voyeurism

Sony Ericsson

apologies for the radio silence last week - most of it was taken up by a Social Studies workshop i was conducting for a dozen very enthusiastic teachers - it was one of the most successful and enjoyable i've had the privilege of facilitating :-)

today, another important milestone was crossed.

i've been able to finalise the manufacturer of the phones that i would like to use in my study.

barring any unforseen obstacles, i'll be using handsets from Sony Ericsson . specifically which model, i haven't decided yet. the handset would have to be able to run Java, browse WAP sites and be able to take (and view) photographs.

Sony Ericsson has been extremely generous in their support of my project, and they have also been very prompt and courteous in their correspondence with me.

this contrasts sharply with _that_other_nordic_phone_company_, who wouldn't even give me the metaphorical time of day. the emails i received from them reflected that the person who was typing them (their so-called 'Marketing Communications Specialist') did not even have the courtesy to read my mails properly (and i had purposely kept them short and to-the-point, for fear of this very thing happening).

enough about them.

Sony Ericsson has been wonderful, and i intend to reciprocate the favour.

while i'm on the subject of acknowledgments, i'd like to, at this juncture, thank Karen Tan and Victor Lee from the InfoComm Development Authority of Singapore for their absolutely invaluable, and prompt, help. the two of you are terrific ambassadors for the IDA :-)

next on the horizon - i need to confirm which of the three telcos in Singapore will be providing the infrastructural support for my research.

:-)

"Let's get this show on the road"

okie!

two significant milestones today :-)

first, submitted my application package to CRPP. it contained all manner of documents, from transcripts, to sealed letters of reference, to certified true copies of my identity card, birth certificate, income tax assessment and my previous degrees :-P

there was even a recommended sequence in which to pack it :-P

for those of you who are thinking of applying for yourselves, you can download the documents from here.

second, i had a meeting with the Director of the School of Information & Communications Technology at Ngee Ann Polytechnic - Ms Angela Wee - and one of the lecturers - Agus Rahardja.

the meeting lasted about one-and-a-half hours.

there certainly seems to be scope for collaboration between the School, and CRPP. they suggest that our initial explorations could be with respect to developing the coding portion of my research study into a Final Year Project for one of the students in the Diploma in Information Technology (Mobile Computing) course.

i'll be working with Agus to ensure that the coding requirements will be sufficiently challenging for the appointed student. if all goes well, coding will take place from this November to May 2004.

it's been a tiring but fulfilling day... :-)

information ecologies

guess what...

after three months, one of the universities i applied to wrote me.

the gentleman suggested that my research proposal (that's the original unwieldy one, the one where i wanted to study everything and anything related to pedagogical uses of the mobile internet) be _expanded_ :-P

to quote him "the range of the PhD work would need to be broader"

hmm....

i don't think so :-P

one good thing did come out of the mail, though.

the gentleman proposed that the "approach" i take be that of 'information ecologies'.

i did as he recommended and input the term into a search engine (google), and the most useful page i was able to come up with was this . this was published in 1999. the passage of four years in internet time is an eternity. and if you think that piece is anachronistic, have a look at this :-P

reading Nardi & O'Day's work, it struck me at first that the concept of information ecologies would indeed be quite useful in analysing my research. for example, they come up with phrases such as "in each of these settings, humans help other humans use technology"; and "We introduce the concept of the information ecology in order to focus attention on relationships involving tools and people and their practices. We want to travel beyond the dominant image of the tool metaphor, an image of a single person and his or her interactions with technology. And we want to capture a notion of locality that is missing from the system view." All sounds pretty promising so far, doesn't it?

But whoa there... read the first quotation carefully, about humans helping other humans use technology. that's _not_quite_ what my research will be about. instead my focus is more on humans helping other humans _through_ technology.

a subtle but all important difference.

further problems emerge on a closer inspection.

under their heading 'characterising information ecologies', Nardi & O'Day write "In an information ecology, there are different kinds of people and different kinds of tools. In a healthy information ecology, they work together in a complementary way."

again, this seems to be straying beyond the purview of my proposed research, in which i will be using fairly homogenous groups (in fact, social software augments _existing_ social groups), and primarily one kind of tool (MMS-capable handphones).

i think one of the most interesting aspects of Nardi & O'Day's writings, with regards to information ecologies, is when they write about the importance of, as they express it, 'locality'.

to quote them again: "The notion of 'a local habitation and a name' captures for us the essence of an information ecology. The name of a technology identifies what it means to the people who use it. We do not just refer to what the technology is called, but to how people understand the place it fills. The identity of the technology is different in each of these local settings because the perceived role, availability, utility, and other properties of the machines are different. The habitation of a technology is its location within a network of relationships. To whom does it belong? To what and to whom is it connected? Through what relations?"

some quite deep stuff, there.

but again, at the very most, only obliquely relevant to my proposed study. the focus of Nardi & O'Day, at least as far as i can interpret it, seems to be continually on the technology, rather than the human activities which the technology affords. this seems to me to be the case, despite their protestations to the contrary.

to summarise then, while i had at first thought of information ecologies as a possible precursor to social software, i now view them as fairly different. while the former seems to me to focus on the unique relations which groups of people build towards the technological tools they use, the latter focusses on how information technology reinforces (or weakens) existing relations among people themselves.

the latter, to me, seems so much more worthy of investigation :-)

flux

wow.

in the twelve days since my meeting with john and sengchee, a lot has happened.

also, it turns out that i spoke a little too soon about being able to confirm my supervisors. for reasons which i won't go into here (for the sake of his privacy), sengchee regretfully had to pull out of our endeavour. i'm still in the process of negotiating a second sup, but things are looking good and i should be able to confirm matters by the weekend. watch this space.

now for the notes of the meeting.

thank God that my tightened and expanded research proposal was received positively. one very good idea was to have at least one of the orienteering activities (either the 'tourism' or 'environment' one) conducted at Pulau Ubin. the idea was also floated about seeking to interest the Singapore Tourism Board in the study :-P

john also suggested that i make more explicit a couple of the research questions, along the following lines:

- how do pupils seek to explore and understand the local environment in which they find themselves?
- how are such understandings of three-dimensional environments communicated, through text, pictures and video, with their peers and friends?
- what are the mechanisms (including textual and non-textual cues) which teens employ to coach their peers to successfully navigate alien environments?
- how can the technologies of social software, specifically messaging technologies of the mobile internet, augment and/or detract from the processes of making and sharing meaning about place?

(that last question has remained unmodified)

finally, the proposal is at a sufficiently developed stage that i think about preparing a budget for it.

i'll work on that tonight :-)

birth pangs

i've decided to post a brief chronology of how it was that i finally made the decision to begin my doctoral studies.

pursuing a doctorate has been something which i have been toying with since my time in Boston, back in '99. but i did not really go beyond getting various prospectuses, mainly because i did not at that time have a topic which i felt would be able to hold my attention for a few years :-)

from what i have dug up, i first resurrected the idea seriously in December '02 (upon secondment to the National Institute of Education (NIE)). that was when i revisited the websites of various universities and printed out as much stuff as i could find on procedures and requirements. this time, i was also serious enough to request transcripts from the various universities that i had studied in thus far, as well as applying for a GRE test date. although i cannot recall exactly how it was that i decided upon pedagogical applications of the mobile internet as my broad theme of research, i do know that i did spend the rest of the month writing my initial two-page research proposal (alas, i do not have a copy of that).

in January, i took my GRE test, as well as attended a couple of education fairs about studying in Australia. by this time, my research proposal had expanded to six pages (single-line-spacing).

in February, i went down under for a recce trip. It was also in that month when, during one of the orientation sessions organised for new staff, i found out about the work of Lim Cher Ping, right here in my workplace at the NIE. In 2001, he and several others had carried out some research on text messaging. Needless to say, i initiated contact with Cher Ping, and later Seng Chee that same month.

in March, i had my first meeting with Sengchee, and also contacted Allan Luke, who is Dean of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP).

last month (May) i was able to confirm, by the grace of God, both Sengchee and John as my supervisors. that brings the story up-to-date :-)

research questions

for the past three days, i've been working on refining my research proposal (which has grown from six pages to twelve :-P ), based on the suggestions made by john and sengchee during our meeting on saturday.

on saturday itself i did not do any work, but on sunday i spent some time trying to reformulate my research questions, based on the tighter draft (which essentially describes how multimedia messaging might be used in orienteering, in order to get glimpses into how teenagers construct and share meanings about space and place) which i had been asked to submit earlier in may (that same draft was approved in principle during saturday's meeting).

i had a block on sunday, while trying to reformulate the research questions. i kept running into the wall of thinking that i should investigate demographic determinants of the degree of success / failure of textual and non-textual clues during the proposed orienteering activities. if i had gone down that road for the actual research, i would have ended up in a quagmire of statistical analyses.

then i went for a walk to clear my head and i was able to shift my paradigm, towards differentiated curricular tasks, based on the various high-stakes topics in the Geography elective at the 'O' level national examinations, instead of the demographic determinants problem.

so, just so that you can gain a better understanding of just how tightly my study has been focussed so far, here's a comparison of my old research questions, and the present ones :-)

first, the old:

What affordances of the mobile internet offer opportunities to improve teaching and learning, and in which specific ways?
How can technologies of the mobile internet change the way content is delivered in and out of the classroom?
Which specific demographic and socio-economic groups would benefit most from instruction which uses the mobile internet as a complementary technology?
How will such technologies change how values are imparted, and how schools are managed?
To what extent will these changes facilitate greater and more timely communication between teachers and the wider school community (such as parents and counsellors)?

now, the new:

How do pupils make meaning of the local environment in which they find themselves?
How is this meaning shared with their peers and friends?
What are the mechanisms (including textual and non-textual cues) which teens employ to teach their peers to help themselves?
How can the technologies of social software, specifically messaging technologies of the mobile internet, augment and/or detract from the processes of making and sharing meaning about place?

i'm going to bed now...