Infinite regression; its turtles all the way down

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

phd summary gets wordled

Managing change in educational contexts

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

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...

Question on the edge

How has the internet changed the way you think? A question from the Edge, posed to some of the deep thinkers of our times, so thought I'd answer it too...nothing wrong with my sense of self importance today...

I have voice, I'm engaged, involved...there's a democratising capacity. I can engage with conversations that have temporal currency with some of the best minds in the world. And sometimes these other great people even engage with Me :)
Arguably, I live at the bottom of the world (unless you want to spin the globe a bit) a beautiful little laid back place New Zealand yet because of the internet I get to play with others i would never have had the opportunity to otherwise, the terrestrial constraints of geography and finances to span this just wouldnt make it likely otherwise.

I read more... everyday...and its no longer just for escapist fun...well...actually it is that too. I have a timely inquisitiveness at my fingertips. In the past i might have had a thought, a question to wonder, so fleeting that it would not wait for the next person I talk with to mutually ponder over, or to find a book or a library to extend the thinking... The internet extends my reach and I can follow such trains of thoughts, here, now... So today, I woke early, I cleared an email or 10, I followed a google alert to Sherry Turkle, it took me back to the edge question via @silverstream, I noticed the 'meme' person Susan Blackmore was there, and Taleb and Shirky and Rheingold too, and a whole lot of reading potential for a rainy day or several hundred such days...and fleetingly regretted my phd topic was not to follow such a great question with some of the (named) great minds of the 21st century (so far). But I'll stick with my phd of the very small (mobile) screen...but wouldnt be surprised if there's some commonality here and there...

So back to where I was...there's more reading, and its linked in a timely way to my interests.
And it's a lot like Alice down the rabbit hole, I could get lost in (t)here a long time...note to self...follow up on intentionality from yesterdays ponderings...when I read a thesis...it cited J Foder (1989) Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Preface, p.ix
"Oh, mice have died and worms have eaten them: but no rock, and no spiral nebula - and no worm, for that matter - has ever chased a mouse, let alone caught one. (Mousetraps catch mice, of course; but that manifests our intelligence, not theirs.)
But I would never have got to such ponderings without the internet...
Nor such fears...
My thinking is altered, how I approach questions altered, how I approach answers similarly altered. But maybe I'm also older/wiser ;)

As a PhD student i wonder about being well enough read, there is always more...and my markers, will always have read more and differently. How to stay on top of it all? At some stage I have to concede I cant. But there's more information to be on top of than ever there was in a terrestrial plane. The ante has been upped. Will supervisors understand this? Like the wonders of domesticity at the beginnings of the last century, with so much more domestic machinery, the demands for whiteness and brightness became an enslaving domesticity for women, rather than a freeing of time, it just raised the bar...

So the internet creates for me some anxiety also.

Yesterday I altered my face book privacy settings, which had defaulted to public. Am I happy with family photos being strewn in public places? A younger life spent reading books (James a Michener, Leon Uris, C K Steads Smith's Dream....even the Matrix...)and it leave me with some distrust, some caution, in a world in which hiding would be difficult.

My life is altered. I am altered. I think I'm more thoughtful than I would have been otherwise...certainly, I think, I have more informed thoughts. Which brings up another aspect, I'm changed in what information I try to hold on to and what information I know I can search for, and perhaps, possibly more importantly, have learned skills rather than facts, how to search for, and how to evaluate what I find. I have a more tenuous relationship with ideas, a willingness to try for size rather than a permanent attachment to facts. And here its hard to know if this an internet thing or not, but I would not have developed such a way of seeing all 'facts' as networked without being introduced to actor-network theory, and again the internet made readings on this accessible.

And my relationships are altered. I'm connected, there's comfort in knowing people I want to be in hands reach of, can be...well at least can be present with me in voice or picture, or video. I dont accept Sherry Turkle's tethered analogy, what I feel I have is extended trust. I have a school aged child living in another country with people I have never met, where I dont speak the language, and who my parents generation had fought against...

so...whats in my head, whats in my heart, how i relate to others...all altered.

And back to Alice, Ive already had several impossible thoughts and its not even breakfast time yet :)

I'm a bit more fractional than I ever used to be...Being here there everywhere...and holding ideas more loosely...and connecting ideas more frequently... concurrently, I am networked, connected, and embedded more, rather than less,, in my/our world.

And now Im headed back to what those other clever people had to say...
here's my favourite, so far
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/sweetcron/items/view/4660/the-2-billion-eyed-intermedia

How can the wind be borrowed? Finding oneself (and losing oneself) in a new (old) aesthetic

How can the wind be borrowed? How can it be made to have a bearing on corn and bread? How can its force be translated so that, whatever it does or does not do, the corn is reliably ground? Yes, may use the words translation and interest as well, because it is no more and no less difficult to interest a group in the fabrication of vaccine than to interest the wind in the fabrication of bread. Complicated negotiations have to go on continuously in both cases so that the provisional alliances do not break off.
(Latour, 1987, Science in action)

And so it is also for fund raising for a charity, will the sun shine on Christmas in the park, will the donations suffice for another year of service...

And for a phd student...
How to bend the wind...how to represent that which takes shape in one context, squeeze it through pages and have any evocation of what one sort to represent.

Tyler, cited by Strathern (1991) on what ethnography does:
"the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation"...Ethnography works by evoking in the reader responses that cannot be commensurate with the writer's
- there is no 'object' that they both grasp....rather s/he provides a reader with a connection to it. Ethnography makes available what can be conceived but not presented."

The image loses its power the moment it becomes a subject of discussion as a shift to rhetoric alters the form.
A juxtoposition then of image following image where sediments of previous evocation might connect the one with the other in the reader's mind.

Mediation effects

A New Zealand take

Technical mediation

In what ways do the media we shape, shape us in return?

The concept of young people being negatively affected by the ubiquitous mobile telephone (“mobile”), has taken firm hold in the public consciousness. Unfortunately, an instrument blaming perspective fails to consider the relational issues involved. Questions of how we are both shaped by and shape our technologies are neglected when questions collapse to binaries of good or bad. This paper draws on the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour as a means to understanding the discourse positioning the mobile as an object of harm, and for strategies considering how the mobile might be positioned otherwise. In an attempt to redress the negative evaluative imbalance associated with mobile phones, an example taken from research in progress involving Youthline’s text messaging for counselling is explored. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested, including strategies for text messaging and for positioning the mobile as an adjunctive instrument supporting students through their studies.

Haxell, A. (2009). In what ways do the media we shape, shape us in return? In Same
places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009.
http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/haxell.pdf

Slideshow

Ascilite09 Ailsa Haxell

View more presentations from ailsa.

Playing with time

"Playing with other people , you must keep the time they keep."
In writing a thesis summary i am told some general guidelines:
Context (present/past tense)
The problem (past tense)
Data collection (past tense)
Data analysis (past tense)
The findings (past tense)
Conclusions (present tense)
Implications for further research (future tense)

I think there is room for movement.
Time, and chronologies, are punctuated differently for different actors in a network, Once upon a time marks beginnings, and they all lived happily ever after an end...but for whom, surely different realities will contest this.

There is no God-like view, accounts are partial; fractional and biased. One's present implicates past and future. Whats important to me today, may be blown out of the water with the important things that happen just a little further on. And any chronology of events with which I mark times passing are going to be very different to that of others.

As Etienne Van Heerden said, there are so many pasts, and "it" never looks the same.

In my thesis,
The past is with us, it creates the conditions of possibility (current tense)
The problem, continually evolves (current tense)
Data collected, is partial, reflects a time and place, or several times and places
Data analysis, is done here and now at a particular time and place,but is also read in the here and now of a different time and place
The findings, and conclusions are speculative.

And then there is the weirdness of language, in English there is a way of talking of the past but which does this with currency, a continuous past.
She was saying...
Of writing a thesis summary, is it of an object (study past) or is it more like a painting, its always here? Not the artist showed...but shows...
Is it not possible the tool (a thesis) may be more like an engine, not a camera enacting a future, rather than capturing a past?

Performativity in social science research; what a haiku knows

Photo by Michael Flick, cc license, original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/17773534@N03/3078450238/

Void in form

When, just as they are,
White dewdrops gather,
On scarlet maple leaves,
Regard the scarlet beads!

Such poetry brings a reflexive stance to my understanding of what material semiotics and performativity can bring to my doctoral research. This Japanes poem by Ikkyu (translated by Stryk and Ikemoto,1981) stops me in my tracks.
In wonder I can think about what makes things so, what assemblages are required, how does the performance hold me as well as its assembly of actors and of spaces.

In iterating toward openness by David Wiley, I too wonder about what's needed to turn my educational institution into a place where I want to sit within and wonder at, rather than wonder why.

The frustrations of working in the academy where change happens either in incredibly small increments or tearing people distressed into a future they are scared by, are the issues that prompted my own studies into change and the use of emergent technologies.

Taking an actor-network approach is what helping me in making meaning of my world, as well as the worlds of others. I have come to appreciate that there are alternate realities. Sometimes these clash, sometimes they coexist.

Developing a network sensibility provides a fuller knowledge of the contingencies that hold certain actors in place.
This sensibility also provides for understanding that the social and the technical, that people and their technologies, are well enmeshed, that each actor is also a network.

Having this sensibility doesn't leave me stuck in despair though, for knowing the intimate details of how things are aggregated also provides insight that things can be done differently. Its a practical and pragmatic knowledge. There are potentials for adding to, taking away; working around; aligning alongside; or splicing into.

Trying to work change through lineal change theory approaches will clearly cause unexpected frustration.
Trying to use a rationale chooser approach similarly doesn't work. Logic and the wonders of an innovation do not of themselves create the conditions for a different way of being.

With wisdom shared by Seth Godin (2009), If you want to change what your boss ([or other people you work with] believes, or the strategy your company is following, the first step is to figure out how to be the best informed person in the room. To put this into actor-network terms, is to state the obvious, to reveal is to critique

Reference
Doolin, B., & Lowe, A. (2002). To reveal is to critique: actor-network theory and performativity in critical information systems research. Journal of Information Technology, 17(2), 69-78.

What if the price of mobiles connecting with mobiles for counselling purposes is that people don't

Frank Schirrmacher is interested in George Dyson's comment

"What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?" He is looking at how the modification of our cognitive structures is a process that eventually blends machines and humans in a deeper way, more than any human-computer interface could possibly achieve. He's also fascinated in an idea presented a decade ago by Danny Hillis: "In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds."

Is this what George Seimens and Stephen Downes have been getting at with connectivism cck09?

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.

And this is what led me into looking at how changes are both shaped and shaping with the integration of mobile phone technologies into texting for counselling.
To rephrase the question:
What if the price of mobiles connecting with mobiles for counselling purposes is that people don't?

And the questions provoked keep coming:
If you were asked, where do you keep whats important of your life, is the answer facebook?
I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just aware that I have not only outsourced parts of my memory (i never memorize phone numbers anymore, and i leave editing and spelling to autochecks), but now i also consider that i have an external repository of my photos, and my highlights and lowlights of my life, and the bits inbetween floating on a'cloud' of blogging, twitter, facebook , texts and emails, del.icio.us, librarything
Need i fear like chicken licken having the sky fall on my head?

I think twice about what i post, here and there, I think twice about whats accessible into perpetuity by whoever whenever...
If I am exposed to an attention overload, how do i select the attention deficits to filter this? How do the tools i use select what they will attend to?

I spent an hour 20 yesterday trying to convince my mobile phone to talk with me let alone anyone else. Part of my life I cannot have back...
I told myself again and again that my mobile was to make my life easier... i had an inkling that i had been suckered into thinking this thing that was meant to improve my life and had decided i was not worthy of it. So much for my reach being extended, my voice being carried, or my hearing being able to cross the Tasman. For a cyborg I wasnt doing very well. Seemed something as supposedly worldwide as global roaming, visa top ups and the international company of vodafone could not make good on promises. Be with your bestmate anywhere anytime...yeah right.
I fell into a dark hole for a small time.

I begin to wonder who and what is determining my reality.

Schirrmacker provoked in me some angst for my very human condition, I suspect i need a psychotherapist to help me with this one:
but with the possibilities unfolding

the question of predictive search and others, of determinism, becomes much more interesting. The question of free will, which always was a kind of theoretical question — even very advanced people said, well, we declare there is no such thing as free will, but we admit that people, during their chidhood, will have been culturally programmed so they believe in free will.

i had loved Pandora, our detachment was a forced one. Should i now be grateful that my 'choices' are no longer contrived by the machine?
I love amazon.com, should i be worried that my choices could be traced?
On my blog, my readers are more likely to be looking at just one posting than any other (it mentions panties) ...(whoops I've done it again).

That i am not so fully in control of how i might be perceived, or judged that I might not be so much predicting my own life, but having it predicted by others, through the cloud, through the ways i am linked to the Internet, are matters of import. Not so much that i should retreat from such involvements but that I should be more interested and invested with where such creations take me.

Reading Latour(2008), he talks me through the sin with Shelly's Frankenstein - was not in the making but in the abandonment. To withdraw from technology is not an answer, it is not possible, i am already inside of the machine and it in me.

How then to proceed? What is important, what is not important is something Schirrmacker describes as being linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad....

And I suspect it needs time because in the chaos of now, things are always unclear, it is with hindsight that a trajectory can be plotted.
Meantime I live withe the 'wealth of information' available, and the means with which to access it . I wonder to myself about the wonders of this- do thesis now have more references than 10 years ago... Are the expectations on PhD students to be well read more demanding now that there is so much more that can and therefore should be accessed? In my 100,000 word thesis, is 20,000 in referencing something that reshapes academia...and thereby me? being in this information cascade how to cope with information bittiness?

Nick Bilton, reassures me saying

We'll create and consume whatever information makes us happy, fulfills us, and leave the rest by the wayside. Maybe. Or maybe we'll school like fish in the Web's algorithmic currents, little Nemos, each of us convinced we're going our own way because, well, we never stop talking, never stop sharing the minutiae of our lives and thoughts. Look at me!

The informavore in me just hopes i dont get swallowed by sharks while I'm finding Nemo.


References
Latour, B. (2008). “It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization In J. Proctor (Ed.), Postenvironmentalism: MIT Press.
Shirrmacker, F. (2009) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html#sp

The one with the most toys wins

Data of itself is not the persuader or we wouldnt have such well informed smokers.
Seth Godin is suggesting that if you can data mine you'll be ahead of the (marketing) crowd. While data is one of the allies you might align with, of itself it does not have its own trajectory, it does not 'do the work'.
More alliances need to be formed. Instead of 'letting the data do the talking' which patently as shown by the examples Seth Godin points to are not enough, other ways of winning friends and influencing people (and making the world to your liking) might also be considered. For example, providing behavioural clues or examples demonstrating usefulness, consider how you might make the 'better' choice an easier choice, as well as how you might unpeel current attachments. From Latour, it would take a connecting up of favourable alliances, and reducing the strength of others. Putting it crudely, the one with the most toys (ways of doing the attachments, and detachments, and number of attachments able to be brought to bear) wins.

The hinterland that Markers of PhDs find themselves in

I've been reading John Law (2009) on performativity in social research method, where he discusses the hinterland inside of which things are done.
And there's scope here for studying the hinterland inside of which PhD marking occurs...
More to add to the box for the post doc life :)

Here's a taster that didnt use ANT or hinterlands taken from Kiley and Mullins (2002)

Examiners assume PhD candidates are still apprentices in the profession of research in their discipline; and so their theses are judged in terms of current competence and future promise as academic colleagues. If there are particular problems, then the examiners regard the department, the supervisor and the candidate as all being potentially implicated; and if there are remarkable achievements, the recognition likewise extends beyond the performance of the individual candidate. Similarly, the examiners themselves are conscious that their own reputation is being judged through the quality of their reports. (pp. 13–14)

There are then marking concerns that are right outside of the thesis itself, ones that a PhD student writer has no ability to control for.
Does the marker have time for this, is it a duty or a passion, is the thesis to be compared to several assessed or are they are relatively new academic with the thesis being judged against the markers own work...for the criteria themselves are broad and open to wide discrepancies in interpretation. What else are in these dark woods?
How are markers selected...is there respect for the research method, at the very least one would hope a marker was coming from the same or similar paradigm.
Getting past what makes for a passable thesis to one that is outstanding, Kiley and Mullins note the metaphors used valuing the artistry of the thesis. Personally, and as a PhD student 'sparkle' comes easily to me. My worry is that what I see as sparkle the marker may see as tinsel. While there is a level of art in a thesis, what i like and what others like in art is always going to be a debatable and possibly, a fashion commodity.
"I know what I like, and I dont like that."

I am back to wondering about the circumstances of markers, and their tolerance for difference.

I wonder what else is in the hinterland...


Refs
Mullins, G. & Kiley, M. (2002) 'It's a PhD not a Nobel Prize' Studies in Higher Education, 27(4).
Kiley, M. & Mullins, G. (2006) Opening the black box: how examiners assess your thesis, in, Doctorates downunder: keys to successful doctoral study in Australia and New Zealand, ACER, Melbourne, pp 200 - 207.
Law, J. (2009). Seeing Like a Survey. Cultural Sociology, 3(239).