AoIR: Facebook is the new business card October 24, 2007
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Facebook.3 comments
I am now home in Denmark after two lovely weeks with conferences in Canada. The latest in Vancouver was Association of Internet Researchers‘ annual conference entitled Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play (which by the way will be held in Denmark next year at the IT University of Copenhagen – hooray). I really enjoyed the conference which was right up my alley with many of the sessions focusing on social networking. Especially, Facebook was a hot topic this year and many American researchers presented their work on Facebook’s entry among their students.
What is interesting (in a sort of meta way) is that Facebook now functions as academics’ business card. Instead of handing out our business cards when networking between sessions we would more often friend each other on Facebook. This, I find, has many advantages. I don’t have to keep track with a bunch of physical cards, all my contacts are stored in the same place, the site remembers them for me and the profile pictures make it easier to remember who is who.
By the way, it is interesting to see how Facebook is exploding in Denmark at the moment. As fellow researcher Lisbeth Klastrup has pointed out in a recent blog post more than 1500 Danes a day currently join Facebook.
4S: Slides for today’s presentation October 11, 2007
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences.1 comment so far
Today I presented a paper at the 4S conference here in Montreal as part of the session called “Ways of Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking”. Unfortunately, there was no LCD projector in the room where the session was held (!!!) . As you can probably imagine, it makes little sense to give a presentation on social practice and central mediated actions on a social networking site without any visualization in form of slides with screen shot examples.
Therefore, I have uploaded my PowerPoint-slides – they can be found here (2,5 MB).
The slides are interactive in the sense that the links in the text are clickable (click on link to get to picture, click on picture to return).
Leaving for conferences in Canada October 8, 2007
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences.add a comment
Tomorrow I am going to Copenhagen where I will be giving a guest lecture at the IT University in a digital culture-course.
The day after that I will leave for Montreal where I am participating in the 4S conference. Here I am presenting a paper in a session called “Ways of Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking”. The conference ends at the 13th and a few days later I will head on to another conference, the AoIR conference in Vancouver, where I will be presenting as well.
My paper for both conferences is entitled “Understanding Social Networking: On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online”. An abstract can be found here and the paper is available for download here.
I hope I will have time to do some blogging during the conferences. I will be back in Aalborg October 22nd.
Acting with Technology October 5, 2007
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Aalborg University, Academic, PhD, Technology.2 comments
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.