Follow-up

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End of the term. Time for a follow-up of some of this spring's projects - or at least the ones that I have written about on the blog.

January
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I went to the Center for Sustainable Communications' (CESC's) workshop and thought that it was a kick-off for generating ideas for new projects for phase three (2012-2015) of the center's 10-year life span. After the workshop nothing much happened for some weeks and then, in the beginning of February, I got an e-mail that thanked all the workshop participants for the "great contributions". After some back-and-forth mail conversation I realized that I, and everyone else who wasn't already in the loop, had little to say, and little to contribute to the project-generation process and, by extension, little to contribute to the research projects that would run in phase three, and to the center in general. That was a bummer (that was an understatement). Everyone is "welcome to participate in CESC activities" up to but (for the most part) excluding participating in formulating and participating in research projects during the next three (or perhaps five - who knows) years. That would not be strange but for the fact that this center is actually hosted by my school (Computer Science and Communication) - even though few researchers and ph.d. students from my school are actually involved in CESC activities. Strange.

I handed in no less than two small-ish applications for internal pedagogical means (KTH/School of Computer Science and Communication). One project was granted money ("Supporting students' studying habits in the age of procrastination). Me and my colleague Björn Hedin can work with this project 80 hours each during the next academic year and I will thus come back to this topic later on the blog. But the brunt of the work will be done next spring as both me and Björn have most of our courses happen during the autumn.

The other application ("Better project courses") was neither granted nor rejected, but I was rather asked to think through and rework the application (it was on the "maybe" list for getting a grant). After thinking about it I decided not to. It all of a sudden felt like a very bureaucratic process, and like it furthermore required a lot of work for what in the end is really very little money. What's the point of spending a whole day re-writing an application where I only ask for money for 10 days worth of work? And furthermore, I strongly suspected that I had promised too much in terms of results for a pittance of money/time. Since I had already been granted money for one project I also felt it would be difficult to keep two such small projects in the air at the same time and deliver according to the promises.


February
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I handed in no less than two applications to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, but after having waited for two months, I found out that both were rejected. That is ok, the competition was really tough (less than 12% of the 899 applications went on to the second round and only half of those applications end up with grants (i.e. one in 17). What I don't like though is that there was no feedback whatsoever beyond the nugget of information that related the fact that the application had in fact been rejected. After having put so much time and energy (unpaid of course) into writing these applications, I do have to say that I find it disheartening and nothing less than disrespectful to not even get some feedback in the form of a sentence of a paragraph of text.

I went to a workshop, "Beyond sports vs games" to discuss the material I have collected on programming competitions. I feel really bad about the fact that I haven't had time to look at and analyze the material (interviews) that I collected in the beginning of the year... :-(


March
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I sent an abstract, "Beyond web 2.0: Post-collapse computing" to the Internet 13.0 conference. I was quite surprised when it was rejected. Especially as the two reviewers gave it 73 and 70 out of 100. The abstract was evaluated based on content (25%), significance (20%), presentation (20%) and recommendation (35%) and both reviewers gave me sixes (twice), sevens (thrice) and eights (thrice) and it was still rejected. WTF!? Interesting process though, with the weights and a resulting numeric value between 1 and 100. I sent a reworked version of the abstract to another conference three weeks ago (The 3rd International conference on degrowth, ecological sustainability and social equity). Lets see how it fares there.

I wrote about our upcoming course on "Sustainability and Media Technology" and expect to come back to that topic (probably several times) when the autumn term starts. The course itself starts on Tuesday August 28.

I handed in two abstracts (based on the RJ application above) to the workshop "Articulating alternatives". Both were rejected. Again, WTF!? "We have received a large volume of abstracts of a very high quality and [...] we regret to information you that on this occasion your proposal has not been selected". Perhaps I should have been a little more candid in my blog post about the workshop. I criticized some aspects of the workshop call and could have been more diplomatic ("The call could easily have been cut down by a third [as it] partly repeats or states similar or overlapping concepts and ideas several times and/or in different places"). I know for a fact that the organizers read the blog post before they made their decision (quite some traffic from Britain the very day before I got the rejection) and I hope that didn't play into their decision...? Something to think about for next time though...

I also handed in two more applications, but haven't heard anything about them yet. One will get back to me before the end of the month, while the other will take a few more months before they make their decision.

April
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I've met my career coach only twice this far. There could have been time to meet for a third time before the summer, but that didn't happen both because of me and because of him. We have both been slow at different times. I look forward to continuing/finishing the program during the autumn.


It felt like May just happened, so there isn't that much to follow up yet.

Have a nice summer!

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Books I've read lately

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"Books I've read recently" is a recurring topic and here is the previous blog post (same topic, different books). I'm finally starting to catch up with writing about the books I've read recently - as apart from books I read "some time ago". I read the book below in February and March. All three books below are about sustainability and all three are edited books with collections of texts.  

Heinberg and Lerch's "The post carbon reader: Managing the 21st century's sustainability crises" (2010) is published by the Post Carbon Institute, an American think-tank and non-profit organization "leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world". They have around thirty experts ("fellows") in their stable and many of them have written chapters for this book, ranging from climate and culture to economy and education (and much in-between). The quality of the texts are high and several texts made a big impression on me in this hefty (34 chapters, 450 pages long) book. It's difficult to say something about an edited book since it collects many diverse voices on many different topics, but I very much recommend this book. A major part of the book (30 chapters!) is available online - enjoy!

Douthwaite and Fallon's edited book has a great title, "Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse" (2011), but does not live up to the level set by the Post carbon reader. This book is put together by another think-tank, the Irish Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) who aims to identify characteristics of a truly sustainable society and then to articulate and promote its implementation. Editor Douthwaite (a co-founder of Feasta) died half a year ago. Unfortunately, the quality of the texts are mixed, and a few were not very good. What furthermore irritated me was that it was hard to find a focus and a red thread as some texts treated big, global challenges, and other texts treat a (very) specific project. Some texts treated issues mostly of interest to Irish readers and perhaps of less interest to others. The texts were also of varying length (ranging from 5 to 30 pages) and the impression I got as a reader was that book was fragmented, and that some texts should have been rejected. Perhaps the core idea of the book should have been communicated better to prospective authors so as to get a more cohesive end result!

Finally I read Kingsnorth and Hine's edited book "Dark Mountain (Issue 1)" (2010). The Dark Mountain Project is a strange beast, "a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself. We see the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it." The Dark Mountaineers are "beyond environmentalism" - they have stopped believing the world can be saved and that (climate- or other human-imposed global) disasters can be averted. So they mourn, but they also try to find reasons to rejoice and find happiness in a world heading in the wrong direction. This book was even more eclectic than "Fleeing Vesuvius", but it never attempted to be anything other than a literary experiment. Beyond (quite different) texts (essays), it also contains fiction, drawings, poetry and photos. The quality varies, there were a few great texts - for example editor Kingsnorth's own text - but let's just say that the recently-printed Volume 2 and the soon-to-be-printed Volume 3 hasn't made it to my to-buy list. Another quirky detail was that you could only pay for the book with a PayPal account (which I don't have, so it was kind of a hassle - but this might have changed since I bought the book). 

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Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)

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My department, the whole School of Computer Science and Communication, and, as far as I know, all the other schools at KTH have undergone a so-called Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) this spring. RAE is apparently (according to Wikipedia) something that comes from the UK:

"...an exercise undertaken approximately every 5 years [...] to evaluate the quality of research undertaken by [all] British higher education institutions."

KTH has/will be visited by "Around 100 internationally renowned experts from academia and private industry [...] in June to evaluate 47 research areas". Just search for "KTH" and "RAE" if you are interested in finding out more about RAE, or about the previous KTH RAE (from 2008).


Much energy and time has been spent to collect information for the upcoming RAE during the spring (publications etc.). A report about our research area ("Unit of Assessment") - Mediated Communications - has been written and this week, finally, the experts came to talk to (or "interrogate"?) us.

I gave a 10-minute presentation about the Sustainability Team that I'm leading. Not that there is that much to say - we formally started up our activities only during the 2nd half of the spring term and have met only a few times this far. But, it's of course always possible to talk about our perspective on things (e.g. regarding sustainability and ICT), about individuals members in the team and their/our projects, about the new course (Sustainability and Media Technology) that we are giving after the summer, about what we want to do in the team (soon, or in the future) etc. I filled up my 10 minutes and actually got a lot said. I talked fast and I think (hope) I made my point. Or a point at the least.

No less than 8 teams and 2 "impact case studies" were presented and it took 3.5 hours altogether including a coffee break and a presentation of the whole research group/department. We also had a general rehearsal in the beginning of the week (another 4 hours). I honestly think that I have also spent at least 4 more hours (but probably more like 8 hours) putting together my presentation, revising my presentation and practicing the delivery. I had to create some new slides and even more importantly, I had to think through how I could position, and what I could say about our team. It's kind of absurd, but I think I have thus spent at least 1.5 full days, or perhaps even 2 full days, working on and with this 10-minute presentation.

On the positive side, it forced me to both flesh out and then distill my message, and it did give me a chance to communicate my/our sustainability perspective not just to the "jury" (the invited experts), but also to my colleagues and my bosses. I also learned more about what my colleagues do and that was in fact great. But still... 1.5 or 2 days of work for a 10-minutes presentation... I hope I at least will have much use for it later. The presentation is so compact, and I had to take so much out that I think I could easily expend it into a 45- and probably even a 90-minute lecture if I add some additional material. Now it's over and I can concentrate on other stuff that urgently needs to be done before I go on vacation.


Below is a nice picture from the slide set I used. It builds on a text I wrote quite some time ago about the inexpensiveness of electricity (compared to, say, a hundred years ago). My conclusion was that energy, for all practical purposes and from a historical perspective, basically is free today. Or, if not exactly free, then at least "too cheap to meter". The examples in the slide below would not have been possible though, were it not for this great blog post about "free energy" by Barath Raghavan. For some reason I just didn't think about "free energy" in exactly these terms before I read his blog post. Do notice the aesthetics of the pictures and the almost total absence of people. The meta-message is that not only is energy free/too cheap to meter, but we are liberally squandering it today by illuminating roads even when no-one drives on them etc.

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Media Technology bachelor's theses spring 2012

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I wrote a blog post recently about the five bachelor's theses that I have been the advisor of during the spring. This is the complementary blog post about the ten bachelor's thesis that I was the examiner of (only nine a listed below - the tenth is not finished yet and is a special case).

Being the examiner means that I read them quite carefully and prepared constructive critique as well as later also grading them. These theses (below) however only represent 1/3 of the theses that our students wrote this spring - so the title of this blog post is slightly misrepresentative.

I will later update this blog post and add links to the theses (they will all be published on the web - eventually). I especially liked the first four thesis below, they are more-or-less impeccably done and for the most part represent all you can ask for in a bachelor's thesis.

- Cedergren & Hellman, "Smartphone applications: The future tool for vocabulary learning?". Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Florell & Berg, "Automatisk incheckning för att förenkla kontakt i större organisationer" ["Automated check in to aid communication at large organizations"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Andersson & Dawoud, "Supplementary video lectures and open educational resources in contemporary university mathematics. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Hammarbäck & Höglund, "Mattespel - vägen till bättre matematikundervisning? En studie på effekterna av spelifierade matematikläromedel för gymnasieskolan" ["Math games - Towards a better math education?: A study of the effects of gamified math education for upper high school"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

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- Andersson & Jonell, "Utveckling av ett motiverande gränssnitt för inlärning: motivations- och prestationsaspekter" ["Developing a motivating interface for learning: aspects of motivation and performance"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Juntti & Lilja, "Föreläsningsbaserade interaktiva Sceencasts" ["Lecture-based interactive screencasts"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Hernandez & Huanca, "Användarstudie av mobila textmeddelandesystem" ["User study of mobile applications for text messaging"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Bergsmark & Nothnagel, "Virtuell handel i onlinespel ur spelares perspektiv" ["Real-Money-Trade in online games from the player's perspective"]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Janarv & Warne, "New incentives for players in virtual goods trade: How the marketplace in Diablo 3 changes trade with virtual goods". Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).
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Articles I've read lately (May)

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Just as last month, my 30-day promise for May was to "to read an average of 10 pages of academic articles every weekday and preferably at work rather than home". The result has been so-so for two different reasons:

- A deadline for an article made itself known and I had to exchange a lot of the readings on my literature/article reading list. I have little idea if I managed to reach the 220 pages that was the goal for May, but I presume I didn't (see below). I organized the texts-to-be-read into four neat weekly folders at the beginning of the month, but new stuff "jumped the queue" and I have "pushed forward" 2.5 out of 4 weekly folders. They sit on my desk and beg to be read in June instead...

- Bachelor's thesis season. In the first half of the month I had to read the five thesis that I'm the advisor of and in the second half of the month I instead had to read the ten thesis that I was the examiner of. These 30+ pages long documents have to be read quite carefully and with some attention to detail, and 15 thesis ≈ 500 pages of text that needed to be read urgently. This took a huge bite out of the time I had for reading stuff in May.

Taking this into account, I'm pleasantly surprised it turned out that I still managed to read 15 texts this month, although I believe the average length of the texts (articles) is low and I'm quite sure they together don't reach the 220 page-goal for the month of May. Some of the texts are purebred bona fide academic articles and others are of "mixed origin". The articles can for the most part easily be found through Google Scholar. Do note that I have added a "tag" below, "unpublished", referring to things that are not available on the web and most probably will never be (so don't bother looking for them...). Here are the 15 texts I read min May with a short comment about each of them:

• Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 503-512). ACM. */ One of articles that kicked off the field of Sustainability and/in HCI. The articles summarizes and proposes a program for going forward. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Eriksson, E. (2012 - unpublished). The oh so not written thesis - A jumble of UCD, sensemaking, organizational change and people. */ Written for an internal doctoral conference/colloquium at my department. I was the designated opponent. UCD = User-Centered Design.
• Hall, C. A., Balogh, S., & Murphy, D. J. (2009). What is the minimum EROI that a sustainable society must have? Energies, 2(1), 25-47. Molecular Diversity Preservation International. */ What Energy Return on Investment (EROI) (i.e. how much surplus energy) must our energy sources have in order for us to be able to maintain our civilization? The fact that we always go for the lowest-hanging fruit will turn out to become increasingly problematic in the (close) future as we have to switch from "better" to "worse" energy sources. 
• Hecker, T. E. (2007). The post-petroleum future of academic libraries. Journal of scholarly publishing, 38(4), 183-199. UT Press. */ What is the future of (academic) libraries and librarians after we are hit by peak oil and we start to abandon unsupportable technologies? "This article presents informed speculation about the place of academic libraries in the resource-compromised and ecologically devastated human condition of the not-distant future". Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Heinberg, R. (2010). What Is Sustainability? The Post Carbon Reader, 11-19. */ Concise, excellent primer/discussion about what constitutes "sustainability"; "A sustainable society [...] would be able to maintain itself for many centuries at least" (hint: it's all about the environment). Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Jesshope, C. R. (2006). The Microprocessor and Peak Oil - Discontinuities in our Civilisation. Inaugural lecture delivered on the accession of appointment as professor in Computer Science Engineering of the University of Amsterdam. Vossiupers UvA. */ A blatant case of false marketing; "peak oil" only used a rhetorical device to signify "big changes ahead". 
• Picha, M. (2012 - unpublished). Publishing and broadcasting - Editorial process structures and environmental impacts. */ Written for an internal doctoral conference/colloquium at my department. I was the designated opponent.
• Raghavan, B., & Ma, J. (2011). The energy and emergy of the internet. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (p. 9). ACM. */ Very interesting attempt to estimate "how much energy is required to construct, run, and maintain the Internet". Includes both "running costs" as well as the emergy - the energy that is "embodied" in the Internet's constituent parts (i.e. the energy needed to construct cell towers, routers, end devices etc.). Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Raghavan, B., Irwin, D., Albrecht, J., Ma, J., & Streed, A. (2012). An intermittent Internet architechture. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Energy Systems: Where Energy, Computing and Communication Meet (p. 5). ACM. */ Very interesting thought-experiment to "re-design the Internet for an energy-constrained future powered by diffuse, intermittent, and expensive power sources". Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Reeves, S. (2012). Envisioning Ubiquitous Computing. Proceedings of the 2012 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM. */ Extremely interesting article about how visions of compu-techno-futures are created and communicated - with a focus on ubiquitous computing. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Rijnhout, L., & Schauer, T. (2009). Socially Sustainable Economic Degrowth. Workshop in the European Parliament, Brussels. */ Proceedings of a workshop with mixed quality of the contributions. I very much like the text by Joan Martinez Alier (Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona) and Francois Schneider's text (same university) was also interesting. These are people/authors I ought to look up!
• Thomas, D. (2009). Surviving Transition Sustainability in the 21 st Century. */ A not-very-good summary of many different things. Lacks purpose, clarity and sharpness; a forgettable text - I don't know where it is published or how it turned up in Google scholar. 
• Tomlinson, B., Silberman, M. S., Patterson, D., Pan, Y., & Blevis, E. (2012). Collapse Informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM. */ Extremely interesting attempt to define a new subfield, "collapse informatics" - "the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity". Most closely relates to this blog post.
• Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104. New York. */ A classic that I re-read. Has been referred to almost 9000 times in Google scholar - a must-read for anyone interested in ubiquitous computing. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Zapico, J. (in press). ICT and environmental sustainability, friend of foe? */ A book review that is written by a colleague of mine and that is to be published in the interdisciplinary open-access journal Information technologies & International development.

Here is the previous blog post with articles that I read in April.

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Green ICT for growth and sustainability?

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I have just returned from a workshop in Vienna on "Green ICT for growth and sustainability?" Do notice the question mark - one of the main questions at the workshop was indeed to "improve the mutual understanding between the "pro-growth community" (i.e. economists and policy makers oriented towards growth as an overarching policy goal) and the "beyond-growth community" (i.e. scientists oriented towards the limits to growth debate and policy makers involved in sustainable development)." (the quote comes from the pdf "event flyer").

The tension between pro- and beyond-growth was also one of the things that originally attracted my attention. I know what I personally think, but I need to have an intelligen "stance" in regards to this question when I teach my new course on "Sustainability and media technology" after the summer. I asked the moderator to perform an informal poll (raised hands), and the majority of the participants (75%?) claimed membership in the "beyond-growth" community. I did have problems connecting this large majority to the actual opinions expressed at the workshop though, so I guess there is no real consensus as to what "beyond-growth" actually means though...

The subtitle of the event was "Linking science and policy", something I didn't think much of at the time, but which actually is one of the explicit goals of the EU research project of which this workshop was a part. The event that I participated in was part of a larger (research) project of linking "sustainable consumption and economic growth" and it was the last of five such workshops (the others four were held between January and May 2012 and covered "Sustainable food consumption", "Sustainable mobility", "Sustainable housing" and "The role of household savings and debts in a sustainable economy"). There was perhaps a (slight) tension between the interests of on the one hand some of the organizers who might primarily have been interested in the larger research project and the whole series of (five) workshops and on the other hand the participants of this particular workshop who were primarily interested in "Green ICT" and less interested in other sustainability topics or in linking science to policy (?)

The term "knowledge brokerage" was used several times and I take it to be a more fancy term for "discussing stuff together". I'm not sure about the success of this event in terms of "knowledge brokerage" between EU policymakers (Eurocrats) and researchers, but I do think it was a success in many other terms and I enjoyed participating in the workshop very much. What was so good about it? The short answer is 1) the organization and 2) the participants. The fact that many participants enjoyed each other's company might in fact have been an effect of the great organization. So what was so great about the organization then? Here are a few things:

- The organizers had hired a professional mediator/presenter. He worked throughout the event and he knew just enough about the topic (Green ICT) to pose good and relevant questions, but he above all knew how to make people interact with each other and how to get the participants to open up and to pose good and relevant questions. He was great and he set a positive tone for the whole event.

- The program contained many events which were "interactive". Instead of (only) "passively" hearing talks and lectures, there were several exercises where we divided ourselves into parallel working groups depending on our interests. These work sessions were followed by "debriefings" and knowledge transfer between the work groups. More than half of the program consisted of these "active" (or "interactive") exercises. The other half consisted of invited talks ("keynotes" - see the list of speakers) and panels and of coffee breaks and lunches.

- Coffee and lunch was served where we worked and so we could eat and socialize during these breaks. This together with the slightly "pushy" mediator recurrently telling us to talk to people we didn't know made it easy for many to get to know many other participants. The program started at 9 in the morning and very few people dropped in later or left early.

The main exercise we did was something called "systems mapping". Part of my participation in the workshop was in order to evaluate if I could use this method in my education in general, and more specifically in my upcoming course "Sustainability and media technology" in particular. I think I will write a separate blog post about systems mapping within one or a few weeks. I might also write a follow-up blog post that more specifically summarizes my take-home lessons from this workshop as this post is more about the (organization of the) event itself.

It was stated that the proportion of researchers-to-policymakers at the workshop was 80/20. I'm not so sure about that, I could only find one person (of the 40-50 participants) who agreed that he actually was a policymaker. Some participants were neither, or in-between (for example an analyst working for the International Energy Agency). During the final discussion, we agreed that as stakeholders go, perhaps equally or more interesting than having EU policymakers participate would be to have (also) participants representing industry (for example Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc.). There was one guy at the workshop, Dan, who being an "environment research manager" works with "green issues" in Microsoft's data centers in Europe, and his input was extremely valuable. He actually knew a lot of stuff about the practical work of making data centers green - some other participants (researchers) also knew stuff but he had "inside info" (although there were also things such as actual Microsoft figures that he wasn't allowed to talk about). It would have been great with more people with "inside info" about these present-day closed-off "Internet factories"...

There will be a second round of workshops on the same topics between December 2012 and April 2013 and I will keep my eyes open for the follow-up Green ICT workshop. I would be especially interested to go if a large-ish proportion of the people I met decides to come back! I learned a lot and made several interesting contacts that I will get in touch with during the coming week
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Almedalen

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Something quite amazing happened this past week. I was called up by young green (Mp) politician Jakop Dalunde. Apparently he works for the thinktank Fores (with a green liberal profile) and his area of responsibility is "digial freedoms and rights" ("programområdet digitala fri- och rättigheter"). Although non-political, the political parties closest to Fores' point of view would seem to be the Center (C) and the environmental (Mp) parties. This was just the non-amazing background, so quickly on now to the more amazing part:

1. Jakop had found a bachelor's thesis that was was written by two of our students two years ago (2010). I was their thesis advisor and Jakop called me to get help to get in touch with the (ex-)students.
2. Jakop had read the thesis (quite amazing in itself as the thesis competes for his attention with "everything else that has been written in the world"). Not only had he read it, but he liked it very much.
3. Jakop wanted to invite the authors/ex-students to a seminar that Fores is organizing this summer at the Almedalen week. The Almedalen week (official homepage) is a yearly event, the premier event in Sweden for politicians, lobbyists and decision makers to meet and schmooze and it is held in Gotland during the first week of July.

The thesis in question was written by Amel Wely and Dhavyd Vanderlei and it's called "Personlig integritet i social medier: En studie av ungdomars privatliv i Facebook" ("Personal integrity in social media: A study of people's privacy on Facebook" [sic]) - abstract in Swedish and English, pdf of the report.

The specific event he wanted to invite them to is described as follows in a follow-up mail from Jakop:

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En sak vi kommer göra är att ha ett seminarium i Almedalen och vi tänkte snäva in oss på integritet i sociala medier. Om frågor kring hur sociala medier påverkat det offentliga samtalet, människors förhållande till privat/offentlig sfär och tillit till de företag som tjänar pengar på deltagande i sociala medier.

Vi skulle också vilja komma in på gränsdragningen på vad som enskilda användare måste ta ansvar för och vad som är upp till politiken att säkerställa.

Den formella progamtexten är som följer:

"Rättigheter uppe bland molnen – hur värnas individens integritet i sociala medier?

När hela våra digitala liv finns lagrade på en server på andra sidan världen - vad har användaren för rättigheter och kontroll över den information man delar med sig i sociala medier? Tankesmedjan FORES bjuder in till seminarium om hur en progressiv nätpolitik främjar frihet och öppenhet."

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Great fun with transfer between the academy and society/politics and one of the two authors is very interested in going. I hope that 1) he gets to go to Almedalen and talk, and that 2) I get some kind of short information/report about it afterwards.

I still happen to think that a bachelor's thesis that was written that same year (2010) should have garnered an official KTH press release - but the students in question didn't want to. I was of course the advisor, or I wouldn't write or know about the thesis in question... The thesis is called "Blogg: Med metriken i fokus ("Blog measurement"). It treated politicians' use of (or lack of use of) social media and it was published very timely, just before the last election to the national parliament. Abstract in Swedish and English, pdf of the report.
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"My" bachelor's theses this spring

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This week has been extremely hectic; work, work and more work. It has hands-down been the toughest week during this academic year. I've worked 24/7 and haven't even been able to (allow myself to) sleep enough - and I still have a pile of urgent things to do over the week-end. The main culprits are the bachelors theses (which I wrote about when we kicked them off in the beginning of the term). I'm one of three examiners and have to read, evaluate and prepare critique and feedback for the upcoming presentations. But that would have been ok, had it not been for the fact that two other tasks ate up the major part of this past week - and I also had to spend yet more valuable time preparing for these two other tasks (instead of reading theses). Phew! I can't wait to be over with this glut of work (it finishes this coming Tuesday).

I will write a blog post later (just as I did last year) about the 10 theses that I'm reading/examining. Here and now I instead settle for presenting the 5 theses (10 students working in pairs) that I have been the advisor of during the spring.

I've been working with this groups of students during the major part of the spring and we have met as a group regularly, every second week or so. Everyone has been pretty involved in everyone else's thesis. It's the third year we do this and I think we have more or less perfected the process now and more or less everyone (teachers as well as students) are very content with this course and with our process for squeezing out theses. Seventy-something students wrote their theses (in pairs) and all but one thesis was completed before the deadline (this past Monday). Ask me about it if you are interested (by writing a comment below) and I'll tell you everything you want to know about our group advisory processes.

The five thesis I've been the advisor of have all been written in Swedish (the abstracts below are written in English) and they are:

- Bergendahl & Rehn, "Politisk filtrering på Facebook? En utvärderande studie med hjälp av personas" [Political filtering of Facebook? An evaluating study using personas]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Fyrvald & Roth, "El i hemmet - Hur kan man visualisera den?" [Household electricity - How to make it visible?]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Jeppson & Murselovic, "Från visualisering av elförbrukning till beteendeförändring?" [From visualization of energy consumption to behavior change?]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Taberman & Thelenius, "Hållbar utveckling i teknikbranschen med socialt ansvar i fokus" [Sustainable development in the technology industry with focus on social responsibility]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

- Gabrielsson & Lundh Heinstedt,"Ett nätverks betydelse - Hur påverkar kontakter en medieteknikers väg till drömjobbet?" [The importance of a network - What impact does contacts have for a media technologists way to their dream job?]. Abstract. Thesis (pdf file).

I think both me and the students are pretty happy about the resulting reports. The bachelor's thesis is  great practice for the students before they write an individual master's thesis that is twice as large (30 hp) two years later.
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Students' attitudes to social media in higher education

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I wrote on the blog about a study of ours about social media in higher education a year ago (actually 15 months ago). At that time many things were still unclear about our study. We have now collected new material (we actually did that half a year ago). Ph.D. student Pernilla is writing up an article about it - her first - and I'm helping her out. The preliminary title of the article - which will probably be changed later - is that same as the title of this blog post. This blog post is based on a discussion we had this past week when we were hashing things out, trying to find the "core", and refining the basic argument that we base the article on - what is we want to say in this specific article? It is very easy for the text to "sprawl" in several different directions, and we recurrently have to prune it down to something that is easier to handle. What fits and what doesn't fit here? What should stay, what should be developed and what should be taken away (or saved for later)?


We have been discussing what to make out of our material, i.e. what specific issues, problems or perspectives to focus on in the analysis of our material. The one point that has been with us from the start is the idea of "two separate worlds". Instead of using social media for everything and all of the time, many students feel a need to separate and perhaps even erect a barrier between their personal/leisure use of social media and using social media for learning, in school/higher education. They don't want me as a teacher to know as much about them as their friends do. This separation of uses is contrary to how many others imagine we will use social media in higher education ("just hook'em up through Facebook").

Another idea, or lens with which to look at the material concerns the relationship between social media, formal learning and hierarchies. Social media flattens hierarchies and can decentralize education (we can learn/reach resources anytime and anywhere). We usually think this is a good thing, and for the most part it might be. But perhaps there are some uses for hierarchies now as then (as well as for secrecy, c.f. Wikileaks)? Perhaps (some) hierarchies are necessary in a university setting? It is after all not possible to disregard the fact that it is part of my job as a teacher to evaluate and grade the students' performance, so in some respects, my opinions (about the topic and about students performance in learning the topic) in some sense really is more important than theirs. So, what does that say about the desirability or necessity of hierarchies in higher education?

These two ideas (two separate worlds & hierarchies) jell just fine. You have a model with on the one hand private, relatively non-hierarchical uses of social media and on the other hand relatively hierarchical school/higher education uses of social media. This is a structure, or a lens that we can use to interpret and analyze our material.


This all has just been background for the real topic of this blog post and that is what we decided to take away from the analysis of our material (below). We came to the conclusion that while interesting, it just didn't fit this article. It could instead perhaps become another article in and of itself - instead of trying to squeeze too much into the same article.

So the basic idea (label: "networking") is that many students push the idea of using social media in higher education not as a pedagogical tool - to pass a course or learn a specific topic better - but in order to network, i.e. to get to know new people and add them to an expanding network that you might have use of later, to get your first or your second job and for the benefit of your career.

The problem is that this idea is more difficult to "add" and integrate to the mix above. Rather than just two arenas; personal life and professional life (school/higher education), in order to analyze "networking" we would need to add a third arena which is the salaried work our students aim for landing after they graduate. This introduces not just a new, separate arena (professional life/work/career), but also a new tense, i.e. the future. Our students haven't finished their education and using social media for networking purposes and for the benefit of their future careers is a way to bring the future to the present. The future casts a shadow over current activities and the students try to adapt to this reality. This is all very interesting, but it introduces "complications" in our article that sort of pull it in another direction compared to our other observations (above). It introduces a third arena (work) and the future tense - messing things up. So we decided to put the idea of students' use of social media for (future-related) networking purposes aside for now (e.g. not include it, or perhaps mention but not develop it in this article). This blog post is a way to document and archive this for-now-discarded idea - should we decide to pursue it in a follow-up study and a follow-up article.

The idea of networking is interesting though. Disregarding the future and the students' work/career concerns, what could networking mean today and in the students' present context? Networking in a study-related context could mean establishing contacts and gaining friends that could help you with this course, or who have useful information about other courses that could be of interest - or that you should stay away from. Networking could also be a way to find a study partner for the next course and the next term. Networking for private purposes could for example mean finding friends, establishing contacts with Swedish students (if you are from abroad), or just getting information about an upcoming party or something else happening next weekend in Stockholm. But that's not the kind of networking our students were talking about in the material we have collected.


The impetuous to write this blog post was to document an idea for future use. I have tried to make this blog post accessible also to people other than myself and the colleagues I work together with to write this article. I hope I have succeeded. I feel though that it is not so easy to balance different agendas and readers (myself/colleagues vs other readers) against each other and pull it off! The function of using this blog to document or safeguard a (temporarily discarded) specific idea for a future article is, I believe, a new first and yet another way to use an academic blog.
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Books I've read lately

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"Books I've read recently" is a recurring topic and here is the previous blog post (same topic, different books). I read books in "batches" of 4-5 books, preferably pertaining to the same or similar topics. For different reasons, I have this grab bag of books lying around that I read during the last quarter of last year but that I hadn't come around to writing about yet. After this, I'm more or less in phase and will write about books that I have indeed read "lately" (this year) instead of "some time ago" (last year).  

I've already mentioned Allen Guttman's book "From ritual to record: The nature of modern sports" (1978) before, in relation to my interest in competitive computer programming. The book is a little strange, sort of divided into two quite separate parts. The first part is the one that is of interest to me, discussing what sports are (in relationship to play, games and contest) and presenting a model with seven characteristics of the process of "sportification", i.e. of the process when an activity have gone from being a (pre-modern, pre-industrial) pastime to becoming a modern sport (with national and international organizations, stop-watches, records and so on). The second part consist of an in-depth analysis of two (very) American sports that that I hardly know anything about and that interest me even less - baseball and american football. Although I found many intriguing ideas in the book, I still don't know enough about the area to know how to treat it - assume a critical stance towards it and look for flaws to criticize, or to treat it as holy writ.


Jane McGonigal's have chosen a provocative title for her book - "Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world" (2011). The content is provocative too because her basic premise is that reality sucks and games are better:

"The real world just doesn't offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn't motivate us as effetively. Reality isn't engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn't designed from the bottom up to make us happy. And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community: Reality, compared to games, is broken."

She starts out not by defending games, but rather by attacking the pointlessness, hopelessness, disconnectedness and futility of reality. Games are better at focusing our energies and helping us attain our (game-related, but not seldom "epic") goals. Game designers and the people who make the games come alive are "happiness engineers" and the best hope for a better future on this planet. We should cherish what they have learned while designing games during the last couple of decades. But then she softens up and spells out what we can learn from games in order to "reform" reality and make it more meaningful, fun, social etc. What raises her book above a rant is that she has worked practically for the better part of a decade with creating games that are to be played by people together, not seldom in public, and that "makes a difference". She has many experiences to draw from and gives many practical examples of games that actually make a difference on a personal, social and even societal level. The book is good, choke-full of interesting and provocative ideas, but I'm still slightly ambivalent about the message. I would like to have an in-depth discussion with someone else who has read the book.


The third and last book is Mikolaj Dymek's massive (450 pages long) Ph.D. thesis "Industrial Phantasmagoria: Subcultural interactive cinema meets mass-cultural media of simulation" (2010) - pdf available online. This is yet another "schizophrenic" book consisting of two quite different parts (like Guttman's book above). It might not be obvious from the title, but the thesis is about (the future of) computer games and the computer gaming industry. The first part of the thesis is what I expected Mikolaj to write about, based on his earlier interests (I know him from a Ph.D. course that I taught five years ago). So he writes about the the gaming industry; about value chains and business models, about game developers, publishers and distribution chains. The only thing I find a little strange is that his empirical material was collected quite some time ago, 2002-2006. It feels like there is gap, like he's put the thesis on hold for some years...? The second and major/dominant part of the thesis is quite different, much more theoretical, and concerns the emerging field of computer game studies; the different perspectives of so-called "ludologists" and "narratologists" and in-depth treaties about interactivity and about the nature and possibilities of computer games now and in the future. I've tried to stay away from such overly theoretical discussions before, and thus found the more concrete, empirically first part of the thesis more interesting.


To every second batch of books that I read, I add a Ph.D. thesis (i.e. around 1/10 books I read is a thesis) and to every other batch I instead add an "old" book that has sat unread in my bookshelf for a long time (usually 5 or 10 years!). The previous Ph.D. thesis I read was Maria Bäcke's "Power games" (which I wrote about on the blog in February). A typical "oldie" is Albert Hirschman's "Exit, voice, and loyalty" which I wrote about back in September last year.
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