My PhD Blog

Today (1st of July) I am exactly half way through my three year PhD scholarship. That means it is time to really concentrate on me and my PhD project. It also means that I must learn the crucial gift of being able to say no.

Up until now, I feel like I have been much preoccupied with pleasing other people (e.g. students, journalists, colleagues, course participants, professionals, librarians or others who are interested in my research area) and although I like communicating my research results, giving interviews and public talks or being called on as an “expert” in different contexts, I must stop accepting all the invites to exciting activities and start being a bit more selfish in order to get my dissertation done in time.

Of course, it helps that I have now fulfilled all my teaching obligation here at the university. As a PhD student at The Department of Communication at Aalborg University I have to teach 600 hours during my three years of employment. At the end of this semester, I have fulfilled this obligation. Although I enjoy teaching and supervising students, not having to do that for the next year and a half will probably (hopefully) help me to concentrate more on my project and my interesting data.

Let the writing begin!
(And let’s hope I don’t suffer from P.Q.S.… )

My colleague and friend Anders Albrechtslund will be defending his PhD dissertation next Monday. The dissertation is called “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Introducing participation and ethics to surveillance“ and is a collection of seven published papers.

Anders writes about his dissertation:

The main focus of the dissertation is to understand surveillance, and participation and ethics have been ways to grasp the concept. I introduce the concept “participatory surveillance” to emphasize aspects of surveillance practices which are not adequately expressed in the current surveillance studies literature… [...] This way of grasping surveillance might be in stark contrast to the everyday understanding of something unpleasant and unwanted, which terrifies and controls its passive victims, a description we know so well from depictions in books, films and TV series. However, when certain everyday social relations are studied, e.g. online social networking, these practices can be described as active, positive engagements with surveillance. Consequently, there seems to be more to surveillance than meets the eye.

Especially, I find Anders’ paper on “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” interesting. Here, the practice of online social networking is conceptualised in relation to the social and playful aspects of surveillance.

I wish Anders the best of luck with the defence and look forward to attending the event.

I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to announce my participation in the forthcoming Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) conference called “Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place” which will be held in October 2008 at the IT University of Copenhagen.

I am part of a panel focusing on the internet “At the Intersection: Public and Private, Global and Local, Design and Use, Virtual and Textual” together with Anne-Mette Albrechtslund, Anders Albrechtslund, Thomas Ryberg and Rikke Frank Jørengensen. In this panel we present different papers that analyse cases of internet intersections from a variety of disciplinary outsets.

Also, I am participating in a roundtable on social network sites and online communities called “Life on the move” chaired by Daniel Skog and Lewis Goodings and with participation from Amanda Lenhart, Jan Schmidt, Nancy Baym and Raquel Recuero - all of whom doing interesting work on youth and online social networking. Read more about the roundtable in this blog post from chair Daniel Skog.

Looking forward to yet another interesting AoiR conference

A long while ago, my colleague Thomas Ryberg and I started writing a paper about “strong” and “weak” ties in networked environments. Now, two years later, the paper is finally published in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

The paper is entitled “Networked identities: understanding relationships between strong and weak ties in networked environments”. Unfortunately, the paper is not available for free download, but here is a short abstract:

In this paper we take up a critique of the concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) voiced by several authors, who suggest that networks may provide a better metaphor to understand social forms of organization and learning. Through a discussion of the notion of networked learning and the critique of CoPs we shall argue that the metaphor or theory of networked learning is itself confronted with some central tensions and challenges that need to be addressed. We then explore these theoretical and analytic challenges to the network metaphor, through an analysis of a Danish social networking site. We argue that understanding meaning making and ‘networked identities’ may be relevant analytic entry points in navigating the challenges.

Read more about the special section on networked learning here.

I am in Finland at the moment giving a couple of guest lectures at The University of Vaasa at The Department of Communication Studies. Today I taught the “Advanced Course in Multimedia Communication” and tomorrow I will be giving a lecture on the course “Text and Discourse Analysis - Practice”.

Both the lectures deal with my research on Arto (which is actually a boy’s name in Finland ) and the theories and methods of discourse studies that I am using.

The Finnish counterpart of Arto is the social network site IRC-Galleria and it is interesting to hear how the history of that site seems to be similar to Arto - especially when it comes to the moral panic and the stories presented in the news media. Also, it seems that the Finnish youngsters are using IRC-Galleria in the same way that the Danish teenagers are using Arto - only the average age on IRC-Galleria is about 20 years old, which is a little older than the average Arto user.

By the way, Facebook is of course also really huge in Finland. All the students I taught today had Facebook profiles.

The view from the University of Vaasa - nice, with ice on top of the water.

Today I moved into a new office a the University. The office is a one-man office, which will be quite a change as I am used to sitting in a five-man open office space. However, I am excited to have my own office and I think that the peace and quite will be an advantage when I start writing my dissertation (which I plan to start doing after this semester).

Also, I now have a much nicer view facing the main building of Department of Communication:
[The view from my new office.]

For the locals; I now live in room 3.008, 2nd floor on Kroghstræde 1. Feel free to come visit

As some of you might know, the students at Aalborg University are studying under what is called “The Aalborg Model”, which means that they do problem oriented project work in groups. Therefore, they hand in a rather huge (usually 100-120 pages) project report each semester dealing with an open-ended problem of their own choosing.

Formerly, each group would defend their project during a group exam lasting approxemately two or three hours. This semester, however, we were not allowed to conduct the group exams due to a resolution carried out by the government saying that group exams are not allowed at the Danish universities; the students have to sit for an examination individually. Therefore, our students studying under “The Aalborg Model” are forced to defend their joint projects during an individual exam.

Because of that, my January has been more than usually busy. I just counted that I have held 32 individual oral exams this past weeks (in stead of eight group exams as it would have been in the good old days).

Even though all the exams went really well and the students had produced some interesting projects, I cannot help but feel that it is a real pity that they cannot defend them together. Not only is it more time consuming for me as the examiner to prepare 32 different individual 30 minute-exams rather than eight group exams, but it is also a shame that the great discussions and the high level of abstraction, that usually are part of a group exam, now disappear.

Well, I just wanted to let you know why I have been so absent on the blog lately - and tell you that now the exam rush is over I will be blogging about the many interesting upcoming activities I am attending - e.g. a PhD course next week, a trip to Berlin and Safer Internet Day 2008 on February 12.

More about that in blog posts to come

Please notice that I have a new office phone number. See contact info.

Today it is exactly one year since I started “My PhD Blog” and it is time to do a little status update.

I have written 52 blog posts during this one year period. That equals one blog post per week,which I think is acceptable. Especially, considering the fact that I only blog about my activities as a PhD student or subjects related to youth and online social networking.

Here are some other blog stats provided by WordPress:

As for my PhD project, I must admit that this first year of the project period has gone by extremely fast. I am amazed at how much time goes by with non-project related stuff - such as teaching, supervising, reading and answering e-mails, attending meetings and network activities, writing papers and articles, giving talks, attending conferences and PhD courses, giving press interviews and other stuff. All of which are really exciting activities, but only very peripherally related to my project.

When it comes to my project I have been engaged in data collecting. I have conducted two qualitative online questionnaires which altogether generated more than 3000 answers. Moreover, I have been doing different kind of ethnographic studies. I would label it “ethnography” rather than “virtual ethnography”, because some of my data collection take place outside cyberspace. Actually, the more I think about it, I dislike to concept of “virtual ethnography” or “online ethnography”, because I think that online social networking cannot be separated from offline life. That is something I will get back to in a later blog post. Among other things, I am working on a concept I call “nexus ethnography”. But more about that in the new year.

I hope that 2008 will be a productive year and I look forward to blog about my activities.

Happy New Year to all.

Another colleague of mine, Marianne Georgsen from e-Learning Lab, is defending her PhD thesis this week. This will take place Wednesday at the Department of Education, Learning and Philosophy.

Here is a short description of the thesis (in Danish):

Afhandlingen handler om kommunikationens rolle i samarbejdsprocessen, med særlig vægt
på kommunikationens betingelser, når samarbejdet medieres af IKT. Der sættes fokus på
betingelserne for den videomedierede interaktion og på identifikation af de ressourcer,
brugerne tager i anvendelse for at kunne samarbejde i virtuelle omgivelser.

Read the whole summery or see the invitation.

Good luck to Marianne