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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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'

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

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

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

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?

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

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.