My PhD Blog

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.

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

My good friend and colleague Anne-Mette Albrechtslund just got a PhD scholarship from the Danish Research Council. Anne-Mette is interested in user-creativity in computer games and she will start her project in February. Congrats to Anne-Mette (who will then continue to be part of our research centre at e-Learning Lab).

Thomas’ PhD defence on Friday was a nice experience and I think it went really well. It started out with a short introduction by supervisor Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld whereupon Thomas gave his 45 minute presentation explaining the patchworking metaphor as a way of understanding learning. After that the members of the assessment committee each had some time to ask critical questions such as “What is learning?”, “What is the difference between ‘learning’ and ‘doing’?”, “How close is patchworking to technology?”, “Is patchworking general to all group work processes?” and “Can individual learning also be viewed as patchworking?”.

I know that some people in the audience thought that the questions were rather hard and critical, but Thomas managed to keep a cool head during the whole defence and he answered all the questions in a reflective and intelligent manner.

Therefore - not surprisingly - the assessment committee gave him a really nice evaluation afterwards urging him to develop his concepts into a theory and a book. All in all, it was a really good day which ended with a nice dinner and a party at out home for supervisors, assessment committee, family and friends.

My “colleague”, both at work and at home, Thomas Ryberg from e-Learning Lab is defending his PhD thesis this Friday. This will take place at 1.00 pm in room 1.104 (the auditorium) at Kroghstraede 3, Department of Communication, Aalborg University.

Supervisors are Professor Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld and independent researcher Etienne Wenger. The assessment committee consists of:

• Pirkko Raudaskoski, Associate Professor, Aalborg University (DK)
• Dr. Christopher Jones, The Open University (UK)
• Professor Barbara Wasson, University of Bergen (No)

Here is the abstract for the thesis:

“Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue”

The old saying and wedding tradition cited above captures well the essence of metaphorically understanding learning as a process of patchworking. The metaphor of patchworking highlights how learning processes can be seen as processes of stitching and weaving together different ‘patches and pieces’ into something new. The patches and pieces may not all be new, but can be old borrowed and of a widely different fabric; yet in their combination they form a new patchwork.

During 8-10th of August 2005 six teams of young ‘power users’ worked intensively on addressing different open-ended learning challenges. This took place within a larger event and symposium arranged as part of the ‘Power Users of Technology Project’ – a research project formed around the hypothesis that young power users of technology might be learning, working and solving problems in new and innovative ways due to their intensified use of technology; and that we can gain valuable insights about the future design of education by studying young people and their use of technology in relation to learning and problem solving processes.

On basis of a close empirical examination of the Danish team of Power Users and their work on a self-chosen learning challenge this thesis argues how we can theoretically understand, analyse and methodologically approach learning processes through the metaphorical lens of ‘patchworking’. Furthermore, the thesis critically discusses the relations between youth, learning and technology and what valuable insight, for the future design of education, we might gain from studying young ‘power users of technology’.

See more here.

This week I have been participating in an interesting PhD course at Aalborg University entitled “Acting with Technology - Research Methods on Context and Change“. The course is mainly focusing on methodology and providing methods, tools and techniques for research on people acting with technology in various settings.

The course is divided into two parts. The first part consisted of sessions with local researchers Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Ellen Christiansen and Pirkko Raudaskoski focusing on e.g. problem based learning, user-driven innovation, action research, activity theory, ethnomethodology, Nexus Analysis and other related fields. I really enjoyed this first part of the course which both inspired me and assured me that I am on the right track in using Nexus Analysis as an overall methodology or research framework in my PhD project.

The second part of the course will take place in November and will be lead by professor and anthropologist Bonnie Nardi. I am sure that this part of the PhD course will be interesting too and I am looking forward to have Nardi commenting on my methodology and research design - especially the part where I plan to apply a multi-sited ethnographical approach.

By the way, here are five nice questions to consider in any PhD or research project:

• What is the problem (practical, societal, political, personal motivation, and scientific)?
• Who has the problem (different actors)?
• When did the problem come into existence (historical facts and historical development)?
• Why did the problem come into existence (causes and trends)?
• How can the problem be solved (methodology/design based research)?

From Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s slides.

My good colleague (and fiancée, I might add) Thomas Ryberg, just handed in his PhD thesis today. The thesis, which is almost 500 pages long, is called ‘Patchworking as a metaphor for learning - Understanding youth, learning and technology’ and amis at describing how the learning process of eight young ‘Power Users of Technology‘ can be understood. Read more about his project here.

I am tremendously proud of Thomas who I think did an amazing job (I hope I will be able to produce something which is just half as good when my turn is up).

Congrats to Thomas (the smartest man I know :-))

After the last couple of weeks of alternately being on holiday, working from home, writing paper etc. I am now back at the office and will be answering my mails and phone on a more regular basis.

Of course, I will also be blogging on a more regular basis - among other things I am about to examine the data I have collected from two online questionnaires on youth and social networking and I will probably be blogging about the results from time to time.

Additionally, this semester will be very busy for me. I have a lot of conferences and courses to attend, lectures to give and I am teaching and supervising 1st semester students at Humanistic Informatics at Aalborg University.