About research blogging

This autumn there was a slight stir in the Norwegian blog arena, as the forskning.no, the web site associated with the Norwegian Research Council, started a blogg with invited guest bloggers. Jill criticised the style and approach, while I said "yes please, and can I bring some friends?" when I was approached and asked if I wanted to blog for them.

It's the "bring some friends" part I am the most happy about, and it's also starting to spread on the blog. At first we (Ragnhild Trondstad, Kristine Jørgensen and me) were the only ones who blogged under a common name - spillforskerne, "the game researchers." Now there are more groups popping up, such as the sports researchers and the welfare researchers.

At the beginning, the blogs were an odd mix of too long and too heavy articles which could just as well have been printed in a journal, and too light articles which looked like "sex-in-the-city-goes-to-university." Now, a few months into the project, most of the bloggers have learned. Today's blogger is a typical and very good example. He's the dean of the medical faculty in Trondheim, but just before Christmas he slipped on the ice, fell, and broke 4 ribs. This leads to reflection on his field - medicine. A personal experience combines with his expertise to a process of contemplation and reflection which leads to sharing with others.

While this is not exactly blogging about ongoing research, it definitely communicates research. He links to other people's research, he puts it into a larger context, and he personalises it through sharing his thought process. By doing this he also describes how integrated research and reflection is in the life of researchers. He opens up to the process. Instead of spending his time dwelling on his considerable pain, he searches for a distraction through his job. Most researchers recognize this feeling. It's why we work until we get repetitive stress injuries, until we burn out, or until we are numbed with pains from the neck to the butt.

Also, he answers the question "when do you get time to work?" We get time to work all the time. Most of the researchers who publish regularly, who search for new projects and are active in their fields display a deep and abiding interest in the field, and can work while having a conversation with their children, going for a walk, or reconvalescing after accidents.

Of course, this means that we never really get to work. When you have the job pulling at you constantly, you're also constantly interrupted. The child does not want to listen to your lecture, your partner needs to talk about his own things while walking, the painkillers takes away your ability to really focus. Not to mention the distractions during the work hours. Students, lectures, meetings, colleagues, phones, assessments, reviews, deadlines, budgets, equipment - where are the ivory towers when we need one?

All of this is very nicely displayed on forskning.no. The system used for blogging is still not the best, and the approval process is comparably slow. But it has a good balance between the personal and the professional, it presents the people behind the research, and it's the most popular page on an already quite popular website.

It's the week before Christmas

Everything is slowly falling into place. The subject for which I am responsible this spring is taking shape. I have a few interesting dates for lectures and other public appearances in place. I am for instance scheduled to be part of Faltin Karlsen's defense in January. There are a couple of great people coming here to talk to the students. The book is finally out of my hands, and with the publisher, not to return here until in March, when the publishing date is.

I will be insanely busy during the Christmas week, but it will be good busy. I have to write a first draft for an article on e-learning and games, and for this I am planning to follow up the topic of theorycrafting and crowdsourcing. This means I have to read up on literature on how to be a better gamer, and test the theories out in World of Warcraft. Oh, the sacrifices we do for research. It all falls into the cross-over community topic I started to look into for the IR 9.0 conference in October 08, and aims at more work on collaborations and participation using multiple platforms. More about that later, I hope.

A lot of the work I am doing on games is now slowly falling into place with the work I have been doing on social software and the social web. Patterns are emerging in ways that makes it a lot easier to, for instance and rather unexpectedly makes it easier to lecture on Public Relations - which I am now doing regularly again after a break while in Umeå. I have always been in love with the process of seeing connections, caught in the web of knowledge as I am.

Now it's finally stopepd raining, after a week. The storm has relented, and I am optimistic about people coming home for Christmas. I'll be celebrating in one of the few spots the family controls which is still free from internet access: my mother's house, where I grew up with the most beautiful view I have ever lived with. It will be busy, messy, loud and not peaceful at all. But it will be a very different kind of mess, and I can't wait.

Wishlist

It's December 1st, and the kids have started hinting at what they want for Christmas. In that spirit, I have been trying to figure out what I want.

New umbrella.
I just went to Oslo and was dressed for cold, but ended in rain, with no umbrella. Home I checked the family store of umbrellas. We have loads of them, but only one or two that actually work, and none of the broken ones are worth repairing. So, a new umbrella, one with patterns and colour, strong enough to endure wind, but small enough to fit in the computer backpack.

Alice B. Toklas cookbook.
I got one years ago from one of my sisters, and I loved it. So did one of my friends, and she loved it so much it never returned. I'd really prefer to have the missing one back, but the recently published Norwegian translation would be good too. And no, I have never tried the brownies.

A red purse.
I have found the perfect shoes (despite not being able to search Copenhagen for them in October) for the Christmas parties this year, and now what I lack is a purse to match. As age progresses, I find that I need somewhere to put my reading glasses when I go out! So it has to be just big enough for a pair of glasses, some cards, cash, keys and a cellphone, and a deep, rich red. Yep, I have seen some already, but I just can't bring myself to paying 6-7000 kroner for something I'll use 5 times. Then I'd rather save the money for a lap-top for when I work at home, a semi-portable one that would be perfect in front of the television - but not really on the road. I'd use that probably about 340 days a year.

And that's where it stops. Somehow, my desire for more objects into my life has become quite limited. Sure, I'll be happy for presents, and there are things that make my life easier. I am starting to accumulate shopping bags, for instance - little nylon ones that lie peacefully in the pocket until I go shopping and say a slightly smug "no thank you" to the disposable plastic bags. Now, one may ask if it's better to have several nylon bags than plastic, but I have seen it work: bringing a bag keeps the content of the plastic-bag drawer down.

And that brings me to what I really want for Christmas. I need to unclutter my life. It feels like I just accumulate, rather than throw away. So if you have a brilliant de-clutterer...

Blogfest in Urbino

I have just learned that Fabio Giglietto and Luca Rossi are a great team when it comes to cooking up original, entertaining and intellectually challenging events. They are also great fun to hang out with, but I knew that.

As a lot of the Academic BarCamp lectures during the Festival dei Blog were in Italian, I didn't get it all, all the time. But the open-source schedule was pretty full:

A BarCamp is supposedly all about self-organisation, which meant that if you wanted to go here and give a lecture, you could. But they had made sure to get some people who were actually prepared, by both using invitations and online scheduling. Still, I had to be quick at the board to keep my original time and place for the lecture.

One of the most interesting observations was how important this event was to Italian media. Fabio mostly, but also Luca, were chased by people with cameras all over Urbino. I only saw Fabio stand still when in front of a camera:


Another interesting aspect was how much the "play" part counted for the festival. It's a cliche how much more spontaneous and playful Italians are than us steady, slow Norwegians, but sometimes those stereotypes do fit. The Italian blogosphere is a lot more interested in meeting, making out, and playing, than our rather slow and carefully considered bloggers. Would we have been able to organise a Twitter game in the middle of a Norwegian small town Sunday at noon? I think not. First, nobody would be there. Second, if a stranger wanted to tie a black thread around a strangers wrist and parade him or her in front of a judge to prove they had found a "follower", it would have been considered weird at best, threatening and offensive would have been more likely.


This was just part of an event where the participants also had to run around in Urbino guided by coordinates and google map from point to point. This is when the second stereotype about Italians decided to strike, and the entire net in that part of Italy collapsed. No fear though. True geeks have satelite links, or girlfriends with 'net connections. So when the "Blog olympics" were done, it was time for prizes. And of course, the media documented this extremely important sports event:


And then there were just a few more interviews, before the event could be wrapped up:


And if you still would like to see my lecture, it is on this site, but you have to pick "barcamp" on the tags over the initial movie, then scroll down on the right to my name, and then cross your fingers that it will eventually show up.

SEB bank and evil overlords

I have blogged before about my problems with banks, personal numbers and bureaucracy while living in Sweden. I thought I was out of it and had finished with the whole thing. It turns out I am not yet done.

As I left Sweden, I was still waiting for one last payment. I had tried to get the money while I could still take them out from a Swedish bank, so I could finish the account properly, but they didn't arrive. As it was a sum of some substance I didn't want to just forget about it, and by the time I found the money hadn't been paid while I was still in Sweden, it was too late to change method of payment. So, I made a deal with the SEB bank. I'd empty the account from Norway, down until I had less than 100 S kr left. Then they would close the account on a certain date, if it contained less than 100 S kr.

A few days before the set date the money arrived, and I cleaned out the account and cut the card to pieces. End of story, I thought.

Not that easy.

Turns out I in the process of ending it, ended up owing the bank. Not a big sum, about the same as the bank could potentially have owed me as part of the deal to close the account. I was really surprised, I had a debet card after all, I thought I couldn't take out more than I had in the account.

The problem is, I am about to ruin my credit record over a ridiculous sum, because I thought the story was over, so I didn't change the address on the account and hence got no notifications - and the bank didn't agree with me, and didn't cancel the account, and sent notifications to the old address.

So now with the expenses, the amount has doubled several times. What I owed by the time the University in Umeå forwarded my mail is no longer something I could have asked a friend in Sweden to cover, and I need to figure out a way to pay. Of course talking to the Norwegian SEB doesn't help. I need to deal with SEB Sweden, and that I have already discovered several times over is not particularly easy.

Oh well, this is the punishment for thinking something could be easily fixed, and systems are fool-proof. Both assumptions are wrong, at least in this case. So here I go again, the saga of Swedish banking continues...

Still not really real

I just downloaded the copyedited files from Peter Lang publishers. I haven't looked at them yet. It's too scary. It's worse than an exam. Perhaps even worse than getting the evaluation of my Ph D. I am hoping people will read this, I mean, real people, not just five peers who are equally geeky and nerdy as me anyway.

Well, now I know what I'll be doing: Reading my manuscript. Just in case anybody worried I'd be bored, now that I am back in Volda. I am not. Instead I am scared.

Last two weeks

I have been travelling again, and it's been fantastic. Last night was not so fun though, back home here I was treated to some seriously bad weather: full storm, rain and some sleet, planes that were cancelled, busses that didn't arrive and ferries we luckily did catch. So you'll get the reports from Urbino, Venice, Copenhagen and Oslo a little later. Two academic gatherings, several meetings and a seminar is going to take a little time to process and blog properly anyway.

Web stream from Urbino

Not live, but as soon as it's coded my talk, which startet 15.30, will be on this site.

At 16.18 what you can see there is Fabio Giglietto introducing the Blogfest, together with Maz Hardey.

Research blogging and blog norms

Forskning.no, the news portal associated with The Research Council of Norway, has just started a blog. It's a site where researchers contribute to a national project of making research easier accessible and visible in Norway. Apart from their normal journalistic work, they have cooperated in many different ways with research and educational communities in universities and colleges. My own students have for instance in many different periods written for forskning.no, and had their articles edited, commented on and published by specialists - an extremely useful exercize for students of Public Information.

Jill Walker Rettberg, probably the most highly profiled blogger in Norwegian academia, is however not happy with the blog as it's organised. She wants technical changes, more specialised blog-tools and different behaviour from the bloggers. I agree with her comments on form (we agree on a lot of stuff, as long-time readers of our blogs know), and have already communicated much the same to forskning.no, making it clear that our blog will not look quite like what they have published so far. But it's going to take a little while yet until I get on with blogging there and get to see how much of her criticism of the tool and of NFR's policy of blogging that is too-the-point, and how much is just a matter of letting a new group and a new publisher get some time to settle into their role.

As for the comments on payment - one of the responsibilities of a publicly paid academic is to participate in the public debate. Yes, there should be ways to register blogging in a way that would give us "points" when counting publications, and I am certain this would propel Norwegian academics into a blogging frenzy all over the country. However, we are already paid to be part of a public exchange of thoughts and ideas. No, I wouldn't turn down the money if forskning.no paid me for this. But yes, I am willing to do it because it's part of what I am supposed to do.

And what am I going to do?

What is taking a little time to organise is a group-blog within the framework of forskning.no. Three other Norwegian game researchers are joining me, and we will be blogging on game research. The first post on this blog is circulating among the bloggers as we speak. I promise, the first blogpost will be about establishing the blog, its topic and style, as well as introducing the bloggers and saying a fw words about game research. After the first post it's free for all: to engage with the field of game research according to the preferences of each blogger. We will produce at least one post every second week, which means a minimum of one post every two months as we are four. This is not an unreasonable amount of text. Most likely we will produce more, long and short posts, and forskning.no will pick a post to feature on the front page when they see something they like.

Will we adhere to Jill's style demands? Sometimes. Will it be a brilliant blog by experienced bloggers? Sometimes. But blogging is about more than one style. Blogging is about freedom of expression, of the potential of the writer and the tool, and about the choices made in a process, not according to some already set norm. If it was not about breaking norms of publishing and experimenting with form, blogging would not have developed much in the first place, would it?

Festival of blogs

I have been invited by the wonderful people at the University of Urbino "Carlo Bo" to join them for the blogfest in October 10th - 12th. I have promised to contribute to the barcamp, and am looking wildly forwards to it.

I am planning to talk about topics which will become the main focus for my research for the next year or so: the playing of the web. One of my very early hypotheses, and the reason why I started studying computer games, was that the new technology invites an approach which is more playful than mundane. In order to understand this hunch, I had to explore games and theory around games. Well, with one thing and the other, I have been doing that for a while. Now it's time to lift my nose out of the virtual worlds and start drawing the lines from the game-projects I have been involved in, and to larger contexts.

While Italy looks like a counter-productive place to start discussing these topics, as I am afraid I won't be able to get as much out of the general activities as I would in a place where I could understand all of the language, I am looking forwards to hang out with Luca and Fabio and the rest of the crowd from Urbino, and I'll ruthlessly make them listen to me, as well as translate what I don't "get".

Secret blogs

Once upon a time I had a secret blog. Many others did as well, and some were shared: For a while several of your established blogging researchers shared one. Some of these secret blogs were not all that secret, as we told each other about them. It was blogs about things too personal to share under our own names, but sometimes too painful or too exiting to hide. I have deleted most of those secret blogs, but some are still out there, even beyond my control. Life moves on, the immediately urgent topic is not so urgent any more, things change and passwords get lost. The ones that are now lost are not particularly personal though, so I don't fear to be tracked own and have to face them.

When I thought about these secret blogs now, it is because I suddenly intensely miss having one. I wish there was a spot in the blogosphere where I could write about personal grief and anger, in such a way that it would not harm me or anybody else, but I could still voice it. By writing it, giving words to my frustration, I could release it, forget the password and move on. But I have no more secret blogs, and I don't believe in that kind of exorcism for this. It creates no bonds and no protection against shifts in priorities, guilt, anger and the desire to rewrite history.

Still, I know the attraction of the secret blog. I'd write about it there, my anger, my disappointment, my grief. Instead I have to rewrite and sublimate it all into a metapost, a post about the usefullness of a certain type of blogs.