Internet Research 9.0 April 28, 2008
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Conferences, Internet Research.3 comments
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 🙂
JCAL paper out – finally April 15, 2008
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Publications.add a comment
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.
Greetings from Vaasa! April 3, 2008
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Teaching, Travel.3 comments
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.
My PhD Blog 