, annually i repeat this step in creative writing, I tell myself it doesnt matter, its a fiction. Ignore the timelines, but oddly, retrospectively, and with no intention at all, I see they are actually reasonably accurate.
I write a colloquium document,20,000 words.
I write through writers blocks about whats blocking me establishing the need for the research, scoping relevant literature and a research method and demonstrate knowledge of the ethics involved. I have tentatively approached one of the three places i wish to undertake the research. I want to compare and contrast them.
At my verbal colloquium (two profs, two academics,three internal to the uni one external) it is put to me that it is to big. I argue it is the contrast Im interested in, they suggest again we might rework this as i progress.
I keep reading, I attempt the multiple ethics applications, multi layered,internationally, and come to a grinding halt. Its too big. argggghhhh
My supervisor talks me through options, i dont see the wood for the trees. I'm so glad he can. I recall a conversation about which of these is the 'cure for cancer' and where do i want to be positioned into the future.
I make a choice to study change and a voluntary organisations use of emergent technologies.
Knocking it back to one site of study i do an ethics application that is still huge, still multi layered but only involves one site. Phew. And then i do it again for a NZ ethics committee. Its huge, its persoanl, private, involves children, involves children without parental permission, it involves artefacts where consent was not explicitly sought. Only alarm bells not hit are working with human remains, radioactivity or genetic modification.
All this fussing over...text messaging...

Bilingual thesis?
I read and read and write and write and data collect, exciting times, intellectually.
Socially i suspect i become more of a one track conversationalist. I'm glad i have friends similarly narrow minded. We take turns in talking our narrow fields.
And here's where i stay for a long time, there's a lot to read, a lot to write, and im waiting on getting a 360 ish data collect with particularly ethereal research participants to come forward. They eventually do.
Meantime I now have a multi levelled tangled mountain of threads of data to work out what to do...
Tangled mess of data.

I tease out threads, I read, i tease out threads and read and write, and find some ways through and into to sort this knotted mess of tangled thoughts and observations and everything.
Putting the world into words is not easy. I blog bits of this.
I write of some of the threads followed, and i find literature that similarly writes of such messes.
I have lost my soul to this tangle

The writing progresses. I have an intro. I have a perfunctory and boring lit review.
I have a research method. I have data. I come back to the boring lit. I rewrite and rewrite. I eventually find an article that helps rewrite this so i hate it less. I do wish that writer had written that article earlier, but if he had i suspect i still would not have recognized its value... the rewriting puts a new spin on the latter stuff, i rewrite the latter stuff... finally the process feels iterative. Ive heard its meant to be and am now feeling a bit more confident that I'm doing something that works, something others describe as normal.
Im less pushed around by what i fall over, Im less reactive to whats possible.
I have more control on my world.

I have a clearing sense of what it is thats new, of what i did and why, of how i did it and can justify this. I wish these writers i love would stop writing, i havent yet got to the top of the literature mountain and there is stuff i would like to read more slowly, stuff i would like to read again. But i need to write, there is a timeline.
I am becoming discriminatory in what i have time for and what id do not. I thought i had this before, but now its much more decisive.Im getting a bit OCD, But Ive got it sorted.

I write too much, There is a word limit and i can see i am going to go over it. I work at killing my darlings,
the words so carefully crafted. Iteratively i recheck whats before so that whats left out no longer matters. There is a blurring. the document writhes as i try to recall whats in whats out, i know ive written stuff but where...i try to keep an unruly pack of cards stacked and fantasize handing in a snowglobe of paper where order doesnt matter.
But then i realize its just about folding the world differently.

World making is what it is.
I keep writing.
I have about a tenth more of methodology to do, about a tenth more of data to be played with
And then conclusions, about three i think, short snappy one...reality i have learned is multiple, and so for my endings.
Meantime i am more sedentry than ever, the brain is active, its had a major workout, so has the soul, meaning of life... the body not so much...

An exercise in worldmaking :)

A thesis in almost plain language

2011-04-10T09:32:00.004+12:00

Attempting a plain language summary of my study as suggested in phdchat# and role modelled by @lizith, @OrgMotivation, @martin_eve and @jennacondie,and @claretCarly

Its an interesting assignment, one i have turned to my own ends. Since I am studying the use of change with emergent technologies in a youth counselling centre, and since young people appear to be changing this service from the outside in by using text (SMS) messaging as their preferred means of making contact with the organization, I provide a summary of my thesis in txt spk.

when kidz txt a helpline
wats goin on?
who & wats involvd?
wuld u? culd u? shuld u?
dunno?
This thesis looks @ changes @
Youthline NZ: a crisis helpline
4 young peeps

Now for the less succinct version, where i try to be clear, but its not quite plain, I'm still attached to certain turns of phrase.

Change and the use of emergent technologies in a NZ youth counselling centre

This research focuses on the relationship between how people think about change and what they do to enact it. This is explored with reference to changing health professional practices where interpersonal interactions are increasingly mediated through computer and communication technologies. In investigating the use of new and emergent technologies for counselling the study traces how the work of counselling is reconfigured, and how relationships of those involved are negotiated.

The site of study is a not-for-profit organisation, Youthline (Auckland, NZ). When this study begins the organization is providing telephone counselling predominantly through its crisis helpline. At the start of this study there is a constant buzz of phones ringing and of counselling conversations occurring. Over the course of this study the phone rooms become almost silent. Youth still have problems, and still seek help, but increasingly this occurs silently. This study investigates what occurs as counselling moves into the silent and small space of short message service (SMS) or text-based mobile phones.

In providing a text-based helpline since December 2004, this organisation becomes a world leader in the practice. There is presently no evidence base for this practice and while this study does not address the effectiveness of such interventions, it does consider factors making the practice more, and less, viable.

The analysis is undertaken within an actor-network sensibility. Actor-network theory (ANT) emphasizes relationships held, dissolving and evolving between actors whether human or otherwise. This study investigates how the actors involved, human and otherwise, are performed in, by, and through their relationships.

Performances of change and the use of text-based counselling are presented as short narratives, slices of practice, telling of contingent relationships. Eliciting these narratives included interviews, artefact analysis and observations of practice, over the course of two years.

The performance of such stories provides partial and decentred ways of knowing. The use of the word partial is deliberate and relates to more than one meaning. The stories do not, and cannot, encompass the whole. In addition, such stories reflect the author’s own partiality. “I” write a text composed of slices, where such slices of stories sometimes sit alongside one another, but which more often intersect and which sometimes clash, reflecting the precarious reality this thesis depicts.

A tangle of constitutive relationships are shown to embed mobile phone use and texting in particular, in young people's daily lives. In analysing the tangle of contingent relations making text counselling more and less viable, the intent was never to prove text counselling as good or bad, but to know the uncertain and revisable nature of text counselling as practiced. Opening up text counselling allows us to see how this practice is shaped and might be shaped otherwise. Specific strategies for strengthening the work of this not-for-profit organisation are then able to be made explicit.

I really would appreciate some feedback on this:
1. Should the txt spk version be the first page of my thesis?
2. Is the longer version clear?
3. Any other feedback also welcomed :)

Actor-Networking / Artist Networking

2011-04-03T13:12:00.007+12:00

I became interested in this art as a result of two presentations given by Bruno Latour, where one of his ppt slides used the artists work. Annoyingly these videos that i had previously linked to, and which ANTHEM had linked to are no longer on the server.One is still accessible here: is http://www.aaschool.ac.uk//VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1380

What is also odd is the difficulty i have in tracing how i got to this artist Saraceno this morning, i cant recall the trace of how i got to it, searching my history in firefox doesnt do it. I am left with holes as big as those in the imagery: the gaps in the digital trace of my net surfing as well as wondering how can i be so forgetful when I'm only talking about half an hour.
Odd how ethereal such traces can be.

The artist is Tomas Saraceno. Images on a google search are here

Now to network in my computer clever one to rip it...

A thesis txt spk: 2b/not 2b?

2011-04-02T10:58:00.007+13:00

I'm finding voice, and negotiating whose voices gets heard in the thesis.
Mine own being one part of this.
Since a major component of my thesis has been the take over of a youth counselling network by text, culd i jus txt?

Seth Godin states

"My take: the smaller the screen, the more hurried and less informed the decision ends up being.

Yes, there's more currency, more immediacy, more with-you-right-now-all-the-time and more data being collected. But......

If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone."

Seth

Guess that's why the phd wont be submitted in txt spk

Nonetheless,
the writing off a medium as less useful for good works is a bit offhand.
And Godin uses twitter himself to point to very short blog postings.
The good works still occur.

But what is useful here is that he has identified consideration for what suits from what does not.
Some digital literacy is called for in such choices.
Lankshear and Knowbel, challenge understandings of literacy and of digital literacy especially:

texts evoke interpretation on all kinds of levels that may only partially be ‘tappable’or ‘accessible’ linguistically...The significance of the new technical stuff largely has to do with how it enables people to build and participate in literacy practices that involve different kinds of values.

An appreciation then of media effects, in what ways are values reshaped?
Leads me to consider questions of power and influence, and to know how technology has influence.

Or to use Kevin Kelly's phrases, its about having consideration for what technology wants.
And then negotiating this.

A first step would be to increase awareness of what technology asks people to do; so I have listened for it. And being informed by Bruno Latour's Actor-network approach, I interview the technologies involved: Have them submit their cvs, ask them about their best practice, do some performance based questioning, and some performance review in observing practice

And following wot apears to b a hostile tkeova,

The thesis i am negotiating wnt b
txt spk

wuld b 2 tight & probly trite

:-#

2L8

Storytelling: writing a thesis

2011-03-18T06:58:00.008+13:00

Once upon a time is a much more interesting narrative than thesis writing, where typically the format follows: this is the problem, this is how it is addressed, and here's what was found, and therefore this is recommended.
As an example:
This study into what went wrong found little red riding hood set up by her mother, duped by a wolf, saved by the woodchopper, and at the end the wolf is dead, but so is her grandmother....but lets not dwell on the negative. Although we may also have some recommendations about childcare that could be the subject of another thesis.

*sigh* The only reason that would work as a bedtime story is because it would induce sleep.

The absence of thrill in academic writing is the subject of a blogpostand a twitter link by @andycoverdale who cites Jonathon Wolff's article titled Literary boredom
Rather than fostering excitement, academic writing styles give the plot away on page 1.
A peculiar attribute for avid readers, is it that academics have to read so much they need the last page first?

Could a more engaging narrative be written as a thesis?
This could be serious, if its to change something, and don't all thesis writers set out to make a difference, then it cant do that if no-one reads it.

Option 2, turn it into something more thrilling in your post-doc life.

In considering the story rather than the plot... it is possible for a thesis to engage otherwise, it does not have to be situated in a netherworld of absent authors and distanced readers, cancelling the distance between reader writer and subject matter is what Patti Lather writes of in academic speak.

In their 2004 book, Storytelling in Organizations, John Seely Brown, Stephen Denning, Katalina Groh and Laurence Prusak explore how narrative can be used for transferring knowledge, nurturing community, stimulating innovation and preserving values. These are things I want my thesis to do. Surely it is possible to get there without being dull?

For Latour also, it is in the story telling that uncertainty resides. If the story doesnt engage, an ANT analysis fails.

But if a thesis doesnt follow conventional wisdom, might it fail also?
A point of tension: do I take the risky exciting path that might have wolves?
Or the path where the wolves are dealt to in advance?
The latter is obviously the safer option, these academic types dont seem to want surprizes...we save those for our children, ironically to help them sleep at night.
How strange is that?

"This dark telling is of a young girl with a mother whose stretched too thin, sandwiched between providing care of children, care of aging parents, and wriitng a thesis,but soon the daughter finds she has far more important things to worry about than lack of dinners on the table and having to take sandwiches to her granny. When people start turning up dead with their throats ripped out, she begins to suspect her Granny may be to blame."

Now to write my own thesis review: A great story bought back to life by interruptions to the thesis narrative.

This leaves openings for further study, perhaps a gendered telling...where's the father in all of this?
Or a feminist marxist one...exploitation and inequality in the divisions of labour
Perhaps an empowerment narrative might leave less bitterness? But heh, just whose reality do we work with here? This is not a happy telling for any of those involved, wolves have to live and eat too, and are probably an endangered species, the mother's worn out, the young and old neglected, and the woodchopper- please tell me he doesnt get to carry off the child or Im going to have to get concerned about further dubious and exploitive relationships...

Perhaps, having written out my angst I should now return to the endeavour of writing for the staid audience of thesis markers.

References
Lather, P. (1997). Creating a multilayered text: Women, AIDS, and Angels. In W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 233-258). New York, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

If knowledge is distributed, if agency is distributed then what of accountability?

2011-03-10T15:13:00.006+13:00

Today Frances Bell and I gave a presentation on CCK11 about networking power and authority.

Cant wait to see the capture off eluminate, the audience was great, and i want to read the backchat, attending to the whiteboard and the microphone, meant i didnt always follow the chat...
These are the slides used.
Below them are the notes, some of which i referred to during the presentation and some which got lost in ...association.

Networking power and autority

View more presentations from Ailsa Haxell.

slide 1
An invitation to talk to cck11 through George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
A joint presentation was then negotiated between Frances Bell and myself to explore issues of actor-network theory, connectivism and power.
There’s always some networking that goes on behind the scenes, Frances and I have never ‘met’, there are things made more and less possible through courses such as this.
NB the haiku was used by Lennie, I. (2003). Managing metaphorically. In S. Linstead (Ed.), Text/work : representing organization and organizing representation (pp. 41-56). London, England: Routledge.

slide 2
Things, matters of concern, even ‘facts’, even gender… Simone de beavoir being ‘made a woman…identity…all get made in association
de Beauvoir, S. (1974). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage.
…means identity is fluid and also, roles fluctuate.
The haiku only possible through translation, when this and that go together some things are gained and some things are also lost.
In change resistence will always be met, as what is drawn in may need to establish a niche, and may not want to leave where it was settled either.

slide 3
There’s talking politics and being political Bruno Latour.
Any movement in the network meets resistance, always there are issues of power, control, authority, acquiescence.
Movement in one part creates movements, ripples and even ruptures elsewhere.
Just as identity is made in the moment, so too is everyone elses identity.
And because this is actor-network informed analysis, it also acknowledges that being shaped in association related also to how people are enmeshed with what they make, and what they make is enmeshed with us.
Wesch, M. (2007). Web 2.0 ... The machine is us/ing us [Audiovisual ]. Retrieved January 16, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE’ the machine is us/ing us is relevant here.

slide 4
Given we are looking at power/control/knowledge and how this is shared or not…we have an opportunity in terms of form and function, where do you see this as relevant, and so participants could post.
What came back was a myriad of ‘actors’ of tangible and non tangible of shared and not shared things, a network of interconnections

slide 5
Superficially, networks appear to democratize communication and relations BUT.... Examples early experiences of women in Internet communication And http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2680.full
Excellent slide and link from Frances Bell

slide 6
Particpation again invited

slide 7
Excellent slide and discussion facilitated by Frances Bell

slide 8
And how is web 2… 3 …4….
Different, what are the facets required that make them work for better or for worse and as educators what the becomes our role in making such things happen, more and less?

slide 9
What gets said and whats prepared may well be different things, as it was today, these though were my notes:

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matters
Similar thoughts also being expressed by Barad and by Lucy Suchman and by Helen Verran;
Stories that interrupt…. That trouble…John Law
Use of boundary objects to cross spaces, to move through resistance, eg art, eg poetry
From Jane Bennett, with a little bit of editing, my apologies...

“Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment
Admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds,
And then proceed politically, technologically , scientifically (as best as you are able)
With care and humility, forbearance….
:”as you might with unruly relatives to whom you are inextricably bound and with whome you will engage over a lifetime, like it or not. Give up the futility of trying to disentangle, to say its only a tool as if it had not tainted you and you it…
Seek instead to engage civilly,
Strategically?, with human and nonhuman alike… the ones you like and the ones that are harder to tame, the hopeful monsters as Law refers to them.
Instead, shaped in the moment, I got into a bit of a dialogue about individualism and collective responsibilities,,
Just as Weizenbaum had with Eliza, once its out there, you cant suck it back, but it became his life work to continue to decipher the role of man and machine
Or like Latour's referencing to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The sin, what was it ? To make…or to not care…to not stay engaged with…
Weizenbaum, J. (n.d.). ELIZA. Retrieved September 14, 2010, from http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html

slide 10
Participation again invited
Am I responsible…but I didn’t make it…am I still responsible?
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Some of the unanticipated changes are still unfolding,
Media Literacies- Digital literacies
Lanksheare and Knowbel
“mediated by digital encoding privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over ‘normalization’, innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative- innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, do-it-yourself creative production over professional service delivery, and so on, the more sense we think it makes to regard it as a new literacy.This means that being an ‘insider’ to a new literacy practice presupposes sharing the ethos values in question; identifying with them personally. Consequently, what may look on the surface like engagement in a new literacy may well turn out upon closer examination not to be. For example, simply downloading video clips from a popular participatory site like YouTube.com to accompany lectures, without otherwise engaging in any of the forms of participation that characterize engagement in a fan practice site does not, for us, rank as a new literacy practice. It is the cultural equivalent of cutting a picture out of a magazine to use as an illustration in a handwritten story or project. As we have noted elsewhere (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2006), in contexts of using new technologies a lot of old wine comes in new bottles at the interfaces of literacy and new technologies.”
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2007). Researching new literacies: Web 2.0 practices and insider perspectives. E-Learning and Digital Media, 4(3), 224-240. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2007.4.3.224 doi:10.2304/elea.2007.4.3.224

slide 11
Nothing is ever solved in the abstract, practice is always local, performed,
Empirical research stories required

Patti Lather
Research stories that interrupt, that trouble, telling stories that are not bound by niceness
"An ache of wings ” Wanting to tell a victory narrative and knowing thats not the whole story, wrestling with how to tell of whats not so pretty

Promethius
“Prometheus transgressed the boundaries of the human condition. In hubris, or measureless presumption, he brought fire from the heavens and thereby Nemesis onto himself; he was chained to a Caucasian rock. An eagle preyed on his liver, and heartlessly healing gods kept him alive by regrafting it each night. The encounter with Nemesis made the classical hero of this epic tragedy an immortal reminder of inescapable cosmic retaliation….
Everyman now becomes Prometheus; he has fallen prey to the envy of the gods in his inordinate attempt to transform the human condition. Nemesis has become endemic; it is the backlash of progress.” (Illich, 1989/199, p. ¶ 3)
And Latour also has an article on caution in design, we never know anything fully, the knowledge is distributed…and we never know how our plans will pan out, there is always the unanticipated sequalae.
How then do we move forward,: by being grounded in practice…by research empirically based, by producing troubling stories…by knowing ht emyriad of detail involved is to know also that things can always be otherwise.
A humility to move forward knowing one never knows it all, that the whole picture is always only known from ones own situated reality, that other realities exist…that with the best of intentions, the tensions sometimes create, always create other outcomes…
nonetheless, to study what is to inform how things might also always be otherwise.

slide 12
repeat:Nothing is ever solved in the abstract, practice is always local, performed,

slide 13 and 14, participants to draw together the threads.

CCK11# On Becoming a (digitally literate) person

2011-03-09T02:16:00.004+13:00

If i had a hammer...or a harpsichord.... I'd do different things ....
doh.

That i am in a course that uses web2.0 makes a course that cannot function without certain ways of being.

Knowing more rather than less about these effects becomes critically important.

Lankshear and Knowbel’s investigation of new literacies emphasises insider understandings of practice, particular values being shared by those involved:
"The more a literacy practice that is mediated by digital encoding privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over normalization, innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative-innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, do-it-yourself creative production over professional service delivery, and so on, the more sense we think it makes to regard it as a new literacy."(Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 228)

In teaching and learning through a medium involving new digital literacies there are ways of being, and things learned, that may not be overt. Being (more rather than less)conscious of the influence, of the agency held by the distributed network, requires us to challenge every time a dismissive statement such as 'its just a tool' is made.
eg... newspapers are just a tool,
.. so is tv...
BUT they position the 'user/consumer in certain ways...
so too do classrooms...
so too does powerpoint...

so too does web 2.0

Dont be fooled that this suggests in any way shape or form that tools are neutral;
they have influence, for better or for worse.
Technology is not just a tool, it affects how we interact, and it would be a mistake to consider it merely as the bearer of a message.

Todays wee rant was inspired by comments on Jenny Mackness' blog re attacks on connectivism

Wish the inside of my head would stop snow globing

2011-02-28T16:39:00.005+13:00

myspace layouts

My thesis might as well be snowflakes in a snowglobe, then it wouldnt matter which part came first, was on top or bottomed out.
Suits ANT analysis but probably not a popular move for a thesis submission.
After a third major structural rewrite it is tempting to tell the reader, shake a dice, start anywhere, be damned!
Afterall, real life doesnt wait for the planets to align, for changes to run a lineal trajectory. In real life the trajectory is only ever sighted after the event.

Text messaging comes of age in a disaster

2011-02-24T12:26:00.018+13:00

When I started my phd text messaging was seen as a trivial application, as was also the situation for twitter and for facebook, but as is shown in the New Zealand Christchurch earthquake disaster, these platforms have been invaluable.

Text messaging factoids: a cell phone tower covers a small distance. Most have little power and so cant reach far. In NZ most cell phone towers are not shared by the different telecos, but with threats of deregulation telecom had to share parts of the main network.
Also the towers when they are not plugged into main source power have temporary generators that last approximately 10 hours, and then will only function if the power is back on or connected to a generator.

What this means on a practical level: any one cell phone tower can only take about 60 calls at any one time. SMS is so much smaller so is more likely to get through.(This is now being recommended by the PM and civil defence and telecos during the Chch earthquake emergency) Also if the towers get busy, an sms bounces around till it finds a gap. A call cant do this, so just gets a busy signal. Sending pics and videos similarly take up more space, so can clog the towers when there are emergencies. (And so telecos are requesting people dont do this during the Chch earthquake emergency)

A further interesting telephone related fact that comes to light in the Chch earthquake disaster, cordless phones in people's homes require electricity to work. Donations of analogue, corded phones are being called for. This type of phone can work where electricity is still not operating.

Other social networking that has evolved;
Twitter and hash keys #nzeq, #chch to follow real time news
Use of trademe, to advertise free accommadation and labour:
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Chch-earthquake-support/Volunteer-labour/mcat-9530-9532-.htm
Google freely provided a person locator really early on http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/
Telecom making public phones in chch free
AirNZ cheap flights in and out of chch,
Distribution of solar charges for cell phones...
Facebook for accommodation relocation
Studentarmy, Thousands doing the suburban clean up, and
Telecom and vodafone are working together
(eg Vodafone New Zealand asking people to Donate corded analogue landlines to CHCH at any @telecomnz stores)
Help from the world has been amazing

Thankyou world.

Some light relief from flying cars:
Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/864/

recapping the phd process

2011-02-24T09:55:00.005+13:00

What i began with and where i have gotten to are different spaces.
I shouldnt be surprized, but the 'argument of a thesis' seems to suggest one starts here (problem) and gets here (recommendations).

And mine didnt do this.
Im studying change and what i notice is it only ever looks like a clean trajectory retrospectively.

What i began with was how to teach issues of heart and soul using IT.
By the time i got to colloquium I was advised just one of these would be enough, and by the time i had got to ethics application it had morphed and mushroom clouded into three separate studies, comparing professional with lay studies of how care is communicated through IT applications.

Getting real following this attempt to fly too close to the sun, and the process of writing the multiple ethics applications, had me falling out of the sky as my wings melted...

So after a serious and somewhat long talk with my very generous supervisor, i came down to earth; just one of these studies was enough. I remember we talked of which one would go the distance, would be 'sexy', would be the cure for cancer...

So i have an umbrella of studying change, and inside of this the use of emergent technologies in a community helpline, and this has of itself narrowed itself down to what evolved as most popular by the users of the service, being txt messaging for counselling.

Studying change as it occurs is like studying the blur...

I am now close to finishing...but have been at this stage for a year..i am rewriting the front end...and rewriting the back end...and rewriting.
My metaphor for this stage is a flatpack bicycle where every time i get the front end right, the back end no longer aligns and vice versa...but its getting closer, i think its beginning to look like if i 'rode it' it would no longer fall apart, the speed wobbles are less severe.

Interesting some of my most useful reading is what i have read after data is collected- reading i didnt even recognize as useful until i hit the wall, and then on rereading it made sense- and reading that i couldnt make sense of 5 years ago which is now comprehendable- and readings i didnt know i would need until the data analysis led me there- and some reading that wasnt even written when i began :)

And in writing when i hit a blind spot, sudden surprizes that blind me, i rewrite earlier bits while i let the current dazzle settle... had yet another fret about how to write of the research process and the sensitive ethics ...
The bits that are fast to write and the bits that are slow are utterly unpredictable.

Texting comes of age

2011-02-22T17:11:00.002+13:00

Today the NZ Government is asking that people use text messaging instead of phoning loved ones in Christchurch.
(This is following a second significant earthquake in CHCH)
Seems SMS has reached a level of respectability, and is a preferred choice in emergencies.

Information from telecom:
The Christchurch 111 call centre has been successfully diverted to Wellington, and a back up site in Palmerston North is on standby if required. Issues connecting will be due to network damage, congestion or power-related issues.

For Tom

2011-02-10T14:21:00.003+13:00

Pilgrim Library Stained Glass, originally uploaded by Andrew|W.

What sunshine couldnt do without stained glass, nor stained glass without the light...
Living in a connected world matters, but i thinks its how we are shaped in connections that matters more.
A combination effect of relationality. Who I am and how I think, and what i learn is held in the network. The one does not happen without the other.
Such knowledge gained has this ephemeral quality, its held in the network; and does not hold the same shape when attempts are made to move it from here to there, such movement cannot help but shift it further.

On being in the prisms of possibility: from Thomas, a letter in reply

2011-02-10T14:02:00.002+13:00

Reply
profesorbaker says:
February 9, 2011 at 1:18 pm

Hi Elise,

You are here with me today, as I was with you the past day, reading your writing.

Ailsa, you must know, that if I knew you, I would insist on calling you “Elise”, for that is the moment when your writing spoke to me, when your lovely voice first rose from the shadows of print surrounding it, and gave me the possibility of understanding what CCK11 means to me personally, when I first called you, “Elise”.

After reading your writing, I listened to this lovely pianist, playing your song, written centuries ago, and named, for you, “Für Elise”, “For Ailsa”, by Beethoven himself.

Yes, too much optimism, on anyone’s part, is a clear and present danger. On the other hand, a lack of optimism, a failure to believe that you can calm the wind, that you can sustain yourself over water, is also, a clear and present danger.

Only those crazy souls, who dare to dream that a man can fly, only those souls who see life not within the prism of its apparent limitations, but within the prism of its possibility, its potential, its “this-is-something-I-would-like-to-do-ness, and “why hasn’t someone done this before”, those are the ones who push the human race forward, I’ve been told.

Elise, we both agree on one thing, that life is beautiful, although scary at times, and if we strive for the beauty, I’m sure there will be music for us, even if we “be the only ones listening”, to Beethoven himself, playing your song, “Für Elise”…

Oh, Ailsa, your thesis is surely a majestic melody, and your smile, if it be like my smile, must surely last for a while….

My best regards, for my friend, Elise/Ailsa

Thomas

And: A letter to Thomas from Elise

2011-02-10T14:01:00.001+13:00

Do you recall a letter written to Carl Rogers by Rollo May? It too asked that we consider relationality, for optimism alone may not be enough.

May, R. (1982). The problem of evil: An open letter to Carl Rogers. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 22(10), 10-21. doi:10.1177/0022167882223003

Sometimes i get a little scared by too much positivity, a tyranny of niceness, a faith in connecting that assumes inherent goodness, and/or an evangelical regard for the wonders of machines that go ping.

Your post is very beautiful, eloquent and provocative…it has made me rewrite a part of my thesis writing, and has left me smiling most of the evening…it is also one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever made.
so i thank you, sincerely, ailsa

On: A letter to Elise

2011-02-10T13:38:00.004+13:00

Ive kept a copy of our exchanges, and in trust i hope Tom does not mind.
But ive found before that a digital world is sometimes ephemeral, sometimes links no longer take me back to where i want to be, so this is a copy of an exchange held in the public spaces of our blogs.
I'd wrap them with a blue satin ribbon if i could, and place then somewhere precious for safe keeping, but the digital makes some things more and less possible.
Thomas' letter to Elise that followed my previous blog, on where the wild things are:

Hi Elise,

I liked a lot of things in your lovely post. I am a great one for “voice” and I listened to the “voice” present in this post of yours.

You (like me also) have looked at the criticism and controversy surrounding Connectivism as a theory of learning. Rather than turn to criticism, you turned to critique, doing the research required to present your points, well-supported, deliciously, eloquently offered to the reader, in this instance, myself.

Oh, the reading of your post was beautiful, and a measured voice, a reasoned voice, a wise voice emerged, to calm the wind, to view the water’s potential to hold us, if we but dare to walk upon it….

My point: Connectivism, as a Theory of Learning for a Digital Age, is not perfect, but perfectible.

In the meanwhile, a calm voice is appreciated, especially for those who defend the status quo, perhaps secretly fearing possible displacement by a digital age which is now demanding it’s own theory of learning.

No, I have erred. The digital age isn’t demanding anything. Real people are. “Who are these real people?”, you ask.

Digital learners. Digital learners, born in a digital age, the children of the digital age, the children of today, who will have to solve the world problems that you and I are leaving them as their lasting inheritance from us.

You see, you and I didn’t solve the problem of world hunger. As we sat at our tables yesterday, there were others who went to bed hungry.

You see, you and I didn’t solve the problem of world peace. As we watched the news on TV last night, maybe enjoying a pizza delivered by the home delivery service, there were people killing, and being killed, somewhere on this planet.

You see, you and I didn’t solve the problem of poverty. The children of the digital age have to live in a world where 1% of the world’s population has 80% of the world’s wealth.

Our digital children are a part of the 99% that’s fighting for a share of the 20% that’s left.

You see, you and I didn’t solve the problem of global warming.

While we talked about the appalling lack of scientific evidence to support such a claim, how Al Gore couldn’t be trusted, how the snow on Mt. Kilamanjaro disappeared in 2000 and came back in 2008 and disappeared again, how severe summers became the global norm, how wild whirlwinds whirled with regularity, and how the very Earth itself quaked incessantly in 2010, our weather and our planet simply became a bit more inhospitable for life itself, human life that is…

These are only a few of the problems we know we are leaving to the children of the digital age to solve. Their brilliance gives us reason to hope, to be optimistic about the future. But here’s the rub: what about those problems that we’re leaving the children of the digital age to solve, that we don’t know we are leaving to be solved?

You know, those problems that no one sees coming, the problems no one has thought about, no one has ever imagined? Will the education of the past century be up to that kind of task?

Listen to the digital age, for it speaks to us:

The digital age cries out: “Look at me! Look at my new clothes! Am I not more beautiful? Look at all my brilliant connections who share knowledge with me now!”

And we, the children of the last century, the vox populi, we too cry out: “We liked you the way you were dressed last year, ten years ago, last century! Was it not enough for you that I, and I alone, your teacher, poured my knowledge from my brain into yours?

Connections? Bah, humbug!

Who needs connections when you have me? Take those new clothes off! Come into my classroom, turn off that cellphone, put away your digital toys, turn off that blasted computer, no YouTube, no Skype, no instant messaging, no social media for you. By Jove, this is a classroom! We are doing education in here! Get in your seat, second row, third desk, behind student number 33.”

Teacher (smiling) “Good morning class. Today I will be telling you all about…”

Connectivism: A Theory of Learning for a Digital Age, is playing catch-up to Connectivism: the Practice of Learning in a Digital Age.

The transformation, the paradigm shift, the revolution, the reformation, call it what you will, but it has already happened.

We are not Einstein, we are not Newton, we are not the makers of the wheel.

No, we are simply describing the wheel: It’s round and it makes getting from Point A to Point B a heck of a lot more enjoyable.

We’ve already been hit on the head by the apple, gravity has happened, and now we explain why that apple fell down, on our heads, rather than rise into the sky…

E = MC squared? Now that was a tough sell, wasn’t it? But if Einstein could do it, working alone in a patent office, a-l-o-n-e, connected to no one but himself, then what do you think Mankind, the children of the digital age, will do, when they connect and share their knowledge?

Oh, I would think that they will solve problems that we children of the past century could not, or would not, solve…

Best regards,
Thomas

Where the wild things are: Connectivism, CCK2011#

2011-02-07T15:14:00.010+13:00

This unpolished rant was brought on by wikipedias flame wars on connectivism as well as by Latour's and Law's discussions as to whether Actor-network theory is a theory or not.

I always thought philosophy and theory were a matter of scale; the one grander, more over reaching, and the other more grounded, more empirically tested. That the philosophy required internal consistencies a complex arrangements of how the world is seen and constructed and so can make meaning of the world.

Isn't philosophising about what ontologies, epistemologies,are? what is knowledge and how is it known...and in talking philosophy down to earth, what produces the 'good life' which is essentially contestable? While theorizing is more grounded in day to day practicalities?

Kurt Lewin suggests there is nothing so practical as a good theory.
So a theory gets tested in empirical research, in application, in my view it is not necessarily predictive, though this is the stance of 'scientific method' that it be repeatable and so provide consistency... case studies too can provide more and less support, more or less weakening of a theory.

In philosophising a good philosophy, paraphrasing John Dewey (1958) in Experience and Nature:

“Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life experiences, render them more significant, more luminous to us, or make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering experiences more opaque than they were before?”

So I'm thinking ANT is philosophy. And at its finest :)
Its descriptive, and there are empirical accounts
But its not predictive.
It does not over-reach itself.
It illuminates knowing this also creates shadows: a self-conscious theory.
But importantly it meets Dewey's account for being fruitful, for creating the conditions of also knowing that things might be otherwise.

For connectivism, it's still establishing its clarity, its alignments, its contradictions, its loves and betrayals. But theory does not come into the world brand spanking new ready to go...its a little unfair to treat it in the same ways one might treat an adult or a teenager, when its still toddling. And a toddlers survival is not just about it's own robustness, it's also about the readiness of others to engage in more and less supportive ways.

Law in a sociology of monsters describes the newness of things also, citing a story

I said 'I think they might also be called "hopeful monsters".'
She said' What are hopeful monsters?'
I said 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them.' Nicolas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters, p.71

So let us not forget readiness is a distributed state also. A networked proviso.

I now turn to how criticism might be enhanced taking a relational approach.
Latour suggests in doing research one should always be respectful of one's informants/participants/people we work with...and as much as reasonably possible:

Always assume people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil when you're studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point when the thing is irresistible. (p.36)

No reason we should not be so generous to newer theorists and theories in the making. They are not attempts to deceive.

And like Donna Haraway, to say, from a distance, that one knows better, is to see everything from nowhere as one's own situated knowledge is not acknowledged but treated as a gospel truism. Some reflective work on one's own positioning and how one positions others in the network might be useful here. A network is not a hierachy. There is no one at the top with a supreme world-view, instead accepted wisdom (knowledge) is also made and distributed on a network.

I take an ANT stance with this, being connected means being in relationship, so what would happen were the question treated relationally? In considering critique instead of criticisms, if instead of thinking is this good/bad/right/wrong we were instead to consider, what does this bring to the relationships with others (human or otherwise): then not only might it illuminate, and render less opaque as Dewey would ask, but perhaps we might also ask in what ways might that which is looked at, as well as the theorizing undertaken, be otherwise?

The following is a beautiful piece of prose on the type of criticism yearned for by one philosopher, from an anonymous interview titled the masked philosopher:

"I cant help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life: it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind,, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes- all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms."

The masked philosopher was Foucault 1994, p. 326

To yearn for such criticism is to yearn for engagement, to enquire, and not to close down, but to foster connections...such that new learning might occur.

I don't know if i believe in connectivism as a new theory of learning, but what i do know is a connected world makes learning occur in ways that would previously have been very difficult. Technologies bring about new ways of being in relationship, and no learning is possible without relating.

Ref:
Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and nature. New York, NY: Dover Publications.
Michel Foucault, interviewed anonymously in Le Monde by Christian Delacampagne, April 6–7, 1980; reprinted in M. Foucault, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (ed. Paul Rabinow, tr. Robert Hurley et al.), The New Press, New York, 1994.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3), 575-599.
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis: Or the love of technology (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Law, J. (Ed.). (1991). A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination. London, England: Routledge. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=FsINAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=A+sociology+of+monsters:+Essays+on+power,+technology+and+domination&source=bl&ots=PN2gGPt9al&sig=Y1kZy4EfVYcqKssYcB-J9L5zZ_8&hl=en&ei=XRHKTPfyJYfcvwPyl5nWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

The comma as a fashion victim

2011-01-21T18:26:00.003+13:00

I know about apostrophe abuse and try not to perpetuate this violence.
However, it is comma neglect that disturbs me more.
Apparently, they are not as well loved as they once were. They are, apparently, fading from fashion.
Let's be clear on this; abuse by neglect is still abuse.

The following proves my point:

Material girl looking to give up on mastery in search for fidelity

2011-01-20T11:35:00.003+13:00

I just love the writing of Patti Lather as she cites Donna Haraway, and Serres
resonates well with my current quandaries.

Messing with reality: troubling a lineal approach by tangling myself up :)

Lather cites Serres in addressing a code of practice for messages-
"Easy to spot the problem, hard to supply the ethic!" (Serres 1995, p. 101)
His answer is a kind of presence and absence and presence again (Serres, 1995, p.104)

Circumspact, convoluted and sometimes seemingly perverse. A fragmented montage method of argument

cites Neitszche " my theory grows from my practice- oh, from a practice that is not by any means harmless or unproblematic (1967,p.340)

The work of methodology to negotiate the politics of knowing and being known. Method resituated as a way into the messy doings of science via risky practices remade in every situated enquiry

Working the ruins of a confident social science;
as the very ground from which new practices of research takes shape

This books works at cancelling distance between reader, writer and written about.

Ref
Lather, P. (1997). Creating a multilayered text: Women, AIDS, and Angels. In W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 233-258). New York, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press.

on being textually tangled

2011-01-18T22:27:00.004+13:00

I didnt have a language for it...
tongue tied
I ponder being textually tangled.

Reading around I knew i wasnt alone...
many feminist writers...
many other ways of approaching it...
and then there's a matter of deciding how much is enough vs how deep such oceans of exploration and thinking might be.

This late in my canditure i do not have the time to drown anew
As if one ever does.
(Reminds me of a powerful thesis i once read ...
power defined as the capacity to still unsettle 4 yrs later, it quoted a poem of not waving, drowning)

A prompt from Jane Davis http://bit.ly/eAfo9Z on twitters #Phdchat had me rereading
The thesis whiperer, and Inger's post names it for me, it's what happens with threshold concepts.
here's mine;
Voice.
Cant give it- disempowering.
Cant hear it and assume the story is captured...stories change.
Cant write it, it stabilizes something that is constantly in motion

So feeling like Im on a bear hunt: cant go over it, cant go under it, glossing it didnt work, ignoring it didnt either... the way is through it:
and for want of a better phrase i borrow from Patti Lather on both do-ing it and troubling it

So today was only a few words day instead of my goal of 333
And quite a few hundred or so words got binned...
but at least todays new words made sense of several thousand more that came before and after
:)

ref
Lather, P.(2001).Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography.Signs p.199-227
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175873

and commentary on
Troubling the Angels, working with women living with HIV/AIDS

The approach she talks of is similar to the discontinuous writing style i had already decided on via ANT and authors Latour, Mol, and Law.

CCK11 Revisiting Connectivism as a theory of learning

2011-01-18T07:50:00.006+13:00

Bother, cant make a table work here...cant share whats in my head when the actor i ask to carry it to others ... blogger ... turns it into scrambled eggs.

A translation too far.
Now I'm talking to myself
An iterative process.. engaging with the technology, the thoughts of others....the docs...

I need a space to put a pdf ... that others might link to...
could play on prezzie... but my fledgling prezzie skills would take me too long...

mmm...managed it there as not quite scrambled eggs...cant make a table that behaves...sizes and columns...
ah...deleted most...some wont go away but layering a pdf on top covers up my mess......see http://prezi.com/gebyyxino6og/cck11-meets-ant/
You can click on the prezzie below and zoom in
Please feel free to adapt further, make an attribution to me if you use it...
and invite me to come look...

Adapted from a table George Siemens has on learning theories in week 1 readings, but with an additional column expanding on connectivism to consider actor-network theory
I dont have the time to present it in a more engaging, enticing way, feel free... please feel free to become an actor in my network...or to make me one in yours :)

Im back to the phd

CCk11 meets ANT on Prezi

Phd writing, while im lost in the funhouse will the markers see moonwalking bears?

2011-01-11T07:52:00.005+13:00

I set myself a goal of two chapters in two months.
333 words a day would have done it.
And all i had to do was describe the research method, and say what i have done.
Should have been a walk in the park.

But life gets in the way.
There was christmas, new year, taxi driving....
i had allowed 10 days of down time acrosss Dec/Jan. But its now the 11th of Jan and while one chapters done, the next is barely begun.
Finishing a chapter required some time for mulling it over, for reshaping a little, and for polishing...
And the new chapter, needed restarting a few times while i worked out a way of entering into it. And then there is an iterative process of too'ing and thro'ing with previous chapters to make its niche, and to ensure what is said is said but once, and well.
Actually this is a bit of a problem, feels repetitive to me.
And I am forever curious about what markers will think...I fear they may miss what's important while stuck in there own grooves of what they want to see.
They just might miss the bear moonwalking...

So I'm back to being in Barthes 'funhouse' and being my own funhouse architect, I really should have an idea where the door is.
But it has a life of its own, its taken mine :(

Nonetheless, i have found a way in to this chapter.
Im in it, Ive drawn a path for the reader to accompany me on tracing through everything i did up to this point.
I have scared myself when realizing my data is getting a bit old, being collected in 2007-2008...

And am beginning to think it might be time to turn off the internet, tweetdeck, facebook, emails...and bring on
'freedom'

Or alternately, writeordie for fixed time periods.

are we there yet?

2011-01-06T23:58:00.007+13:00

Its close...chs 1,2,3,4,5 are done, as is 7...
ch 6...what i actually did, now needs writing
Shouldnt be a difficult chapter
except
here's where i get to feel judged
did i do sensible stuff...yes it needed studying
did i do it sensibly?
mmmm....maybe i picked something bigger than i should have
Seth Godin's advice was overwhelm the small space.
Why oh why did i study change????
'Tis a bit late to decide studying what's in motion, 'the blur', is unwise now.
mmm but big things need questioning too...keep telling myself im just doing one aspect inside of the bigger stuff...and in an ANT study, scale becomes irrelevant- big little, near far...adding awareness of the myriad actors, and the movements between them, is the point...
In studying a new thing, there isnt a literature base, so it had to pull widely (dammit)

Another q though: will i be totally excommunicated from academia if others view what i have studied unethical...

no wonder my writing is feeling blocked

ethical stuff

in ANT there are multiple realities, i just need to be in the same one as the markers....
Or at least have markers who can appreciate that right and wrong, good and bad are subjective positions; and that sometimes adapting and tinkering inside of reasonable parameters might be more impt than being sanitised, sterilised out of existence.

Maybe this chapter is networking the thesis, the ethics committees, the organisation, the supervisor etc etcc??? The laptop the endnote, the delicious, etc etc, the research participants...the reader...the marker...

Can i be that overt about it...that playful?
or do i just pick up my boring and write it....as Heather would say

nope- this chapter is going to be fair dripping with the first person "I"

Here's some Foucault at his readable best...

"I cant help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life: it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind,, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes- all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms."
Foucault 1994, p. 323.

Never knew Foucault had such a motivational streak. Many thanks, again, to Kamler and Thomson for citing him.
And I note his approach is congruent with that of Latour: the genre of writing needs life breathed through it.

How did you travel 2010

2010-12-22T21:58:00.003+13:00

Frequently, happily, idylically as well as troubled. There were many journeys.
France was sublime, canal boating sublimer... not a word? Tell it to someone who cares.
And with the ANT research, I travel slowly, which is just the way it is supposed to be according to Latour.
Today i travelled between collateral realities and sensitive research.
Maybe tomorrow is soon enough to check out skype or icq or my groupwise email, meantime, I am having to travel in restricted spaces...travel well.

ailsa.

Beyond avoidance

2010-12-21T00:07:00.003+13:00

I've avoided being honest when i know it would hurt, truth without empathy is not a virtue.

Ive also avoided going mad; a phd and fulltime work is majorly taxing.

And Ive avoided finishing the PhD.
Ive avoided managing my time with deadlines. I know they are elastic so why would I?
However, i would quite like my life back now.
Ive avoided strategies that are available, but will use at least once in January. If i make a statement such as this, is it any more likely to occur- i dont know. Ive not tried it before :)
We will see.
I will use 1. the unorganizer to do an accounting of my use of time
2. the writeordie website where writing inside a square can be either time limited or word count limited.

I have meantime avoided the garden; a phd and a garden are incompatable.
I struggle a bit in avoiding guilt. Not of the garden, but of exercise and well cooked meals and of being there for otherss.
The body may recover, the family seem tolerant. I avoid talking to them too much on the content, but it seems it consumes me and spills from every pore, every day. I suspect they would like it done with too...

My biggest regret will be if the methodology section is not done by Dec 31. I work and work and work it, and i feel done over with it, but its still got a little way to go. It is the first time i have attempted a personally set deadline and it frustrates me that the work seems to have its own ideas on what is needed. Resistance seems futile. What it takes is what it takes, i've already put down my clever to pick up my ordinary on this.

What am i unsure of?
Will it/I be good enough? Ive never written a methodology before; am i doing whats wanted? Will a rewrite be required? Its not stopping me though, the learning is useful. When i write, I learn.

This blogpost is in response to the Reverb10 prompt for 20th Dec.
Reverb involves a pledge to write every day: because writing makes you better at it.
I hope so :)
What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

Lesson learned

2010-12-20T06:12:00.004+13:00

When you hit someone with a brick, it doesnt't make them prettier.

Im glad my friend is still alive.
Tears as i write this, prickles of salt dry under my eyes.
I am tied by etiquettes of silence; its not my story to tell.

But in the silence is also learning; connections to a future, I know now what i will never do:
I will never hit someone with a brick and expect it to make for better performance.
Do not confuse my silence with absence.

Cartographies of Silence
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
–Adrienne Rich,

This blog was brought about by the following post about staying away from the whine and producing better wine...
http://www.pg.salford.ac.uk/blog/
In wanting to improve writing: write.

innovations own seeds of destruction

2010-12-16T16:19:00.003+13:00

What innovation does:

Everything we invent, Marshall Macluhan concluded, has four essential effects:

€ First, each invention enhances or exaggerates the body part or faculty of which it is an extension. Thus, the car allows us to "run" faster and farther, thereby shrinking our experience of physical distance. Cars created suburbs and ‹ because we climb into them and wear them like skin ‹ they also create private space in public places.
€ Second, each invention obsolesces an old technology by replacing it with a new one. Thus, just as the telegraph displaced hand-carried messages, telephones displaced the telegraph, thereby shortening time and contributing to the immediacy McLuhan called the "global village".
€ Third, each new invention retrieves something old by using it in a new way. Thus, the first content of television became old movies, thereby inviting a nostalgia by rekindling our reflection of the past. TV has also rekindled our interest in nature by bringing it ever more vividly into our living rooms. Cities have inspired a romance with nature.
€ Fourth, when pushed to the limit, each new invention reverses the effect for which it was intended. Thus, the car, which was supposed to eliminate the horse manure that polluted 19th century cities, has now rendered some cities nearly uninhabitable because of toxic air emissions. And suburbia has created the traffic gridlock that increasingly renders car travel impossible.

Each of our inventions "massages" us into a new shape, changing how we think and behave. We become what we make. "You shape your tools and they shape you," McLuhan said. "It's a loop ‹ you start out a consumer and you wind up being consumed."

But its more than context that makes this happen...as Latour notes, only sociology seems to get away with blaming the social on the social.

So the seeds of destruction are built in to the object...
We invent cars...i want one, get one, use one...and so does everone else...we have to pay for them, drive to work, manufacture the traffic jam...more time driving less time working to pay for the car...and i find myself in a mobius strip...consumed by consumerism.
Its not 'the social' that creates this havoc...its collected beings, human and otherwise making it so.

I like to be in contact, i take to email...i get 10 a day, no sweat, 20 a day alright...how many a day before being overwhelmed...30-50? And then i stop looking...i dont want to know...so i switch media...i go to blog...but get spam..facebook...twitter but before i know it there's too much junk there too... want to gain my attetion?
quaint...write me a letter :)
they are so rare now
i would open it

How to finish the phd in 10 easy steps; Levelling up one chapter at a time

2010-12-16T07:51:00.012+13:00

If this is the answer what was the question, post number 2.

Getting a phd is mighty time consuming and i want my life back.
And compared to facing a line up like the one above, my getting educated should be a walk in the park.

So I have:
1. Done the maths, counted up whats written, yay80,000 already (some thesis are this short!!!) but im still some chapters, bother. I need, Im guessing, but i have aword limit... 20,000 words: two and a half chapters in two months, 60 days if i keep 10 up my sleeve for having a life...before the next semester starts and work gets in the way...if i only write 182 words a day, current average, then the 20000 words i still need are going to take too damn long.
Time to get serious about levelling up. It is only 333 words a day...
2. Redownloaded the phd toolkit- includes chart for unscheduling time so i can 'fit it in' - the phd. And read all the affirmations and anti-procrastination info the toolkit provides
3. Look at #phd and #phdchat on twitter so i dont feel alone; checked today's 'group' time on GMT and participated :) heh is this getting in the way of writing...being connected, find myself smiling lots in the chat...no not procrastination, i feel happier about the phd...
4. Looked at the photos of UK student protests fighting to be educated and realise i have nothing to complain about. Trebled student fees makes a PHD cost how much, jaw dropping open...9000 pound a yr... Blood on the faces of students for Gods sake... More procrastination? Strong motivator. Education is wasted on me? NOOOO!
5. Set up the working space, feet up, laptop, books in arms reach, cats on their own chair. Put nurofen gel on the wrist and kept it within arms reach, put the hand splint similarly within arms reach.
6. Googled writing methodology chapters to check I'm not going astray, as well as rechecking the book i have on helping Doctoral students write by Kamler and Thomson (not that useful on this bit, but sstill always good for the way they write) And reread articles by Lankshear and Knobel on the ambiguity of methodology, plus another on ethnography by Agar
Checklist time:
Is the methodology chapter a logical progression from question? YES.
From lit review? YES
Is the chapter a synopsis of what research method has been chosen or a critique as well???MMM Not sure. Think I'll do the synopsis then in next chapter look at how i talk it down to earth. OK tim eto move on.
7. Set achievable goals. Chunk it down. Made the decision to 'level up' by months end; to finish the methodology chapter...just a few subsections to go...thats 10 days...with 5 days for socialising (heh its christmas) and for editing it....or if i fall behind...and i figure this chapter has so far addressed= 4/5 ANT uncertainties...the 5th has some accrued notes, ...then need to ensure performativity, reflexivity and multiplicity are covered if not done seriously enough in 5th section...and maybe arts based research or allegory...if not in the aforementioned bits..
8. Check in to write or die, if/when i get really desperate, and if i ever stop blogging...there's a free online writing box ...so set the word limit, set the timer...
Time to seriously get down to the business of being an educated person
9. I still have the writers diet up my sleeve. Is your writing flabby, useful for editing, given i think i might write too much...good site for writing in a more direct way, how to take out those extraneous words.

and 10...am too busy writing to try to think up extra steps just for rounding up the list feel free to add your own :)
...see you when write or die has finished with me :)

If this is the answer, what was the question?

2010-12-15T09:31:00.006+13:00

In a reverse of what most quiz shows do, Jeopardy gives the answer, and asks contestants “What is the question?”

“What question was this device designed to answer?”

Ironically,
Mr Watson come here- I want to see you

A landline:
Over time the question shifts:
Is so and so there?
Can they talk with me?
A negotiation
I'd like you to stop what you are doing and talk with me
I want to be with you; together and apart

A mobile:
1992, Dec 3, a three week early naf merry christmas that went unnoticed
I'm writing you a note, it's a message you can look at or not.
And overtime this also shifts, the message is for you, it's for you because a mobile is personal
I have your attention, attend to me.
Manage it
But just because it's short and succinct does not make it impetuous. There is opportunity for review.
I want you to attend to me.
Digital traces of attending, of gaining attention and of being connected.
Digital traces of connecting.
And at not too much cost. The effort can be masked, I dont want ot presume to much, I dont want to appear overly interested...Im a casual kind of medium, the cost is minimal whether financial or emotional.

Education's reigning error

2010-12-02T16:39:00.009+13:00

Why do students fail?
And closer to home for me personally as a student:Why do phd students fail?
I have a friend, heh more than one, and I see that their phds have failed them.
What happened?
The ducks didn't get in line; was it a lack of duck flocking skills, or their duck herding skills? Os a combination of the two? Perhaps a weakness in superglue...
Somehow getting the ducks in a line, and keeping them aligned and recording the process of said alignment, all in a way that would make meaning for others, gathering in the supervisor, the marker, the reader, all didn't come to pass.

At this point I recommend reading Machiavelli's The Prince.
Should be compulsory reading for any Phd student intent on completion.
(And it's freely available from the Gutenberg press, and it's a very short little read for a book that is timeless. Machiavelli certainly got a lot of bad press for a book that is basically about winning friends and influencing people. The moral compass is in the hands of the reader.)

I've just been reading some Actor-networking by John Law (2010) on research methods, and there is an overlap point well worth making in regard to seeing what you expect to see in education. He cites Robert k Merton on "the reign of error".
And there is scope for addressing this in regard to education.

Robert K. Merton elevated the principle into what he called the ‘‘reign of error’’.
Banks fail,he said, because people first wrongly think that they will, but then this definition of the situation become true. STS writers Donald MacKenzie and Barry Barnes have shown how this may happen, for instance in finance. But I also think the point needs to be reworked. Methods, it seems to me are potentially more profoundly self fulfilling than Merton’s talk of the "reign of error" might suggest.

And here's what happens in education, the self fulfilling prophecies become embedded in consciousness, girls cant do hard sciences etc etc...
I knew physics was going to be hard...and it was.
And here's a link demonstrating it http://www.slate.com/id/2276066/
When a teacher told me "everyone in this class can pass maths" ...I did
When my phd supervisor tells me i write well, my confidence is boosted, i write more...and i write well :)
Or so I'm told.
And so I continue.

When I see a colleague hit with a brick because performance isn't great, I see something much less pretty occur. Being hit with a brick does not make things prettier or more effective...
It's not rocket science. It's much more important than that.

Refs:
Law, J. (2010, 31 August- 3 September). The double social life of method. Paper presented at the meeting of the Sixth Annual CRESC conference on the Social Life of Method, St Hugh's College, Oxford, England. Retrieved from http://www.heterogeneities.net/papers.htm

Machiavelli, N., &. (1998). The Prince: Retrieved August 19, 2010, from Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232.txt (Original work published 1532).

The plot thickens: Conversational moves in phd writing

2010-11-22T22:11:00.008+13:00

Kamler and Thomson suggest developing the thesis as argument might be progressed through conversational means, so here goes:

So here's the problem
Change is bloody hard to make happen. (Ch.1 contextualising)
Even when its seen somewhere else and looks like its the best thing since sliced bread, making it happen, getting others to align, how then to win friends and influence people...how to get all the ducks in a row...And as much as i think i might be making a change happen, whats it doing back?
So I'm going to look at change.

I take the example of emergent technologies in a youth counselling centre.
How do things get off the ground, where's it come from...everyone's implicated, and so are things...
Something that's not been done before evolves, there were a few things up in the air, one of them really takes off. Whats involved?
How does it reshape those involve; people, practices, and the things.

So there's a multitude of ways change gets looked at, and they only ever get part of the picture.
How would we know whats needed and whats possible if we only get part of the picture?
And how could we intervene to make such a change more positive, and on what grounds, because things might be otherwise.
And this brings up alternate realities, for which groups or individuals do we talk of when we consider the positive?
Ah there's a controversy in this: What to do with concurrent positives and negatives? And what of multiple realities that sometimes converge, clash or are distributed so that they not clash.

This change that happens crosses disciplines and has never been explored before, so there's a need to check out education, health, psychology- inter and intra-personal, and there's organizational change, top down and bottom up.
And there's consideration for the technology, and consideration for counselling.
So i make a space inside of which I can portray the multiplicity involved. I make a space I can talk from. (Ch2 networking the theory space being clarifications and ch 3 illogics and logics of change lit review)

And in looking at approaches to change, I can say why they are flawed, or at least fractional, and partial in both senses of the word. Can it be otherwise: no.
They give a part of the picture, they simplify too far. I use the literature on change as an example of how realities do this; they're partial always.
I introduce ANT, an approach that seems more robust, while at the same time is very humble; it doesnt prescribe, and it doesnt do causation, and it works with partial- in both meanings. Considerable justification is given to my choosing a method that openly acknowledges no claim to understanding everything nor provides answers.

(ch 4 ANT sensibilities) how to do an ant informed study, what further knowledge of ant is needed

(ch 5 methodological praxis)I negotiate work with a not-for-profit organisation i have been associated with who are expanding the repertoire on approaches they have taken to counselling.
Its important to understand whats going on in as much as we can because:
1. the agency wants to understand how change may then be shaped for good. Shaping services for good matters, it matters for young people; they have a need to be heard and to be taken seriously with regard to services that purports to meet their needs.
2. this research shares practice that has not previously been written of (text counselling).
3. to contribute to discussions of social material relationality particularly in regard for how digital spaces might be interfered with for good; to better meet human purposes

(Ch 6 Slices of practice) So what i did was a three dimensional capture of the network involved in the semisolid practices of text counselling particularly.
I present the findings, some of the findings, sufficient of the findings...to portray the knowledge of whats shaping the service. These are presented as slices of practice.(ch 6, data analysis)
This involves giving voice to artefacts, to data- 6000 text counselling messages, to CCT's, interviewing clients and providers of the service, and staff who make the serive possible.

(ch 7 discussion) And it allowed me to see

1. how things might be otherwise, considerations for the organization, including opening up areas of discussion, opening up questions of what if...what of scale, what of 'stickiness of the medium, what of smartphones, broadband access being more available, costs shifting...
2. considerations for practice: writing up a practice shift; identifying the significant aspects of this new practice
3. consideration for ANT in regard to issues of identity and agency; of multiple realities; of making digital spaces more amenable to human needs

(Chapter 8, conclusion)Realities are multiple; diversity required, conclusions are multivocal:
Whats learned in doing this?
That things can be/are now otherwise:
for the agency
for ant
for counselling
for me: that change takes work; that research involves researcher repsonsibilty.

Some further plot thickening: how to turn the genre of a storyline into the argument of a thesis... I think there's a tautology involved: Seems to my mind that a networked approach just isnt going to do nice straight trajectories.

Ref
Kamler, B. and Thomson, P.(2006). Helping doctoral students write. New York, NY.: Routledge

Poetics of place and space

2010-11-21T09:14:00.006+13:00

Ze Frank's web playroom reached a TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_s_web_playroom.html

Ze Franks TEDtalk begins with a picture, a metaphor of the virtual world.
And he says something like how every talk of the web uses a picture like this, the digital traces made apparent. Its a tracing of the social web from wikipedia, it might have been a network via ANT but the anthrocentrism of social networking per wikipedia doesnt acknowledge the non human actors.

Ze Frank also brings in a picture of a Netherlands street crossing sign. The person looks to be really interested in the button, but seems he's not that interested in crossing the street, having fixated on the button...
and it reminds Ze of a photograph from any current street corner, a person looking at the text on their mobile phone. And what he makes of this is:
"Truth is, life is being lived there,
when they smile,
life is being lived there, somewhere up there in that dense network.
...
To feel and be felt...

He might have said instead: To love and to be loved in return...
Really connecting with people isnt easy"

But Ze Frank manages it, mediated by web
His examples include the very beautiful audio hug; Hey you're ok, you'll be fine, just breathe...Made by strangers around the world.

And it reminds me of my phd study with youthline and its text counselling. What it takes to be supported, to feel affirmed, to be connected, might look small, but its a moment in reality nonetheless.
Its not necessarily the people i am with geographically with that make me feel connected. It can be the book I'm reading, the ideas of writers long past or very distant, people I am unlikely to meet, but whose thinking resonates, and a web of connection made it easier.
And the connections don't stop with the people, but with things of import also.
Transitional objects Sherry Turkle calls them.
And her book Evocative objects, things we think with demonstrates the point, we are shaped in connection not only with each other, but also with things.

Taking this a bit further, into philosophy and into metaphysics, what is, is shaped in connection with us, its not a chair or a table or a ...unless i think it so...its there...but its purpose is established in connection with me.
My mobile is also my outsourced memory, my torch, my holder of talismans- the little messages i dont delete.

Its what helps me feel good about myself.
oh...and its also a phone.

Both human and non-human identities are shaped in connection.
And neither are totally separable one from the other, but entwined, the sociotechnical is made in conjunction.

Gregory Bateson in an ecology of mind explores such connection also:
Is there a line or a sort of a bag where I can say that "inside" that line or interface is "me" and outside" is the environment or some other person? By what right do we make these distinctions?

This challenges bounded ways of thinking, arguing that relational processes are entwined in the forming of people, and of potentials:

It is through relational process that whatever we come to view as independent beings are given birth.... in whatever we think, remember, create and feel, we participate in relationship... we carry with us traces of myriad relationships, past and present, existing or imagined. These traces essentially equip us with multiple and often conflicting potentials for action. (p397)

Its not only our relating with people that has this import.
The social and technical are entwined, identities of both made in the moment, and the agency of both made in networks of possibility.

One of few memories of my Grandad was him repeating the maxim 'clothes maketh the man'
On reflecting, across time, and networking with dead people's thoughts, I find this a very ANT like saying.

But the ANT connection here that I really want to make is that there are people constructively using digital spaces that enhance the very human condition of feeling loved, feeling heard and being connected.

For Peter Sloterdikt, the spaces we make to live in, while talking of architecture, might also consider the digital spaces we choose to shape and be shaped by. Using the metaphor of spherology: a bubble's interior and exterior are made in the same breath. In designing where we live, such shaping influence us.
In moving into digital spaces how too are such spaces shaping us, and how might we shape them better to meet our human needs?

To use cutting edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs to be met, the need to immunize existence, to construct protective islands, to nurture human fragility...we arrive in a world of fingertip buttons.
Sloterdikt refers to his own explicative work; he refers to the dynamism of our being-in-the-world...where every created space enatils a projection.
That we take into each new space the memory of a different space, a past space we have been in.
What interiors are/were needed...becomes...what environments might produce such interiors...
Interiors that trace immunizing capacity, a protective capacity, a protection against the less fortuitous moments of life is what is wanted.

And so he infers that for architects geometry is not a starting point, but instead the atmospheric effects of space.
SO in teaching an dlearning, the starting point shouldnt be ppt...
Obviously not everyone's idea of what is desirable in nurturing spaces will be the same. But there are places to start from that are more and less helpful, the tools or the human values...shouldnt really be a hard question, mmm?

To appreciate technology's usefulness consider a functionalist question of what does the system achieve in current form? and at the end, What could be done instead? Rather than what do we use, begin with intent.
Just as modern achitecture sees itself as molders of humanity, , if one ignores the shot of meglomania, so too might designers of digital spaces.

This links a media as environment approach, in using emergent technologies consideration might first be given to the design of such spaces attentive to the needs of the human condition, remembering that variation exists and that diversity is therefore required.

'Language is the house of being' postulated Heidegger
'The medium is the message' asserted Mcluhan

I'm thinking that reals are made in unreal spaces also.

Refs
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Spheres theory: Talking to myself about the poetics of space. Harvard Design Magazine, 30(Spring/Summer), 126-137. Retrieved from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov
Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative objects. Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

beautifully entwined

2010-11-09T09:48:00.003+13:00

Dont show them, tell them,
a beautiful example of this writing technique:
http://tinyurl.com/2ak6582
And I dont even like tennis, nor does Andre Agassi it seems.
He's beautifully entwined, mind, body, family, the tennis opens...
The opening pages just pull.
What tennis means to his children- failure would mean a new puppy...
Realities are multiple.
His children 1, and 3 know not to run into him, his body is known by so many others in so many ways. For himself in these opening pages he knows his body as pain, his children, such young children, know his body as fragile.

There's seamless movement from one aspect of the network to another, Ramon his racket stringer, the art of tension held physically in his Agassis' own body and also within the focused work of the craftsman tennis rackett stringer and within the physical entity of the rackets.

This is a beautifully written illustration of actor-network theory, beautifully descriptive, the network just gets shown.

Persuading an octopus into a glass jar; literature review writing in a PhD

2010-11-02T15:15:00.007+13:00

Persuading recalcitant octopi into glass jars could well be a future vocation.

Certainly i have enough practice. I had wrongly it seems considered my lit review section an an extension of my own thinking, it just needed a bit of shaping. I now know it as a thing that writhes, seemingly with a mind of its own. Seems my having will is not enough to constrain it, it needs to want to go.

Wish it would stop sucking to me, I'm sick of its tenacious clingyness and want it to let go.

The gem with which I have titled this blog comes from Kamler and Thomson (2006) in their text Helping Doctoral Students Write.

How to write to lead a reader in the directions I want...
Involves making it palatable- plain white bread loses its appeal...sprinkling it with glitter doesnt make it taste any better.

Is gritty better than bland? Mmmm masterchef question...

And I get through the tough patch for another day with a little help from Bruno Latour: I put myself at the top of the arc of that excitement.
And then i can tell a story that doesnt want to choke me, let alone the reader.

This links in well with reading some John Seely Brown on the power of pull.
Heres a pdf from a keynote http://web.nmc.org/files/2010-summer-conference/jsb-keynote.pdf, good slides on the difference between Cartesian learning and social learning (again, I nod my head to Latour, Networked learning)
Another good slide: Change the music and you change the film.
What we see, how we see it...all networked...
...its back to Turtles all the way down.

On being multiple

2010-10-26T14:54:00.007+13:00

I hate personality tests, they seem to assume I'm a stable personality when i have insider knowledge that clearly I am not.
However, I can accept that there are particular contexts inside of which my behaviour is more of this and less of that. At least retrospectively this can be measured. I still have problems with the presumption that this is a forward measure of what I may be like in the future, and the very effect of my having been measured, and found wanting, in some respects may well negate the validity of such testing....
However, I found i could not help myself and slipped my blog into a blog personality profiling website that uses for its analysis Myers Briggs type profiling; presumably it will have a rubric that favours certain words in certain ways (thanks to Heli for the link)
and this is what i supposedly am:
INTP - The Thinkers

[INTP]
The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I wondered if that's just what blogging brings out, esp for a blog oriented on PhD.

I was amused to see on Heli's blog others whose analysis seemingly annoyed them: a scientist who didnt like getting scientist in the analysis, lol. I presume she is too far gone, contaminated, and now a meme carrier for the language of science?

Maybe I really am insensitive?
Am i really that indifferent?

I think its just the blog brings out a particular type of me, the part of me that gets distributed here. The Mummy part of me gets distributed at home.
We r multiple ;)

not getting very far, fast

2010-10-13T22:10:00.002+13:00

I have been around a lot of students lately, the one that lives here is promising a month of pmt, and Im thinking it must be that time of the year.
The ones training to be counsellors on a young people's helpline for two weeks have been practicing skills on each other; number one issue is not getting the work in, they describe it as a fear of procrastination. They seem hard on themselves. I think they are tired.
And its how i feel too; I found i had spent an hour reediting a chapter having forgotten what was in it, after putting it down for two weeks, and then discovering it was an old copy...
I'm concerned that I am losing the plot for a lack of thinking time.
And worried if i dont do it all the time, i'm back to forgetting what i had done...

So, having been practiced on by a novice counsellor, I went searching for the a time management tool to block time, so i would at least have tracked a path of work in another way. ..
instead distracted, not procrastinating, i found this. Its worth repeating. It's by Julian le Grand and he talks of PhD supervision, but also of academic papers.
He describes - where 90% is done but it doesnt get finished
Ive felt 80% finished all this year...
he suggests a misplaced perfectionism
I have re-edited and re edited and then removed patches...

All the loose ends have to be tied up, every argument must be polished, every counter-argument effectively rebutted.

oooh i havent yet rebutted...

Once the thesis is submitted, the article sent to a journal, or the book manuscript dispatched to the publisher, they are open to judgment. No longer can they, or their author, remain in the realm of glittering potential; now they, and their author, are out there in the open, for peer assessment - and for peer criticism.

No i dont think thats quite it
Nonehteless he does say , both positions are needing to be faced. And then he says
Nothing can ever be perfect, nothing immune from potential critique. There will never be a finishing point where it is all done. To misquote someone else – Iris Murdoch, I think, but irritatingly I’ve never been able to find the source - you never finish a piece of academic work; you only abandon it.

I know it will never be perfect...i just want it strong enough to survive.
And I know it just needs a bit more time in the womb.

Today's writing was slow, but it was an uphill part of the journey.
Having meandered my way a path, i could mark the distance covered, the journey taken, map the scenic route and fix it. Ive got a route mapped retrospectively, cleaned it up. looks like i knew where i was going before i got there. Nice tidy research. Retrospectively.
I have alot more respect now for Deleuze, G., & Guattari(1987) A thousand plateaus... daring to write in a stream of consciousness. Dont think the thesis committee of markers would like it though. Maybe a postscript will suffice. or i save it for here :) where grammar and trajectories don't matter.

connectivity

2010-10-09T05:03:00.005+13:00

am finally reading some John Seely Brown...I have a working premise that useful connections will hit on me at least twice.
Its probably not the most reliable premise for incidental learning, but in being slightly more discerning than 'read everything', its working for me as i continue to be overwhelmed by the too much to read, too little time, of being a phd student who wants to complete.

so when i tripped over this person's name twice...i googled it up...and found some pleasant writing :)

Here's a snippet

Clues provided by context

Consider, for instance, something as simple as a telephone-answering machine. Its use is not quite self-explanatory. A moment's thought reveals that the common message "I'm not here now" is, in the abstract, nonsense.
Whomever "I" refers to should be "here", wherever here is, "now", whenever the phrase is uttered. Yet in practice, despite its formal incoherence, the phrase turns out to be much more efficient than attempts at formal coherence, such as "If you're hearing this message, then I will not be at home at the time at which you will be calling."

What gives the more pithy phrase its effectiveness? Clearly, the words alone do not clinch the matter. To be understood, they rely on peripheral clues for interpretation. Background clicks and whirs, hisses from the tape, and the recorded quality of the voice itself all help callers realize that they are hearing a recorded message, and thus prepare them for a message's particular - if in the abstract peculiar - logic. These peripheral resources are not usually regarded as part of the information with which information technology is concerned. Yet, appearing unproblematically in the hiss of a recorded message, peripheral contributions can nevertheless be quite informative, allowing someone leaving a message and someone hearing it to communicate with a simple efficiency.

Important though they may be for design, these peripheral resources are not necessarily designed themselves. More usually, they evolve, as people - often quite unreflectively - enlist the support of contingent properties of a technology to keep things simple.

He writes directly, and he writes how the detective novel clues are missing in this webpage of subtitles and headings. There's playfulness; enjoyment and enticement in the multilayered approach.
And it reminds me of bits of my thesis writing.

He argues for the use of materiality, or performativity, though these words are not found on this page. He argues for simplification, yet what is here validates the complex.
and here he writes what i feel...and do...how clever is that?

"the new information generated in one year is more than a thousand times larger than the size of the entire print collection in the Library of Congress. It is hard to grasp the consequences of this much new information being generated each year, year after year. But people have invented their own strategies to navigate through this immense sea of information."

And here another snippet...here i am ...unable to sleep...and turn to my computer for a useful way to while away my time...i might as well be doing something useful....a phd...and that requires engaging with thinking- my own and others...so im blogging up my thoughts...

Communication technologies have become our central tools to socialize, exchange, build knowledge, they have become part of our private and domestic lives.

I'm entering into ... media as an environment (see macluhan or melkowitz) a context not as imaginary world or of distant world with me as voyeur...but of connection.

Im in it...and if you are reading this, you are too.

on being an incidental on one' s own thesis

2010-10-06T22:50:00.005+13:00

Or at least, sssslightly invisible...
hey its not so bad.
On some days the thesis writes itself.
on other days it co-opts me to write it.
I'm still waiting for it to co-opt others into it's progression, they seem even shier, shire, shyer, than myself...
i quite like this from my niece and her mum:
Philip Ardagh, author of the Eddie Dickens adventures talks about his latest series of children's books, Grubtown Tales, the joy of beards and how he can't keep out of his own stories
I seem to have this double layered story going
level 1 its a thesis; speak in the third person and occassionally slip into co-opting the audience with an arrogance that says we ...
Then in other spaces, I'm back to being me, I say I, I get listened to...and then i turn into a shrinking violet...

Doing better; creating conditions for engagement in higher ed

2010-09-29T13:45:00.004+13:00

Ive been reading some trite rubbish on the ranking of universities for their teaching and its not hard to come up with some more worthwhile gems:

Prof Mollie Neville, writing on value added schools, traced young people's descriptions of "it was like i didnt exist". She recognized what worked was strengthening relationships.
Its not a hard ask to call people by name :)
It's super easy when the medium is online.

Not talking with anyone at school is the sad experience of many young people at school. Prof John Hattie talks of the filmed experience of children at school who didn't talk with anyone all day. This happens at universities too. Assuming learning might involve bouncing ideas around then setting up opportunities for this to happen, fostering engagement in class and online becomes a teaching imperative.

There's a theme here. Knowledge doesnt happen in a vacuum, its made in connections. A focus on relationality provides possibilities for things to be otherwise. Active networking is an approach worth investing in for successful education.
Consciously nurturing the relationships seems a more useful approach than the audits i have seen scoping irrelevant conditions.

A convenient blindness; sessional contracts in higher ed

2010-09-26T10:24:00.003+13:00

http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/departments/Strategy%20and%20Human%20Resource%20Management/airaanz/proceedings/melbourne2008/nonref/papers/R.%20May,%20L.%20Gale,%20I.%20Campbell.pdf

May,R., Gale, M., and Campbell, I.(2008). Casually appointed, permanently exploited: How is NTEU responding to the casualisation of academia in the current climate? Paper presented at AIRAANZ. Melbourne.

Many in the university community take comfort in the idea that sessional academic employment is a privilege and an opportunity – a kind of apprenticeship that leads to tenure. It may once have been so. However the data and the qualitative experience of sessional staff demonstrates that this is not the case in Australia in 2007, and has not been the case for many years. The illusion of the sessional apprenticeship, like the illusion that young people prefer casual employment, contributes to a convenient blindness that allows extreme exploitation to continue. That exploitation is not accidental or self-imposed. It is the necessary outcome of
decisions taken by governments, university administrations and staff in supervisory positions throughout a devolved budgetary structure.

This is an excellent article, that needs wider discussion.

It is so easy to attribute blame, but there are a myriad of factors that have resulted in the current situation.
An ANT analysis, without using the language of ANT comes through.
Revisiting the relational aspects in improving the current scenario would also be useful. For things can always be otherwise.
If you work with sessional staff, start with valuing them :)
The stories pointed to here are of unpleasant experiences; offensive and devaluing, largely invisible, but always personal.

Issues identified:
Not being provided the necessary conditions of work.
Being seen as being part of the problem.
A misleading terminology of flexibility and choice-

Most people do not like being seen as a disposable section of the workforce. Citing a large survey of general and academic casual staff by Junor (2004:284) found that over 80 percent of the casual academic staff who responded wanted ongoing employment.

The article cites Evans (2007)

As one casual academic noted: ‘It used to be that tutoring was a kind of indenture, a poorly paid but pleasant part of post graduate study, valuable experience on the path to an academic career... (now it) leads to nothing’.

Taking a 'relational turn' (Kenneth Gergen, 2009) is worth further consideration;
to approach human beings exclusively as seperate or bounded units- whether individual selves, communities...-is to threaten our future well-being ... It is through relational process that whatever we come to view as independent beings are given birth. ...whatever we think, remember, create and feel, we participate in relationship ...We carry with us traces of myriad relationships, past and present, existing or imagined. These traces equip us with multiple and often conflicting potentials for action. (p,397)

It is in relating, rather than avoiding or in pointing elsewhere a finger of blame, that there is potential for movement.

meantime, leading nowhere sounds like a potential paper...
Must finish the phd...

A cunning plan, or a culling plan? Education on the edge of reason

2010-09-22T16:16:00.007+12:00

Just when you think it cant get any worse, it can.
Today i am seriously asked to consider outsourcing marking to the other side of the planet.
Seriously.
The latest 'cunning plan' is argued in terms of better consistency and saving us from re-training markers each year. And here's a paper for discussion at Mondays meeting:
Some papers are uploaded to Bangalore to be graded
alongside its serious brochure from VTA.
This surely is a solution in search of problems.
Where i work has made 110 people redundant over the last 4 years, presumably this was due to lack of work...or at least lack of work that might make use of these people's expertise... what I cant fathom is expertise from the other side of the planet is apparently better?
And its all sold with a cost-benefit ratio that's "completely in our favour".

A slippery slope?
mmmm just maybe
If they can do online PE classses, sneakers optional you can also do weight training online...

Hoping it was all a bad joke I responded to this latest innovative technological holy grail and ask:
Please tell me its got to be tongue in cheek
Maybe we outsource our work like we have students who outsource their work ...
Except buying someone to do your work when your a student is called cheating...
When its the institution its called efficiency.

The response back: Not being funny - we already out source the marking to Teaching Assistants, many of whom are not New Zealanders - so there is little difference.

Time for a joke?
What's worse than a full glass of digital hemlock?
A half a glass of digital hemlock
... ROFL ...

Love to know your views,
1. Should taxpayer money be spent on paying for tertiary students assignments to be regraded from the other side of the planet.
2. Should content be so homogenized that its not a problem for people in Bangladore or any other place, to mark it?

On the cutting edge, there's blood on the floor

2010-09-22T12:10:00.004+12:00

I love learning in a virtual world, its teaching in it i hate.

The control embedded by 'you cant do that...the rooms had to be booked a year in advance' has changed, yay!
But such vinegar is now in new bottles...
It has become you cant do that because it all has to be the same...every course....looks like this...put up notes a week in advance.... make the readings this size, this shape, from this book...make the ppts using this template...that way when its 'beamed out' the 'live head' wont obliterate what you want the students to know, see...and make sure that whatever you test the students on can be answered from the ppts...
And at its worst it is about surveillance; being watched, kept in check, controlling for sameness and creating mediocrity.
At best it might be about a lack of resourcing that presents a method as resource efficient. What's really dumb is its not resource efficient if the learning is only a regurgitation. And I dont want vomit!!! I dont like vomit. Not my own nor from students.

I want learning to be about freedom, and am a tad gobsmacked because it's what took me into teaching in virtual spaces in the first place; the escape from reality that was constraining.
Now i find the constraints have caught up and i now need to plot my escape from unreality.
Reminds me of snoopy...
jumped over the fence to escape the pound but still in the world *sigh*
Or the man dressed as Snoopy in worst jail break ever...

How to change?
'Cause Im certainly not resistant to changing this...
Am looking forward to hearing from Steve Wheeler next week, he's authored a provocative chapter titled Teacher resistance to new technologies: How barriers to Web Enhanced Learning can be overcome.
Heh? I dont like what's being done to me, I'm happy to work with technology and others so long as its about nurturing the freedom to learn. Its the current imposition that needs the two fingered salute.

And since I started my thesis for these very reasons, change and resistance therein in teaching and learning, I've been thinking a lot about shaping the digital spaces to be more responsive to human needs. (see Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour's)
As does my reading of Kenneth Gergen,in his book on relationality, where there is also a chapter on ANT.

It is through relational process that whatever we come to view as independent beings are given birth. ...whatever we think, remember, create and feel, we participate in relationship...
We carry with us traces of myriad relationships, past and present, existing or imagined. These traces equip us with multiple and often conflicting potentials for action. (p397)

I think the only way is to get relationality back in to the picture.
Whats held in place by relationships can also only change by relationships.
Back to rereading Machiavelli's the Prince, which btw is freely available courtesy of the Guttenberg Press and the wonders of technology, web 2.0 and people who want to help people...
Strategising how to win friends, fight the battles that matter, and make some change happen.

Having got that rant out of the way, i might now be able to get back to marking or maybe the thesis...
Refs
Gergen, K. J. (2009). Relational being: Beyond self and community. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Latour, B., & Sloterdijk, P. (2009, February 17). Networks and spheres: Two ways to reinterpret globalization. Presentation to the Graduate School of Design [Video webcast]: Harvard University. Retrieved from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov
Machiavelli, N., &. (1998). The Prince: Retrieved August 19, 2010, from Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232.txt (Original work published 1532).

Studying what isnt there; a PhD by another name

2010-09-17T11:34:00.009+12:00

PhD writing is very much about finding what's not there, and hoping it will stay empty while one studies it.

Studying the blank space is a really peculiar past time for entrance to the academy

Lewis Carrol or Stephen Fry could have written about the absurdity of it.
I recall seeing a poster in London by Stephen Fry saying something similar:

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

I have enjoyed an entertaining diversion watching Fry's interviews on everything from what is learning to what is web 2.0and he may not have written of the Phd (note the caution with which i say this) but at least it was 30 mins of life i would happily spend this way again.

My problem is, and i think most PhD students would agree, is having confidence to say, yes, the spot is blank. I've invested 6 years in it, and i know there's nothing there.
It's an absurdity really.
Nonetheless (and i do love this word- less than none is worthy of my study... )
there's always a worry that one just didnt look hard enough.

There are so many ways to waste time, if not a life, angst being one of them.
(Housework's another)
But at least looking for Stephen Fry quotes put smiles into this day. Bless him.
Now i really must get back to the writing, and like Fry:

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

(BTW this post was inspired by some very light musing on
1. what i wish i had known before i began the thesis, and
2. what i wish i knew when i finished the thesis.
Topics the thesiswhisperer will be working on.)

Folding time; transference and counter-transference

2010-09-15T23:52:00.006+12:00

Wicked wikipedia. And not in a good way.
Somewhere between August and September 2008, a new little take on transference and countertransference entered the world of wikipedia...and now its everywhere. The same little saying.
I confess I have not read all there is to read on transference or counter-transference.
I am not trained in a psychodynamic tradition.
So maybe I am just ignorant.
I have, however, done counselling in the voluntary sector for 30 years, worked as reg nurse in psychiatric hospitals (a time of deinstitutionalising in NZ) in the 1980s and done a fair bit of reading on counselling and communication skills.
Nevertheless, until i looked it up just now, i had never heard the terms of transference and counter-transference refered to in the way wikipedia and now countless other 'sources' do:

"During transference, people turn into a 'biological time machine.'" A nerve is struck when someone says or does something that reminds them of their past. This creates an "emotional time warp" that transfers their emotional past and their psychological needs into the present."

And now everywhere i look are the same repeated phrases.
Amazon.com doesnt list a book called the Source published in June 2001 that would have credibility in the field, so i am at a loss to know where it came from.

The 'stickiness' of the web, doesnt look likely to let it go, or spit out where it came from.
A curiousity that i wish i could source.

I quite like the imagery generated, very Latourian to have folds in time where disconnected things connect.

hopeful monsters

2010-09-08T13:05:00.005+12:00

Technologies are not born ‘usable’ and ‘reliable’ regardless of their users. (Gherardhi,2010, opening lines)
I love this, I get positioned as a user, yet am feeling used.
But more seriously, when my daughter was born, i was a well adjusted being, and i had a very rude awakening that my parenting said babe didnt make said babe pleasant to be around. She certainly didnt enter the world reliable. makes me think i/we should always know better when it comes to other things we parent.

However as someone who works with technologies, I do find it refreshing and disarming to be reminded that new practices do not come into the world, born, usable and reliable.
They need to be made so, and I need to be made more able to interact with them in their infancy.
As written of by Latour in Aramis, adaptation required not only by Aramis but all those involved; adapt or die.

Gherardhi (2010) has been summarising some of the research on technologies coming into practice:
Such practices become such when use institutionalizes them as one ‘practice’ among others working practices (Suchman et al., 1999).
The concept of technology-in-practice (Orlikowski, 2000) reflects the way with which its users have learned the interaction between humans and non-humans.
And involves the ‘invisible work’ (Star & Strauss, 1999) required of users so that a technology can become ‘usable’ in a given context of use.

The myriad of factors required to nurture into being the new entity of practice involves a network, or as the parable says, it takes a village (an unusual one that lists the social and technical as parents of such protege)

My colleagues recently gave a presentation on the bruising that occurred/occurs with the 'beaming out of lectures across 4 sites via teleconferencing that does or doesnt hook up. It reminded me very much of this videoclip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbJAJEtNUX0

Our conference calls arent quite so funny.

They talked of having their professional identities implicated in the errors. Identity over which they had little control. such identities are made they do not come ready made, and are not as intrinsic as might be presupposed.

In the intro by John law to A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination he starts with a quote:

I said 'I think they might also be called "hopeful monsters".'
She said' What are hopeful monsters?'
I said 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them.' Nicolas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters, p.71

It has always stayed with me, the birth of a hopeful monster, a little bit like an idea before its time, born into a space that isn't prepared for it. How to nurture it through to survival?
Reminds me of the birth of a child and what i was told on the birth of mine, that it would be 100 days of crying. In the romanticism with which parenting is glossed I hadn't expected the tears to be my own.
What are the components that make spaces more and less nurturing?
Such questions are touched on in Latour and Sloterdijk's presentation at Harvard Architecture Faculty, and are the questtions of my thesis.
How might care be communicated when a youth telephone helpline is increasingly being mediated through sms text messaging. Will such text counselling survive, will the other actors?

Like Gherardhi, my intention is to direct attention to practice in which the new practices encounter and conflict with practices already established, and where new activities necessitate negotiations with established power relations.

Refs
Gherardi, S. (2010). Telemedicine: A practice-based approach to technology. Human Relations, 63(4), 501-524. doi:10.1177/0018726709339096
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis: Or the love of technology (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., & Sloterdijk, P. (2009, 17 February). Networks and spheres: Two ways to reinterpret globalization Retrieved from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov
Law, J. (Ed.). (1991). A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination. London, England: Routledge.

listening and being heard

2010-09-05T06:44:00.006+12:00

"But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act." - Carol Gilligan

This post got started by a reading a tweet that got repeated. An interesting aspect of voice that it found resonance here :)
and will resonate elsewhere- in the thesis- but here's the roughish notes - there's a problem in writing a thesis when your mind is two chapters ahead of where you are currently writing...

But it took me on a search of google and back to Carol Gilligan's In a different voice, and I do love being able to read the pages provided by publishers.

In her writing she talked of not being heard when working in the 70's 1970s (on moral development with Kohlberg). A bit like an idea born before its time but also having different voice that just wasnt out there yet.
Now this 'resonated' with me because i had just been talking of moral development and of different voice relating a very poorly executed rendition of Gilligans critique with students last week. I had been looking at adolescence and had ditched the textbook (Berk) for its lack of respect for difference: "Delinquency peaks in adolescence" and opted instead for a New Zealand text, (see ref below)
given that many/most/almost all teenagers live lives with integrity, intelligence and good common sense. To quote Claiborne and drewery:

"Perhaps we might celebrate the competence of young people instead, as a ‘work in progress’ more in need of extension than colaapsing down to their being no cure but aging."Claiborne & Drewery (2010)

In Gilligan's writing was a fuller picture to 'seeing difference not as deviance but as a marker of the human condition'.

She says she moved away from relativism to relationship. i take this to mean a movement away from 'this is my position this is what i see, and from your position you will see it differently'; to relationship, 'this is my experience, my reality is different to your'. For myself, this suggests an ANT analysis; reals are made in relationship.

On being asked what is voice she says:

By voice I mean voice. Listen I will say, thinking that on one sense the answer is simple. it is simple. And then i will remember how it felt to speak when there was no resonance, how it felt when i began writing, how it still is for many people, how it still is for me sometimes. To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act. (p.xvi)

Hauntingly familiar is when those spoken about have no voice, are not heard.
(Tis always a good question; whose voice is being heard.)

Often repeated is that teens are tethered to their phones (Turkle) but it is not teens who are describing it this way.
And in my data collect on youth counselling there were counsellors saying that young people would manipulate them into conversing by text instead of by calling. 20% of all texts coming in were loud and clear, for example: 'if i wanted to call i effing would have', and 'cnt i jus txt coz i don wanna be heard'.
The 'voice' moved to a different medium, it wasnt that relating wasnt wanted. On moving into this medium with young people, relating is enacted.
It connects inner and outer worlds.
To not listen is to deny the choice to relate.

"To give up their voice is to give up on relationship and also to give up on all that goes with making a choice."(xvii)

To choose not to relate in the spaces young people were/are choosing for counselling would be offensive twice over, first for not listening and secondly for disempowering choice.

Carol Gilligan further expands on what it means to have voice:

When people ask me what I mean by voice and I think of the question more reflexively, I say that by voice I mean something like what people mean when they speak of the core of the self.

It is the relational that is mediated by speech, it can also be mediated in print form; while voice in the digitally texted space of SMS messaging being used for txt counselling, is not part of a seen and heard experience of breath and sound in a rhythm of speech, this does not alter that breathing and being heard continues, that an intensely relational act is occurring.
And the costs of detachment are too great to think otherwise.

Reference
Claiborne, L. and Drewery, W. (2010) Human development; Family, place, culture. Auckland: NZ. McGraw-Hill.
Gilligan, C. (1993). Letters to readers In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

How to execute a dream

2010-09-03T20:51:00.009+12:00

In Every bastard says no. The 42 below story is a 'rollicking good story of how to go from woe to go...The NZ vodka story- from $5.00 a litre of product made on a still in a garage to a company sold for 138 million.
The product was named for the latitude at which the company developed down under.

In Pandora’s Hope (Latour, 1999) Latour’s question was:
‘how do we pack the world into words?’ (p.24) And

This is one read that does this exceptionally well.
There is a chronology, but it doesnt restrict the construction of the book which is interspersed, sliced, with vignettes and with visual imagery of the advertising that aided the seduction of a market, as well as its betrayal of competitors.
For example the required public retraction of a defamatory comment on competitors product which is portrayed below.

The title of the book points to the reasons given by the actors who invented the company for its success: "Every bastard says no."
In the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" ethos, this company had directors who decided to prove the naysayers wrong. The bastards who said no drew a resistance to failure, a dogged determindness that might not have occurred otherwise.
The treatment of product, branding and company as their baby reminds me that the product itself is an actor here, given some voice...and more wouldnt have been a problem to me.

Latour (1996b) acknowledges that ANT ‘is an extremely bad tool for differentiating associations. It gives a black and white picture not a colored and contrasted one’ (p. 380).
The quality of the associations is something that requires thick descriptions, this book provides it.
For Jan Nespor, the questions shift from what the assemblages are, to also inquire as to the nature of the interactions- The question is "how and why ‘commingling’ happens, for example, how important to a given outcome is the sequencing of assembly, the pacing of composition, the speciﬁc mix of the elements associated, whether a given element is essential to the mix or open to substitution, and whether the associations are reversible or easily changed. Do associations and delegations come slowly and incrementally, allowing different kinds of uses at different stages as a device takes form (or as different versions of a device are produced), or do commitments come together all at once (the organization bets on a particular product)? Are commitments large at the outset or do they gradually build? How does one translation relate to a preceding sequence of translations (e.g., Latour, 1996a, p. 91; Law & Callon, 1992, p. 52)?"

Stephen Fox also questions the quality of the connections, when he enquires as to what force there may be in them.
"Where is power in Ant? it is in in the acts tions in the network including the actions of inanimate objects such as newspapers, metal...And that non human entities also 'act': eg radiation on atomic structures. Force is tangible. Force is relational- it implies active and resistive entities. Even the self can be acted upon and resisted. If we think about force relations at every point in a network we begin to think about learning in different ways.

Power needs to be explored and demonstrated in the thick descriptions.

The similarities with the changes i have been studying include a dogged determinedness, fickle funding, a transience that makes some things easier and others harder.
Retrospectively it is easy to see the strength of the assemblages; at the time it is a more tenuous reality made solid in enactments.

References

Fox, S. (2000). Communities of practice, Foucault and actor-network theory [September 05]. Journal of Management Studies, 37(6), 853-867.

Latour, B. (1999). Pandora's hope. Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nespor, J. (2010). Devices and educational change. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00611.x/full doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00611.x

Troy, J. and Ross, G. (2010). Every bastard says no. The 42 Below story. Auckland, New Zealand: Random House.

(click on the picture for a bigger image, then hit your enlarge view...or at least read this:
In our ad we had said absolut vodka was judged "the least favourite". The Board (advertising complaints) told us this was a fib....What was actually said was..."no one had kind words to say about absolut..."
They were so apologetic they published this retraction at huge expense...saying they should not have said absolut was least favourite and correcting this to say had no kind words a further three times.
Right-oh
Deeply sorry, very, very
Machiavellian :)

Juxtapositioning technology with heart

2010-09-02T09:50:00.011+12:00

Summarising Latour (1996), maintaining something requires active work on the relationships that hold it so, while at the same time a turning down of other possibilities.
Similarly for a change in the order of things, this requires betrayal of those previously held relationships to be seduced into new ones. (Or at least for the making space for newer ones)

Today I have been reading Latour's wriitng on Macchiavelli's The Prince, while concurrently listening to a TEDtalk by His holiness the Karmapa: The technology of the heart.
(This truly is the oddest juxtopositioning i have ever engaged in)

He talks of the bombing of the Bamyan Buddhas with a startling re-frame: the bombings have drawn people together.
In tearing down, there is a building up, one he equates with pulling down of the Berlin wall.
An act of destruction draws others together. With differences of tradition and tragedy, the depletion of matter, some solid substance disintegrating, a divide that keeps two kinds of people apart had collapsed and opened a door for further communication.

And advice from his holiness:
In climbing trees we risk damaging the tree's roots
We need knowledge of what is going on under the tree.
Whatever work you are doing now to try to benefit the world, sink into that.
We often miss the subtle changes, we develop grand concepts of happiness, but if we pay attention there are little symbols of happiness in every breath we take.
Take a moment to appreciate fortunes of coming together, and an aspiration then to take the good and the positivity that comes with that and to spread this to all the corners of the world.

From Latour
“the burning desire to have new entities detected, welcomed and given shelter is not only legitimate, it’s probably the only scientific and political cause worth living for” (Latour, 2005: 259).

And if i take the technical as Urula Franklin does,(the way we do things round here) as process rather than object. Then the technology of the heart espoused by his holiness makes some sense.
It is about the way we do things round here, with moral purpose, and with the knowledge of the myriad of things that make being, an understanding of and a respect for not damaging these.
Making some meaning that is engaging of hope.
Or as Peter Sloterdijk suggests designing spaces for being that are nurturing.

Relevant readings and references
Franklin, U. (1999). The real world of technology. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press.
Latour, B. (1988). How to write 'The Prince' for machines as well as for machinations
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis: Or the love of technology. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford, England, Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. and P. Sloterdijk (2009, 17 February). "Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization " Harvard University. Retrieved March 3, 2009. from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov.
Machiavelli, N. (1998). The Prince, Retrieved August 19, 2010, from Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232.txt (Original work published 1532).

21st Century enlightenment

2010-08-24T00:04:00.003+12:00

Excellent video by Matthew Taylor of RSA Animate, follows on the thoughts i am aggragating in my networking of the literature for my thesis:

Turkle (2003) suggests “the challenge is to deeply understand the personal effects of the technology in order to better make it suit our human purposes” (p. 44). A challenge not dissimilar to that previously pointed to with regard to designing spaces suited to the humanity required by Latour & Sloterdijk, (2009).
Latour and Sloterdijk (2009) argue for designers to be mindful of their role in humanizing both public and private spaces, for such spaces create the conditions for being. For Sloterdijk the role of the designer is to create such desirable spaces as make human life possible, to consider aspects that make intimacy more and less likely. To create supportive, environments that cultivate humanity and cooperation “an architect has to know more than a simple hut maker.” To recapture the healing spaces of the past, places that provide immunity spaces, understanding the conditions of being become a crucial area of investigation.

Latour and Sloterdijk (2009) both approach ‘being’ as something made, rather than something inherent. And as stated by Latour,
There’s not the slightest chance to understand being when it has been cut off from the vast numbers of apparently “trifle” and “superficial” “little beings” that make it exist from moment to moment.
In saying this, Latour introduces what he names a ‘radical theory of the social’ where ‘being’, whether of people, things, or practice, is created within continuously moving networks. Two important aspects develop from this account; one is the continuously emergent nature of things, that nothing is ever fixed whether it be practice or the identities of those involved, that these emerge as a result of contingent relationships. The other aspect is that this is an existentialist account of being, and one oft repeated by Latour: “existence precedes essence”. In the context of this research, this would mean that more or less therapeutic interactions are not held in the tenets of counselling, or in policy guides, but created moment by moment, practiced into being.

In looking at the use of emergent technologies in a youth counselling centre, this thesis directs a mindfulness to the less visible spaces of CCTs, and particularly to the non-verbal spaces of the Internet and the digital spaces accessed by mobile phones. When CCTs are used not only to exchange ideas, not only to exchange pages of knowledge or data, but also for emotional support, understanding the facets that make 'being' possible becomes vitally important. How might such spaces be humanized and actively created for conditions of being? Rather than addressing this question in the abstract, this thesis explores the shaping involved with such spaces when newer forms of CCT’s are used within a youth counselling centre. And it explores such new constructions of practice as they occur rather than after the effect.

Latour and Sloterdijk (2009) argue for designers to be mindful of their role in humanizing both public and private spaces, for such spaces create the conditions for being. For Sloterdijk the role of the designer is to create such desirable spaces as make human life possible, to consider aspects that make intimacy more and less likely. To create supportive, environments that cultivate humanity and cooperation “an architect has to know more than a simple hut maker.” To recapture the healing spaces of the past, places that provide immunity spaces, understanding the conditions of being become a crucial area of investigation.

Matthew Taylor talks a little fast, i can see myself watching this repeatedly as there is so much crammed in. What is needed he suggests is empathy- but how to put this into our 21st century world in the digital spaces many of us relate within remains a challenge.
I would suggest that there is a need to look beyond the social to make headway on this. The many little things that make up being need further study...and hence my thesis...

lived experience of an actor-network in a Phd thesis

2010-08-22T22:59:00.006+12:00

Networking a thesis begins to get tiresome when the same recalcitrant keeps wandering off and doing her own thing; endnote really is a pain in the behind.
I do not need this lesson in gathering; working the same damn thing just to keep it at the same point let alone moving forward.
I already know that keeping things the same takes work.
(Ok so it was just a weak moment where i almost wrote that an absence of change maintains a status quo. But please, I deleted that already.)
This week, the laptop battery got to a stage where it wouldnt hold a charge for 20 minutes.
The disc drive wouldnt copy to discs. At least flashdrives are now big enough to cope with the endnote library.
Im having to work on a somewhat lesser life form, having been temporarily downgraded, I am already sufficiently appreciative of the fact that the technology and social are enmeshed.
However endnote is driving me batty.
She doesnt format when i have her programmed to do this. She doesnt do this when i manually ask her to either.
Eventually after a lot of fluffing around, creating a new doc, turning off track changes, unformatting all previous citations, ensuring i dont have any boxes ticked on whatever else the Norton endnote website suggested, she would do them one by one....and then i could move each pretty little citation back to my original document...or so i thought, but no, they dont get added to the reference list.
Damn sulky programme.
I am beginning to suspect either the document is too big for endnote or that endnote is too small/frail to cope with the amount of notes, attachments and references she is holding. Ok so this is no little librarian holding 759 refs and somewhere in the order of at least 400 attachments, plus notes from here to there on almost every one of them, and doing this 24 hours a day for 6 years...what is her problem?
OK i concede perhaps its a hard ask.
How much gravel rashing can i expect to do before she decides to play nicely with me again?
Its really difficult to seduce her back in when i am actually really pissed off.

OK, seems i need to stop working with a large document. Even though this stopped me getting repetitive, and handled the cross overs between contextualising the problem, networking the literature and discussing the sensibilities of actor network theory as well as discussing the praxis of research methodology. The technology is adamant that it can no longer cope.
I will, split the chapters into separate documents...just like it suggests in the endnote help for creating a bibliography from multiple docs...and re-enter all the refs it doesn't remember were entered... a guestimate of a few days...

For some black humour have a look at this for a Dear John/thesis breakup letter
http://tinyurl.com/2ung3am

I am not ready to part from the thesis, but endnote could well decide on a parting of the ways.

a (PhD) thesis is like chocolate

2010-08-18T16:40:00.004+12:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hozinja/4864042453/ cc

Both make you fat
Can be bitter sweet
Some look better on the outside and have centres that dissapoint
Can be a self indulgent activity
Both give highs and lows
Both can result in guilt
Over indulgence in either is sickening
Some are better quality than others

Thanks to Nick for reminiscing on winter schools long past
Please feel free to add to the list

Opening the black box that is text counselling

2010-08-11T21:53:00.007+12:00

The 3 minute thesis has parallels to text counselling; i want to say more- I have to miss lots out, the constraints are huge, it makes me come to the point, it stops me going round in circles. And did you notice the staccato rhythm that evolved?
Ironically this matches what occurs in text counselling.
The medium we use shapes us.

3minutethesis

View more presentations from ailsa.

The phones hardly ring anymore at YL; youth still have problems, and still seek help, but this happens silently.
So what happens when counselling moves into text spaces of mobile phones?
How are such spaces both shaped and shaping those involved?
This introduces a political agenda, seeing the things that make something happen provides opening for seeing that things could also be otherwise.
I Traced what’s involved that makes texting the first thing young people reach for when they reach out.
There’s seductive advertising. Bestmates are shown as unconditionally accessible and willing to be available, suggesting lonliness can be bypassed.
NZ is also in a pricing war making for cheap texts. But cheapness is only one factor; when it’s free to call YL, texting is still preferred.
So I looked at reasons young people and the environment that online spaces provide for them.
Texting provides Control: on talking about her dad who had died, one said: talking makes it too real, with texting I can take it slow.
I don't hear my own voice breaking
Another described how texting stopped her going round and round re-traumatising herself . The visual trace reminded her of ground already covered.
Texting provides Voice For example: txtn is ok because i cn keep goin evn if im crying.
Texting provides connection
If you've run away at night or
ur hiding under the house from your dad whose going to give u a beating, texting works.
‘its in ur pocket, its where u r’

Anywhere anytime also allows for keeping strategies and evidence of being connected in the world. I was shown a pocket full of Affirmations, texts not deleted even 6 months later, she said they felt good.
What’s important for counsellors is to see texting as a conversation and not an expectation to mend everything in one utterance
However, Receiving 18000 txts a month provides challenge in sustaining the threads of the conversation
Counselling is Reshaped some skills work in the medium, some don't.
Caution is heightened in a medium where digital traces feel ephemeral but are more solid than conversation or phone call.
Textual traces provide advantages as well as risks.
Privacy remains an area of ongoing tension.
Fewer cues requires caution.

Opening up text counselling allows us to see how practices are shaped, and might be shaped otherwise.
Currently There is no evidence base for text counselling, there never is for something new. This thesis is seen as providing insights into the practice of text-based counselling.
My hope and intention is that practice is shaped in listening primarily to the voices of young people.

Value of the 3 minute thesis is that it forces consideration for the 'so what' question. At the same time i found myself forced into overwriting what participants had said, so as to fit this medium. An actor network approach lets me explain so much more in taking littler steps but covering the distance. in contrast, this covers the distance but at a height where there is a loss of so much detail.
Where this has really been significant is in making me aware of the responsibility i have in writing of practice-
i hope i do it justice.

Counselling by text

2010-08-07T09:08:00.005+12:00

The NZ Herald reports on the findings of the Health and Disability Comissioner where text messaging for counselling is dangerous:

"A young man committed suicide after his counsellor told him by text message not to take his medication, provided he was undergoing regular counselling.

Acting Health and Disability Commissioner Rae Lamb, in a finding issued today, said the case highlighted the importance of consulting other health professionals working with a person, the dangers of providing advice by text message, and the risks associated with "no suicide" contracts."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10663542

While not wanting to take away at all from the fact that suicide is tragic, always, what I am going to do is an intellectual argument here on text not being.
The counsellor involved was unethical. There was a lack of assessment and a lack of professional boundaries. One might have said counselling is dangerous, or that this specific counsellor in this particular situation was dangerous.

To pit texting within a context where it can be considered seriously, it needs to be noted that it is an extremely common practice now. It is not just for the young and it is not just for trivial interactions. It is a serious application. SMS text messaging is the commonest use of mobile phones, is used by 53% of people world-wide, and is now the most widely used data application on the planet.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/03/faster-than-a-locomotive-leap-over-giant-buildings-yes-sms-text-messaging-twice-the-users-of-email-t.html
At some stage it would be used for giving wrong advice.

All conversations have the potential for error ...all mediums through which messages can be conveyed whether face to face, phone, letter, or SMS, have given wrong advice at some time with tragic consequence.

Text/SMS messaging has its own foibles, and rather than demonizing it, there is need to attend to the particular factors and foibles with regard to it's use for counselling (and hence my PhD in this field).

1. Messages are brief. 160 characters per message, and a cost per message encourages brevity. With brevity there is less information on which to base any advice. This brevity need not restrict an ongoing conversation. As with a verbal conversation, an utterance may be short, the conversation may be longer.
2. Beyong brevity, the medium also shares less information. There are fewer paralinguistic and non-verbal cues, and the ones that are there are ambiguous. Slowness to respond may say as much about the state of the telephone network service provider as the person sending a message.
3. The medium may be chosen because of 2. While I have something difficult to say, I may be able to construct my response more deliberately , more carefully, because the medium provides me time to compose myself and my message.
4. The apparent anonymity along with 1,2 and 3, has a disinhibiting effect. Things can be said in a forthright tone that would not occur face to face without checking for more obvious cues.
5. Identity flexibility (Suler, 2005) is associated with 4, 3 and 2. I can elect how I present myself by text. Male, female, young, old, gay, straight, happy, sad, attentive, distracted.
6. Absent presence (Gergin, 2002)
6. In entering into text, attention is shifted, reality moves. One is no longer attentive to the present but engages with an invisible other. At the same time, in the virtual space of talking with someone silently, in conjunction with 1,2,3 and 4 this inokes imagination as to what is going on, it involves projections; the world engaged by text becomes surreal- it is what i perceive it to be. It creates a space in which I am not fully here, or there, but somewhere else instead. I'm not sure that this isnt always a condition of counselling regardless of the medium. I have compassion invoked- I try to appreciate the world view of the other...however with text I have so much less to go on, projections (or assumptions) in the absence of cues increase.
7. Flexibility of anytime. I don't have to wait for the person to be ready to respond with messaging, they can get back to me when they are able, and i can leave the message when i think of it.
8. Flexibility of anywhere. Its where you are, its in your pocket. It doesnt matter where they, or I, are currently situated.
9. Digital traces allow for messages to be kept, this allows for a pocket full of evidence that one is connected in the world, strategies and affirmations can be as close as one's pocket.
10. Associated with 8 is that messages that are unpleasant are also as close as one's pocket, and associated with 7, they can also be intrusive. Strategies to manage these can be taught.
11. Privacy in spite of the sense of intimacy is questionable. In hitting send, errors can be made. As with 9. there is risk of others accessing ones phone and its messages. Messages can be intercepted. Message are visible to network service providers, or police (with warrant).
12. Its affordable. Financial costs can be kept small. Whether charged by the text, 20 cent per message by major providers in NZ today, or on a preplay plan allowing unlimited or very generous texting such as 2000 texts for ten dollars, texting is a cheaper option than being charged over a dollar a minute for a call. In addition texting does not have the transport or opportunity lost costs that might occur with an appointment.
13. The microskills of counselling such as empathy, active listening, sensitive confrontation, translate into the new medium (Haxell, 2008). An empowerment approach of being strength's based can also be identified within text counselling as performed (at least at Youthline NZ)

refs
Gergen, K. J. (2002). The challenge of absent presence. In J. E. Katz & M. A. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual contact, mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 227-241). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Haxell, A. (2008). Cn I jus txt, coz I don wan 2b heard: Mobile technologies and youth counseling. Paper presented at the Ascilite; Hello! Where are you in the landscape of educational technology? Retrieved January 23, 2010, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/haxell.pdf.
Haxell, A. (2010). Empowerment in tight spaces: Youth counselling in a text-messaging medium. Paper presented at the E-Youth Multidisciplinary Conference Balancing between opportunity and risk.
Suler, J. R. (2005). The Psychology of Cyberspace Revised edition version 2.2. from http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/basicfeat.html

Creating heart; the conditions of being in 'online spaces'

2010-08-06T20:21:00.004+12:00

Latour and Sloterdikt(2009)in a presentation to architecture students at Harvard point to the need to design creating conditions of being, healing spaces perhaps of the past in the sense of spaces that might nurture. This led me into a consideration of how online spaces might also be so created.

This particular blog evolved out of a discussion where Sarah came home surprized that her education had left out that NZ had had wars on its land. The learning moment evolved with the story of Parihaka, an introduction to the music clip of Tim Finn and Herbs and the paintings of Colin MacCahon and the Dick Scott's book, Ask that mountain, the story of Parihaka.

Where this links with the PhD is my own serendipitous connecting, and which is in regard to a distinctive NZ historical take on the use of technology.

While incarcerated Te Whiti and Tohu were shown the wonders of European technology. At the Kaiapoi Woollen Mills Te Whiti is cited as being perhaps the first person in the country to speak on a telephone. (Or at least the first to have a conversation reported upon).
 
When asked what he thought of the European technology Te Whiti replied that -

"indeed the Pākehā did have some useful technology but not the kindness of heart to see that Māori also possessed much great technology which if Pākehā were prepared to adopt would lead to stability and peace and the building of a great new society".

Te Whiti was incarcerated in the Sth Island because of his leading a passive resitence movement against the Government of New Zealand.
Recognising the destructive effects of war, Te Whiti and Tohu declared they would use spiritual powers rather than weapons to claim their right to live on land their iwi had occupied for centuries. The population of the village was the largest Maori settlement of the times and European visitors are cited as being impressed with its cleanliness and industry, its extensive cultivations producing cash crops and food sufficient to feed its inhabitants.
When an influx of European settlers in Taranaki, demand for fertile farmland outstripped availability. The Grey Government stepped up efforts to secure title to land it had confiscated but subsequently abandoned. Māori near Parihaka and the Waimate Plains rejected their payments, however, and the Government responded by force.

Obviously Pakeha had a lot to learn.
For my Phd studies, it is about how kindness of heart might be integrated in new spaces.

Refs
Latour, B., & Sloterdijk, P. (2009, 17 February). Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization Harvard University. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from http://webcasts.gsd.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov

Getting from 'raw' to 'cooked'

2010-08-02T01:58:00.004+12:00

Working with ANT sensibilities, cooking with the data seems more and more akin to cooking the books than having a recipe to follow.
I am tolerant of the ambiguity involved, I just need to explain it well.
Seems to involve an ethical regard for the data and for oneself- as Simone de Beauvoir said- being ethical isnt about applying a recipe, but is about being thoughtful
There is need to be reflexive in the process. This was a timely find after my last skype chat with my peers and supervisor on methodology.
I read a little Spinuzzi today- and then tracked down the article by Peter Smagorinsky on method being poorly written of.
Smagorinsky, P. (2008). "The method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports." Written Communication 25(3), 389-411.
I think Peter Smagorinsky places a reasonable demand on the writer to explain themselves, not for reasons of replicability but for understanding of where conclusions come from- explicate.

The round up the usual subjects and put them in a blender just isn't going to be enough. Here's what he says:
First, select all ingredients that could conceivably go in the dish. Review them carefully, then pick the ones you want to use and put the rest back in the pantry, perhaps saving them for another meal that you will prepare later. Then reconsider the ingredients you’ve selected and decide which are most important. Do this again just to make sure. Then mix the important ones together and give it a taste, adding other ingredients as necessary. Put them in cookware, heat, and serve.

OK- as he says,have we got cake, fondue or Thai?
I muse that even dog food could be an option with this level of description.
As an editor he rejects such articles saying:

I have the same feeling all too often when reviewing manuscripts for journals: I have only the vaguest sense of what the author is doing with the data in order to render it into results. If I don’t know pretty clearly how the researcher is conducting the study, then it doesn’t matter much to me what the results are because I have no idea of how they were produced.To me, that’s reason enough to recommend that the article not be published.

Fair enough.
Its not that he wants replicability, he provides the reasons why this will not be likely, but he does want to know what he's eating. Nice.

A bit of a book review; some open musings

2010-07-31T21:06:00.003+12:00

I have had enough of networking the theoretical space (lit review). For a breather I am reading a book whose title was hard to resist as a PhD student, its little...and proud of it's littleness, David Silverman's (2007) "A very short, fairly interesting, and reasonably cheap book about qualitative research"
With a title like that it might not get to the reference list in the thesis... the shortest cheapest resource i found was actually a damn good read on provocations for rethinking method.

I am however feeling good about the provocations Silverman puts forward:
That on interview, a conversational approach provides a way forward, that asking the same thing of everyone may not give answers to the same questions and may not give the answers that will advance the research.
That the conversation far from recalling a reality, makes its own reality - people discover meaning after it is spoken.
Feels a bit late now to see a chapter on what questions a researcher might usefully ask...but I am relieved, my giving up on questions and entering into converstaions instead is something Silverman suggests. Citing Garfinkle (1967) Silverman suggests Asking questions generates the answers the person thinks are wanted, retrospectively rewriting history
What is the relationship between this and that might be better quantitatively addressed, the question posed being a provocation to impose order on what might be or have been disordered. SO my questions reshaping could be seen as a natural progression away from this, instead a more invitational way of asking in doing this, whats going on.

People invoke multiple identities in what they do, in everyday life: As in my ch 1. where my own creation story occurs bringing me into my research on change, and also within interviews (see interview on p. in my data analysis, where i discover categories are an artificial imposition.

Congruent with methodology shared by Latour and the ANT researchers, Silverman clearly states [the]tendency to identify research design with interviews has blinkered them to the possibile gains of other kinds of data. For it is thoroughly mistaken to assume that the sole topic for qualitative reserch is 'people'.

I am intrigued by his provocation that data analysis needs to take longer than the lit review or the data collect...I dont think my life, or the life of my thesis could manage that...
But I am really interested in what ch 3 will contain as to the how of this given he says what to avoid...appealing examples, or the seeking out and analysis of sequences.

Silverman talks of there being no need to construct closed narratives, and i like this humility and not because it lets me off "getting it right". My philosophical position is that reality is multiple, so getting it 'right' is an oxymoron. There are multiple ways the data might be interpreted. Citing photographers, I try to create a mixture of straight information and riddles...and so we are invited to construct narratives...Chelbin, on portrayal of visual imagery, says " if they find it strange, it is only because the world is a strange place. I just try to show that"

There are multiple reasons and ways of describing any given event. Inviting the reader to make their own narrative out of what is portrayed is one way forward.
I am not sure that the thesis marker is ready for this :)

Silverman, like Latour, directs the ethnography gaze to the small, the seemingly trivial, to the mundane...what does it take for things to happen...and I might suggest that agency is thereby distributed. It takes many things to make things take a particular shape. There is no policy, no technical thing that has its own trajectory, nor person that can structure the world to suit. The 'devil' is in the detail.

We have a tendency to attend to the exotic, to the catastrophic, to the moment when the system breaks down, but it is the everyday that makes things tick. It is this that draws attention retrospectively to what was needed.

Silverman frequently refers to Sacks "people should not be seen as coming to terms with a phenomenon , but actively constructing it" (I trust Silverman equally applies htis to the work of thesis students).
It is not that there are facts to uncover, but locally assembled phenomena.

And like Sacks citing Goffman's study in observing Police in the Shetlands developing a sense of pattern recognition, who is or isnt behaving 'normally' how do the people in my study develop this sense of recognising any such normalcy from that which is not...
I feel invited in this book to not collapse the tensions, to consider what I make of the data as but one consideration, and participants also have own considerations, and such understandings will also shift with time.

On presenting photographs, Silverman write "Immediately a number of puzzles come to the surface..."
And i am reminded of the theis whisperer's advice today...read those who write, circle their verbs, see what it is they do.
To paraphrase Siverman and Sacks, Im feeling admonished not to let the data go cold. I present it, I make some meanings, but they will not be the only ones.
Imposing closure seems to be one of the many errors i might make.

Unfortunately, thats the freebie extent of the book online, Im going to have to get it from my colleague to find out about the data analysis. I suspect at this point Latour and Silverman would come to disagreement, for Silverman suggests that letting the people speak for themselves is not the way to go, a romantic error apparently.

An off the wall approach to thesis construction

2010-07-29T14:32:00.004+12:00

The sticki notes let me see where Im going/ going wrong.
Helped me find gaps of where this didnt lead to that, so its useful.
All I did was put up the chapter headings and the subtitles on the wall and then notice that some of the things I needed for the data analysis i had missed including in the lit review section. The ideas seemingly sprang into usefulness of their own accord.
Joys of iterative thesis writing- go back put it in and rework the darned area so it doesnt warp the overall fabric of the thesis.

While i am writing this a curling flutter leafs postit notes to the floor ...
... they served their purpose.

animoto as a teaching resource

2010-05-10T15:03:00.002+12:00

Am wanting students to do some digital narrative, so this is testing whats possible with the free access animoto software

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Does texting make teens less social?

2010-05-04T17:50:00.007+12:00

Does someone really have to ask?

If i write letters am i less social?
If i send email am i less social
If i talk to voice messaging machines
If i use atms instead of a bank teller...
If i drive a car instead of a rickshaw...
If children play with dolls...

Pew internet asked the question, particularly in response to such media reports as this one.

Similar to the fears of writing illiteracy, texting is associated with social illiteracy...yet it is a means of connecting, just differently.
What about seeing it as strengthening the weak ties, the tenuous strands, the myriad of small things that pave social conviviality?

Provocative education

2010-05-02T09:44:00.006+12:00

Having listened to a telling tail on slideshare, I'm provoked.
The potential for opening up learning is to exploit the longtail effect.

Recently I gave a talk to my colleagues on my phd, and its associated behaviour of blogging my way through one, it crossed my mind, again, that readership through journals is important, but limited. I am convinced that even my small blog at 14395 hits since i started it, is a damn sight more hits than any of my very few academic publications.
When (most) people search for information, google is their friend. The access limitations thrown up by publishing companies is not. The outcome is that knowledge that is freely disseminated gets cited more (formally as well as informally), and knowledge that has barriers to it is less likely to be.

In a health promotion understanding, it would be termed making the healthy choice the easy choice. This involves the 4 A's: being available,accessible,affordable and acceptable.

At present we seem entrenched in making it acceptable as assessed by peer review, but if it is not available we might as well have been *pissing in the wind*, to use the crude vernacular.
Its got to be available and that means making it accessible for free.

What an ANT analysis might say of this: it is less about what is 'true' in any understandings of that word, than about how connections to particular knowledge is made easier or harder.
Situating knowledge matters: where you put your hard penned words as an academic matters. Feel free to be peer reviewed and also make it freely available.
Getting it sighted is how a world of difference gets made.
To be cited, you need to be accessible.
Sited, sighted, and cited.

Some ways to increase accessibility:
blogging, tweeting, use http://www.academia.edu/
and consider using slideshare- just a thought, writing a report on the funding that one obtains from one's institution to get to a conference, gets read by how many? What if instead the slides and a podcast are shared instead...

This provocation to my thinking was in response to an excellent slideshow on academic outputs as collateral damage by Martin Weller, Professor of education at the open Uni in the UK.
Some great visual metaphors in this slideshare, to watch out for:
Painting the dinosaur
And embracing unpredictability

Thanks to Heather for the tweet, twent mins of a sunday morning well spent.

Infinite regression; its turtles all the way down

2010-04-26T20:41:00.008+12:00

I'm feeling a little lacking in science today having presented a very descriptive account of an actor network as my PhD study in a work based seminar today. Nonetheless as Latour has it: If those textual accounts in notebooks don't look scientific enough, then what heavier equipment would do? They are all the science needed for grasping a recalcitrant object through some artificial device of representation.

"What is so wrong with mere descriptions? A good text is never an unmediated portrait of what it describes-nor for that matter is a portrait....
No scholar should find humiliating the task of sticking to description. This is on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement." (p. 136)

I had found myself wanting to provide explanations for text message counselling being a preferred practice. Explanations that the audience might credit as having depth and meaning; fiscal forces from economics, ego protection from psychology, even a little bit of conspiracy theory in why I dont have an answer to questions asked twice...
Some nice grounding then from Czarniawska(2003). She calls it plainly, "behind the fiction there is always another fiction, it's turtles all the way down".
Representation is always representation.
And some Latour realism; "Much like safe sex, sticking to description protects against the transmission of explanations."

The lurch in my research question, from a process one (what is happening here) to an evaluative one (is the change good) suggests the work net has enrolled me in stabilizing the change i have been observing...or that i have enrolled the net...an infinite regression. And I really do not know which is true...and it may not matter.

Some more Latour to make my day feel better: A good text should trigger in a reader (or audience) this reaction" 'Please more details, I want more details.' God is in the details, and so is everything else- including the devil."
Today felt like this, questions a plenty, and answers that expanded rather than collapsed down. And knowledge too that it might always be otherwise.

And a snippet from Gell-Mann (discoverer of the Quark, a subatomic particle);
Chapter one draws me in:

I have never really seen a jaguar in the wild...
For most of my career as a theoretical physicist, my research has dealt with elementary particles, the basic building blocks of all matter in the universe. Unlike the experimental particle physicist, I dont have to stay close to a giant accelerator...in order to conduct my work....at most all I require is a pencil, some paper, a wastepaper basket. Often even those are not essential. Give me a good nights sleep, freedom from distractions, and time unburdened by worries and obligations, and I can work. Whether I'm standing in the shower, hovering between wakefulness and sleep on a late night flight, or walking on a wilderness trail, my work can accompany me wherever i go.

Refs
Czarniawska, B. (2003). Management she wrote: organization studies and detective stories. In S. Linstead (Ed.), Text/work: Representing organization and organizing representation (pp. 15-40). London: Routledge.
Gell-Man, M. (1994). The quark and the jaguar. Adventures in the simple and the complex. New York; Henry Holt and Company.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p135)

tweeting is such sweet sorrow

2010-04-25T14:31:00.002+12:00

http://suchtweetsorrow.com/
Romeo and Juliet retold in real time on twitter.
Just goes to show what emotive content can be invoked in 160 characters:
I'm <3ing it

@julietcap16
"Leave your window open tonight because tomorrow I'm going to wake you up with a kiss. =) See you tomorrow xx "

@Romeo
":) Ill see you in my dreams! And when i feel your kiss I'll know im no longer dreaming! SO much love! See you on the morrow :) xxx"

Its a five week performance, of “tweets” - Twitter updates which may be thoughts, messages, links or confessions - of Romeo, Juliet and four other characters .

Provided by a Twitter-stream of six actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The actors write their actual tweets themselves, using the rich backgrounds the writers have given them, along with a detailed diary that tells them where their characters are at any one moment of the adventure- what they are feeling, who they are with, who they want to talk to.

This may be as ordinary as telling us what they had for breakfast or as remarkable as announcing a deep, deep love.

And it all takes place as it would in real life.

To catch up, look at the Live Timeline and The Story So Far on this Such Tweet Sorrow site - also look out for events in the storyline that you can join in...

texting doubles soul quotient

2010-04-24T10:42:00.005+12:00

“Learn a new language and get a new soul” (Czech proverb)
By some estimates, half the world’s population is bilingual and many others are multilingual (Grosjean, 1982). With regard to this group, it has often been noted, sometimes by bilinguals themselves, that bilinguals express different personalities when they speak in different languages.

So begins the following article:
Nairán Ramírez-Esparzaa, Samuel D. Goslinga, Verónica Benet-Martínezb, JeVrey P. Potterc, James W. Pennebaker. (2005). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching.

And i asked Sarah about it because she recently returned from Japan. She agrees, I asked in what ways, and she said she's nicer in Japanese...
Shucks, I always suspected we got a changeling some time between having her and this monster with gripe...

My interest is in what change the medium through which we communicate might also alter us...in what ways might talking in text change personalities....

The cost of texting

2010-04-22T08:30:00.019+12:00

What price do you put on having people who love you as close as your pocket, anywhere, anytime?
Given such measures are hard to calculate, what is the 'true' or financial cost of a text message?
Please do check the maths, the dashboard isnt up with the digital play, and maths is not my strong point...however the bit calculator has helped

A standard SMS message contains up to a maximum of 160 characters.
Most messages are way shorter than this,but I will work with the standard charge as people are charged for the potential not what is actual.

Apparently SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - and it is 1 bit to 8 bytes, except when its SMS and then its 7 normally...
1120bits divided by 7 gives the 160 characters that can be used in a message

At the maximum, of 160 characters, that would be a transfer of 1120 bits of data and converting this to Bytes...
140 bytes

And using my online converter this is
0.13671875 Kb

The costing in NZ has been 20 cents a message sent, regardless of whether it is one character at 7 bits or 160 characters at 1120 bits.
Admittedly there are a variety of other costing options now available (2010)
with telecom
and vodafone
and 2degree mobile (newcomer with a significantly lowered transaction cost, not used by the majority of cell phone users so i have not yet factored these costs)

And regardless of the number of bits sent, we are charged at the maximum possible, used or not, 140 bytes of message being sent each time.

So, 140 bytes divided by the cost per message gives us 140/20 so,
every 7 bytes of data sent by mobile SMS costs a NZ 0.01 cent.

I'm told by the people I interview for my PhD research that young people use texting because it's cheap, but I am now wondering if the actual costs are cheap.
How does texting compare then with other media transfer costs?

The cost of a song to my ipod...
2500Kb to 6000Kb per song and a song would cost me 99cents per song from apple.
If I take nice little songs with nice round numbers, say 4MB or 4000Kb or 40,000 bytes of data. Then that song is going to cost me- from apple-
40,000/99=404
404 bytes of data costs a NZ 0.01 cent.

And then to download it on my NZ$67.00 a month plan for 10 gigabytes
(10 gigabytes is 10485760 Kb or 10737418240 bytes or 85899345920 bits)
(Nb. this also gives me a web page posting, but note how expensive broadband access is for NZers...yet it is soooo much cheaper than sending a text message)

10737418240 bytes can be be divided by my monthly broadband charge of $67.00
to work out the NZ$1.00 charge per byte, so,
160259974 bytes per NZ$1.00
and divided by 100 cents in the dollar, gives me
1602599.74 bytes to the NZ 0.01 cent.

Now I'm not a maths savvy person, so feel free to correct this if I am wrong

for 1 cent 'apple' can sell me 404 bytes of access to a song
for 1 cent I get 1602599.74 bytes of data downloaded when I'm on my computer
and 1 cent gets me 7 bytes when I am sending a cell phone message
Wow.
23,000 times more expensive to text on a mobile phone than data transfer by computer

It is more than a little unfair to compare 'apples with oranges' as I don't have any 'need' for a song, but I might have 'need' for contact.

So comparing texting with other forms of communication:

A letter. How much does that cost me?
NZ $0.50c, for 500gms standard post.
This would be unfair, taking three days to arrive isn't really a fair contrast.
Within 24 hours fast post, NZ$1.00 per 500gm.
A more reasonable contrast, however, I do note that convenience is compromised, but maybe being able to say so much and even send pictures could be used to balance the equation a little.
A sheet of paper weighs about 4.5 grams...and I need to allow for an envelope...so I could easily send 100 pages...and I can write, or draw, on both sides!
When I'm teaching students essay writing, I assume a rough count of 250 words a page...average word is 5 characters, add one character for space per word...and font size still has to be reasonable...and I can send 250 words per page x2 as its double sided...
So that is 500 words a page x 100 pages
50,000 words for NZ $1.00
Or 500 words per cent (not that this is possible, because i will be charged the minimum NZ$1.00 postage)

And 500 words per page (double sided) times 6 (average letters per word and a gap per word), times 100 for the number of pages I can send plus the weight of an envelope...
Then 500x6x100 = 300,000 bits can be sent
And if I take the 'bit' charge per character as 7, since that is what SMS messaging works on... then
300,000 bits could be sent for NZ$1.00
30,000 bits for NZ 0.01 cent.

To convert bits to bytes...
1024 bits to the byte...1 bit = 8 bytes usually -except in the case of text its 7 -
1 bit 7 bytes
30,000 bits x 7 = 3750 bytes or 3.662109375 Kb

Bear in mind, I should subtract the costs of these pieces of paper, and of the ink, but at present i will stick with the transaction cost...

so 1 cent to apple can sell me 404 bytes of access to a song for as long as i want it
for 1 cent I get 14925 bytes of data downloaded when I'm on my computer
and 1 cent gets me 3750 bytes of mail delivery
and 1 cent gets me 7 bytes when I am sending a cell phone message

Amazing then that texting is bought as a cheap option...
"fast, (almost) free, and easy"
'Cheapness' is a relative concept, it is what's perceived.
It also involves issues of convenience, and of relative comparisons.
Being able to 'do it' and 'do it now' has enormous appeal.
The costs of a phone call are higher. The start up costs for a computer vs mobile are higher. The monthly cost with a server is higher- albeit that it gives me greater service potential. The time and transaction needed for sending a letter is longer and more convoluted.
My mobile is as close as my pocket, but I am paying significantly for convenience.

This blog was prompted by today's sideswipe article
True cost of texting:

"According to Nigel Bannister, a scientist at the University of Leicester, sending a text message can be up to four times more expensive than downloading the same amount of data from the Hubble Space Telescope."

Which traces back to a 2008 article http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html

Some writing got wrought, and I am now right on track

2010-04-06T08:14:00.017+12:00

In the little moments I filch from writing, I have been reading how to write a literature review. I have also been reading about how to just write. Here is what I have learned:

My paragraph construction is awry. I didn't know about not starting a sentence with 'however' or that 'nonetheless' is acceptable but means something else? I have only been less than fluent in English for half a century. And am still tortured by it. Time to throw all my toys out of the cot and say 'I don't care'. This is a blog for goodness sake! And I can start a sentence with 'and' if i want to. On the other hand, in my thesis I had better behave and apply some grammatical correctness. Nevertheless, I regret not paying more attention in my English classes as teaching myself grammar is difficult. Subsequently, I have so much unlearning to do.

My thanks to Monash University for establishing an excellent website on writing. Those of us that get into a University and progress to PhD without having learned enough about writing are appreciative.

And my friends wonder about how come 6 hours can be absorbed in progressing one paragraph....

Today I approached the task with stealth, and have, at least, been entertained.

Doing a google search for boring literature reviews I discovered a cute paper on how to write boring scientific papers.
To summarise: hell is rereading one's own work. Hell is also multi-layered and reading student PhD submissions could well be the purgatory that one deserves for inflicting such unapproachable writing on to an undeserving world.
The characteristics that make so much scientific writing unbearably boring, resulting in a top-10 list of recommendations for writing consistently boring publications.

* Avoid focus
* Avoid originality and personality
* Write long contributions
* Remove implications and speculations
* Leave out illustrations
* Omit necessary steps of reasoning
* Use many abbreviations and terms
* Suppress humor and flowery language
* Degrade biology to statistics
* Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

In the Annals of improbable research, I found this gem on How to write a PhD dissertation. The abstract tells me:
In this paper we demonstrate that writing a Ph.D. dissertation can have
many benefits. Not only do you obtain extensive typesetting experience,
but afterwards you can have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to
"Dr. Your Name."

The notes regarding Chapter 2 left me smiling:
There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.
Remember the following phrase: "No one will ever read your thesis.'' You'll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it's vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish.
Say "It's good enough for the thesis" to yourself several times a day. Tell yourself that you'll correct all the mistakes when you turn the various chapters into independent scientific papers, even though this won't happen (see Schulman 1996a and references therein).

I loved Schulman's approach of citing himself frequently, and hope he goes ego surfing and finds that others cite him also. Tracing a few of Schulman's references, I found myself reading the Ig Noble awards for research. My favourite was by David Sims in Organizational Studies, titled You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations
This one helped me to realise the task of academic writing is not so hard. Despite not being successful in my last grant application, I am not a failure. I now have further research that needs to be given voice...I could write a Narrative exploration into the phenomenology of soul destruction in academia...

Having been a little more grounded in the reality with the insight that polishing a gem that's never going to be seen is a waste of a life, and wanting my own life back, I am now ready to write. I will, on the advice of my supervisor, save my other considerations for publishing in my post doc life.
:)

the loss of a Star

2010-03-30T00:04:00.007+13:00

Susan Leigh Star passed away this week.
I greatly enjoy her writings, and am using this space to draw attention to her wonderful writing and to how such work continues.

In writing of Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions (In A sociology of Monsters) Star brought to me an understanding of what it is to be a human being; a fractional state that defies easy classifications, one that makes multiplicity primary bringing with it concerns of power, of standards and of invisible work.

In analysing the under-described work of nursing, she introduced me metaphorically to the spaces on maps where others might just have written 'here be dragons' but in which she wrote of making silent work visible (or not). This has been a pivotal addition to the ethical approach taken within my Phd thesis. In Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work she provided me with strategies to manage ethical tensions.

I love her writing, she includes a serious intent, but also a playfulness is evident, the dedication to the society of people who find interest in the boring things is a beautiful entry to an article that makes the yellow pages a fascinating read in The ethnography of infrastructure.

In enacting silence she began with a poem of Adrienne Rich, and here I repeat it:

'Cartographies of silence'

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
–Adrienne Rich, Cartographies of Silence

And tonight I re-listen to a presentation she gave on the stsmixtures website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/video/stsmixtures/star/
All invisibility is not bad, all silence is not bad... the ecology of visible and invisible is a relational concept and the same with silence.
Working around...sometimes involves secret acts...but its done...and it's needed...to get things done.

(my) literature review; a turangawaewae moment

2010-03-05T08:13:00.008+13:00

This post starts with the angst of trying to sort out why my lit review section didn't work for me. Previously this post was titled as 10 things I hate about my lit review. I've now, obviously, reviewed this. Ive come to the realization that purposing the lit review section entails establishing a place from which to have voice, hence the use of a distinctly New Zealand and Maori word, turangawaewae, a place to stand, a place of belonging.
Here is the rant I began with, self therapy in the narrative form for what was not exactly a writers block, It was written, i just hated it. Now I have this weird space of not liking this post, but electing not to delete it. It was helpful to me. I'd spent months of not liking my previous lit review section and the hole i was in might be familiar to others so i'm leaving it here. Best wishes if you experience the same sort of darkness in your writing.

1. I wrote it 4 years ago, and everyone has kept writing since then, the field grew exponentially while i data collected, so i have to update it. Its not that I haven't kept reading, i have. Its just as one area grows bigger, other areas are similarly reshaped and so also require reconfiguring. There's an accumulative distortion effect.

2. I wrote it when i thought i was going to study everything. Before i discovered doing more than one ethics application was stupid, so its breadth was enormous and is now unwieldy.

3. It reminds me of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I would never have read past Captain Corelli's boring first 135 pages if so many others had not said it would be a good book. Sadly a thesis is unlikely to have the alignment of these persuasive others, I cant afford switching the reader off with tedium before they ever get to the main event (my study). Maybe this is a rationale for a split screen approach. Read the top half of the page if you just want the main event, and read below the line if you want the contextual determinants of the writers thinking. Note to self: revisit Annemarie Mol's The body multiple, tedium was not a justification she espoused.

4. So why is it boring? It's boring to me. I've already been there, and am past it. I already 'know' why another approach is of more value than all the one's i previously looked at...and i find it annoying to go back in my thinking and do it all again in detail for the readers benefit. And then i realized something....

5. The thesis (on at least one level) is not for me. It's for the reader. It's a bit like selling a house. If i do it up, its not so i can live there. It's for someone else, and so it has the requisite number of rooms that fit a majority purpose and they are all done beige bland with maybe a little bit of sparkle. Hmmm, time I got over myself?

6. I've just discovered a whole area of interest to how change happens, hidden within the language of workplace learning. Damn. If only....if only i had chosen just this one facet four years ago.... Can i let go of where Ive been? Do I replace all my precious though shoddy words in the hope that this one sip of a holy grail will result in congruence, a trajectory of happiness?

7. I have spent three months or longer, with the lit review on a back burner eating away at me, Ive tried addressing it head on reading, editing, structuring....and Ive tried letting it percolate in the background, bubbling away hoping some alchemy will happen if i don't foreground it in my thinking, but neither time-honoured approach has sorted my dilemma. I don't like what i had written, nor what i have to write of. Do i just suck the lemon and complete it as a tedious distraction in what is otherwise an ok piece of work? No!

8. I have reread the purpose of a lit review. I have reread writings on how to write one. I can do the 'this versus that', 'this is the same as that', 'this is better than that' and 'therefore...' And i am getting a glimmer that this is the problem. The methodology of an actor-network theory is more modest than this...if i were to take the approach of literature as data, i would be saying something else. I would not be making the normative evaluative judgments. I would be talking multiplicity. So maybe that's the problem; I'm sitting with a schizophrenic moment.
I need a section that recognizes multiplicity and partial accounts; a section that reflects the intersections, convergences and divergences.
It's an issue of form and function; of existence and essence. I want a section that maintains congruence with the overall approach.

Phew there were only 8 reasons I hate my literature review section. And I'm now more sorted after blogging my thinking. I can at least now approach the chapter understanding my avoidance.

So on to some wisdom gleaned from this self indulgent rant.

1. The lit review says no one else has done it, or done it quite like this.
and
2. It makes me visible. A lit review is not all about 'them' its actually about me...it's how come I stand here. A "turangawaewae" moment where I metaphorically position myself within the research field, this is my place, here's where i stand, in this space I have voice.

From Knobel and Lankshear (1999) in a CQU address, I read:

By 'reviewing the literature' we refer to the process of reading and writing about a range of theoretical, methodological, data collection and analysis techniques and tools, and research-based literature in order to craft an argument on behalf of the research design and question(s); one that says, more or less, "here I stand" and these are my informed reasons for choosing this problem area, developing these questions, this methodology, this research design, this theoretical framing and so on. Reviewing the literature for a study therefore serves a number of purposes.
First, reading quickly and widely in the area(s) you have chosen to study alerts you to similar or exact-same studies already done and that address the same problem area and similar questions that grip you. This kind of review can help to minimize redundancy and needless replication of research, or, on the other hand, it can provide you with a study to replicate or 'test out' in a different context or with different kinds of participants.

3. The framing comes from this...hmmm...there's a tension here too. To paraphrase Bruno Latour from a speech given at an aptly named MAD conference on "what's organizing", and which is available on youtube, I can speak of organizing or about the organisation, I can talk of politics or be political. There are layers. I can network in, I can portray a rendering of reality being multiple, and the writing itself is also performative. Writing of intersecting slices and drawing on such slices. Still it sets up a moment in time where there is a convergence on ideas informing the approach taken.
4. This integrates form and function. More than pointing to everything relevant it gives me space to say how and why I'm locking it in place for this study at this moment in time. Its clotting curds for want of a better metaphor.
5. Last piece of advice from Knobel and Lankshear is to avoid the immobilization of infoglut and infoguilt. There will always be more out there...all you have to do is set the boundary and justify it, guilt for not knowing everything is a total waste of life.

Now, back to the lit review, and making it work, and a whole introductory section later positioning the chapter's purpose and my place in this. All's well with the world.

Wordled Summary of the Phd

2010-03-01T13:19:00.002+13:00

phd summary gets wordled

Managing change in educational contexts

2010-02-24T08:54:00.010+13:00

A presentation pointed to via Stephen Downes, and traced down to Andrew Churches
at educational origami, where there is further acknowledgment to a paper by J. Thousand and R. Villa, called Managing complex change towards inclusive schooling.

Nice thing about the model is in pointing toward what gaps might be addressed.
As with any model it oversimplifies.
There can, of course, be combination effects and compounding effects.
And how gaps get addressed will be more important than diagnosing or pathologising.

So I've reread some Latour and reconsidered change in terms of design/ and redesign.
"Drawing things together takes a work of alchemy."
There is some gold in here, but its not within a model that is deficit oriented.
The model depicted would fit with a top down led model such as diffusion of innovation where hastening a change is also based on the premise all change is good...
There might be good reason for being anxious...

Its not what I had planned

2010-02-16T08:45:00.014+13:00

What might I have learned if i had listened to students (or their music) instead of to managerial directives in higher education?

The living end has caught up with me, and its not pretty.
I've been buried in the sand
I've come down with no place to land
I (don't) need you to understand
It's not what I had planned....

Suicidal education
It got sold to our generation
Wake up to the manipulation
Wake up to the situation
...
(ref Aussie grunge band, The living end circa 2006)

So Ive downloaded the ringtone for my mobile phone, it might help me stay grounded in reality.

Pink Floyd's 'Teacher leave them kids alone' seems to have been taken literally. Beaming content from one venue to four others is a fiscal driven curriculum rather than an educational philosophically driven one. Let us not delude ourselves.

In working with new technologies these can be integrated for better or for worse. Measuring worse is of course difficult. As is measuring better no doubt. Both requires one first of all to think better or worse for whom. The second part of the question can then be considered, what is the measure of better? And is doing as much as possible with as little as possible a valid measure? Is efficiency valid when it is also accompanied by accidental learning that could include:
Your lecturer does not want to 'see' you.
Class time is engaging only if one considers engagement in the same way one might watch a film.
Enculturation into university studies means a lack of presence...

If your an educator with doubts you might like to take up the ringtone option as a way of at least reminding yourself that there was, and is, another way. Ghandi's approach of civil disobedience at least keeps me saner in the insane places of academic practice. Meantime i am directed(!!!) to teach to a formuleic template, x mins of ppt no less, followed by x mins of expert videos...followed by x mins of breakout time. Heavens.

I'm writing this on a table made from the floor of a chapel where Mary McKillop once walked, so i figure in hope and faith, that given things changed once they can change again. And being a devotee of actor-network theory, i know things can always be otherwise... enrolling a saint's help amongst one's allies will surely help in the restoration...