monika’s w e b l o g

I just came back from a trip to Leeds to meet my supervisors at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Nice that my student colleagues and me managed to plan this visit together in an informal setting – yeahh. Thus, discussing our work and working methods was an important part of the trip – how to face time management, drifting and shifting into new interesting themes all the time when deepening the research, deadline pressure, etc.

Contentwise, the following has been keeping me busy for quite a while now:
- If the distribution of weblog entries in my field study follows a Pareto distribution (or, eg, an exponential distribution as Michael Barber suggests), what consequences does it have for my research project? And what if there is no such distribution?
- As the discussion goes into social networks quite quickly, is it legitimate to use weblog entries (instead of for instance inbound links) for the study?

I hope to get back here with a clearer outline on this. Soon.

April 24th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

Yesterday I had a supervisory meeting with Michael Wagner in Krems. The discussion revealed many insights and points for deeper investigation.
Re my constant doubt whether to keep the focus purely on weblogs or extend it to related technologies, he suggested I defer this decision until I have a clearer view on whether and where my thoughts, ideas and research questions would fit into the scientific weblog discussion. This is a very useful advice.
20060719_RJ_michael.doc

July 20th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

I am glad to announce that Janet Finlay will from now on join the supervision team for my research project.
The idea was brought up last week in Leeds by my Director of Studies, David Moore, and Janet agreed on his suggestion.
I had the opportunity for an interesting discussion with Janet at the Research Conference, and I am looking forward to future exchange.

July 18th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

On July 12th I had a meeting with my supervisors David and Reinhold. We discussed the progress of the research, next steps, future communication. The major insight for me is that I will divide my empirical study into two parts instead of seeing it as one big block.
20060712_RJ_davidreinhold.doc

Afterwards I thougth about and discussed with one of my student colleagues about how far I could drive such a concept of modularising the empirical research – forming little objects perhaps? In a way that the object concept of weblog entries would be transferred to research objects? In this way, small portions of results would be available very fast, with the possibility of re-combining objects, also with other people in my research group, avoiding a time consuming unflexiblity.
I am not sure how scientific such a concept could be, though.

July 15th, 2006. von Administrator. (4) Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

Today I had the chance to meet Michael Schuster, project manager of twoday.net, Knallgrau. Knallgrau is providing the Weblog Service for all students at TU Vienna.
We discussed the process of my project and the work of other people researching on weblogs, but also my first ideas about which data might be of interest.
It was a very positive meeting and I am glad that Knallgrau will support me by providing data of the weblog-project for my research study. I am looking forward to the collaboration and the exchange of ideas.

May 15th, 2006. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: supervision. .

In the last days I had an intense and very helpful email-exchange with all three of my supervisors. I showed them last Monday’s presentation, and they brought in many interesting points for discussion. Additionally, I had a Skype-meeting with Reinhold on Friday.
Find a short summary of the discussions in the Reflective Journals:
20060404_RJ_davidreinholdmichael.doc (email-exchange)
20060406_RJ_reinhold.doc (skype-meeting)

A big point for me was the discussion whether the Technical University Vienna would provide a good test field for weblog usage in HE (huge amount of data, pilot project, unsecure comparability of data). All supervisors agree that in principle it should work out and provide useful data, if I “design” the test environment and research methods well. That’s a helpful confirmation of my plans and visions

April 8th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

I have a meeting with Michael Wagner in Krems to discuss about my research project.
My draft of thoughts, and the comments of Michael Wagner are collected in the reflective journal.

This is not the very webloggy way to publish thoughts, but I still have to figure out how to best structure and organize my thougths with the weblog…

February 10th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

Reinhold send some helpful feedback about my weblog via email and raises some questions.
Find summary in the reflective journal.

February 10th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

I contact my supervisors via email. I have the feeling to have found some of the key literature on constructivism. I hve started with a rough layout on how my review could be on it. David reminds me to keep in mind my RESEARCH QUESTION and build the literature review around it.
For more details, see the Reflective Journal.

BTW: What to do if the a-key on your laptop keyboard doesn’t work properly anymore?

January 10th, 2006. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .

Today we got assigned our supervisors from Krems University. My supervisor will be Michael Wagner. So I am glad to work from now on with David Moore (Director of Studies), Reinhold Behringer and Michael Wagner.

November 25th, 2005. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: supervision. .