miniNode

Well, it’s obviously not easy to publish myself. Neither has this proven to be de driving force I needed for my phd work. Maybe I overestimated how motivating it would be going public. Maybe it really doesn’t feel that public. Perhaps it isn’t (it very much isn’t).

I just read that an interesting article on the Guardian by Scott Rosenberg. The title was “The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against.” In the end he has a nice quote: “Blogs have realised that old wisecracking twist on an Andy Warhol aphorism: that, someday, everyone will be famous for 15 people.” That’s narrowcasting.

But Barabási seems to have proved that real networks don’t develop like this (of course I understand that is not what is meant by the above quote, but bear with me). Given that the blogospehere is a network, which it most certainly is, it has hubs. Hence the A-list. Hence a periphery that are occupied by many nodes, among them the mNode.

So fame will not be distributed to everyone. That is the point of it. And then even 15 fans is to much to ask. Where am I headed? I’m not sure, but I think I’m trying to convince myself I like blogging, but that reaching out to many readers still isn’t my main goal. Five would be fine. Three maybe. Hypocrisy is wonderful, especially on Fridays. Cheers!

Learning as some kind of change

As a dubious remedy for my eLoneliness, Facebook came along. It’s like ordering spam, but the spam is knitted out of stuff from your social life or, more likely, from your social past. So you keep returning. It’s a sort of politeness. And the interface is perfect for people like me (almost half way there, at least if we don’t stop a lot of things or start believing (even more) heavily in medical science): Simple, clean cut, easy to navigate and usable for a lot of things you didn’t really have to do.

Last week I attended a course called “Learning and identity.” As usual such a “wide” header attracts very different people and some of them seemed to have a quite different understanding of both these concepts than I have. Some spoke of grasping “how people really are,” “behinds the mask” and so on. I don’t know much about such grasping, but from my perspective identity is more like Gees “packages;” made and remade by us seeing trough them and living in them.

“Core identity” is not what I’m looking for. And neither is it what was meant with “identity” in the course header. But one of the discussions was interesting. I claimed, backed up by a nice citation from Bateson, that the “word learning (.) denotes change of some kind.” And “identity,” even if you see as a very dynamic entity, isn’t. The word identity is not pointing at change per se (rather the opposite). If learning takes place, it may be called a subcategory of change; it is the change we are talking about. Some other participants talked about how “we should not think in boxes” and argued we must focus on the similarities rather than the differences (being a fan of Bateson I obviously raged).

What is changing? I guess that is what much of the discussion in educational and learning research is all about. Probably a lot of things are changing for learning to occur. Mapping them all might be impossible. But I don’t think you need to map everything to talk sensible about learning and identity. What I have to do is “draw the borders,” finding how much I need to take into account.

Participation and the eLonely

Participation is no doubt a key concept in understanding what’s going on. When someone is just surfing now and then, they are like tourists, superficially interested and maybe easy to cheat. When someone spends a lot of time in different “virtual worlds” (a word that has to be renegotiated), playing games, blogging, or whatever, they are citizens. But what about those who spends a fair bit of time on the net, but never really “get connected”? Who are we? The eLonely?

We, the eLonely, are a reaching out, trying to participate, missing the points, talking rubbish like everyone else, but not the right rubbish. The eLonely are virtually pathetic; who we are elsewhere doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I think that if a give up blogging (etcetera), I will be wandering around the net. Not like the “tourists” mentioned earlier, but like a virtual hobo. I wonder if there are many virtual hoboes out there.

That is a field in need of inquiry. And funding. The question is how you go from eLonely to virtual hobo. What are the characteristics of these social and mental “traversals”? Is it possible to extend the metaphor? What about eShelters? What is the “e-” equivalent to soup or rags or supermarket wagons?

Moving in every direction

It’s obvious that the typology I proposed earlier on research approaches to blogging is too simple, though I’ve just found something similar in an article from 2005 (Lawson-Borders, G. & Kirk, R. (2005). “Blogs on Campaign Communication,” in American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 548, Dec 2005, Sage). They distinguish three approaches to research on blogging: Blogs as social diaries, blogs as organizational tools and blogging viewed as a sort of participatory journalism.

From the perspective of educational science something is missing in that list(: On the other hand: blogs as organizational tools is quite similar (or identical) to using blogs in educational contexts, when this means using them as a form of LMS (Learning Management System). But there is another strand within educational research that is focusing on the language use in blogs, and how blogging may boost the learning of literacy (for instance Huffaker, D. A. (2004). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom)

In surveying the field one could also use other distinctions. Descriptive research differs from prescriptive (action oriented) research (though the lines may be blurry). Some see potential changes in their branch (typically journalism). Some see another chance for preaching about technological enhancement of learning and educational processes. It is somewhat self-oriented to only ask what a new thing might do to you. It is somewhat upside down to continually ask what new things may to for you.

At the moment I’m progressing without direction; getting closer to a target that surrounds me, rather than being some specific point. And maybe Monty Python's Quest for the holly grale wasn't just absurd after all?

Bateson again

Once I was very interested I cybernetics and the application of this approach to the human sciences. I read Bateson and liked his high flying ideas. He uses his concepts and principles all over the place, from cells via human communication to evolution. It’s full of insight and very far out. If you are curious about cybernetics, The principia Cybernetica page is a nice place to start.

I don’t know if any of that will help me now, but there is hope of using some of the ideas in discussing socio cultural theories of participation. At least I think so. Jay Lemke shares many of his interesting thoughts one his pages (a lot of drafts and some finished work of his is there). He seems willing to go beyond the “blind man and stick” analogy in applying Batesonian theory to research on Internet communication and learning conditions in the knowledge/information society.

Bateson’s learning theory is especially interesting here. Yrjö Engeström saw this in the early 80’s, but it is somewhat swallowed by the activity theory and ends up losing it´s biological aspects. But things may change

Blog research

I’ve been writing about research on blogging in general and have tried to summarize in four broad categories: 1) Blogging as a new form of, or at least a very special challenge to, journalism. 2) Blogging as writing “an inside-out diary,” a more traditional understanding of what’s going on in a blog, focusing on things like identity and identity construction. 3) Blogs as tools or, more correct, as potential tools, in schools or other organizational contexts. 4) Blogging as participation in different sub-cultures or discourses, a more socio-cultural view.

Any comments on this are of great interest to me, of course. I know that people have tried different taxonomies on blogs, ranging from rough differentiation to high resolution. This is next on my agenda, but surveying the field should, the way I see it, include a description of different “entrance-points,” so I will first try out the four “streams” described here, before I connect it to the categorization of blogs.

One way to “try it out” is writing about it here, I guess. And I really advise you to click on the link at the beginning leading to “the introduction of the iRack.”

mNode

I found this incredibly scary. Maybe I’m just tired since its Friday, but mixing genres like war and commercial smoothness seems ugly in a more profound way than just telling us that they are very good at making killing tools. Tools beeing one of my interests and all...

I've been making preparations for doing the empirical part of my projects on young Norwegian bloggers. It’s a slow process, since I’m (obviously) not sure what I’m looking for. Why people blog, maybe? How this activity is a part of the social life these people lead? How the blog is not just an inverted personal diary, but also a coordinating tool in different practices? Huge and vague questions like these don’t really push you forward.

Today I will meet with my supervisor and hopefully enter the weekend with an almost anabolic self esteem (alternately feeling like a dot; dimensionless and invisible). This seems to be the normal states of the PhD student, something like a binary opposition. Or maybe everybody feels like that all the time, to quote Futurama. I’m not sure. Bite my shiny metal ass…