My month at the OU has now reached its end. Time has passed so quickly it seems like just a week ago that I first arrived. When I try to summarize my experiences, however, it becomes clear to me that I have been here for much longer than that. I will surely return to some of the discussions I have had here also in future postings.

To me, one of the greatest advantages of working here has been to be part of an environment where distance education is the standard, and to get to speak to people who work with questions relating to language education at a distance all the time. I hope to get the opportunity to return here some day, if only for a shorter visit!

As for my mid-atlantic accent, I do not think it has been influenced much during my stay here; spending one month in England has not caused me to start speaking with RP, and, if anything, I suspect there will rather be a slight touch of a German accent in there . On that note, I would like to wish you happy holidays by directing you to an international Christmas poem posted at Life de Luxe, which in some ways reflects the code switching that is going on in my head at the moment – just mix some Swedish in too, and you’ll get the idea…

Happy holidays all!

On my way over here, I had to pay a fine since my luggage was too heavy (it should be noted, here, that we had been able to reduce the weight of my suitcase with 15 kilos before I left home). Going back now, I would not only like to fit the Christmas gifts I have bought, but also the bookshelf which is standing in “my” room. My hostess has some very interesting book titles in there, many of which relate to language learning at a distance. Here are some examples:

Tandem learning on the Internet. Learner interactions in virtual online environments (MOOs) , by Markus Koetter
Supporting lifelong language learning, edited by Lore Arthur and Stella Hurd
Developing Intercultural Competence in Practice, edited by Michael Byram, Adam Nichos and David Stevens
Distance Education and Languages: Evolution and Change, edited by Boerje Holmberg, Monica Shelley and Cynthia White

One book which I will definitely need to get a hold of when I get back is Cynthia White’s Language Learning in Distance Education. It provides a useful general overview of this issue, and among other things it includes a theoretical section where, for instance, the notion of social presence in distance education is discussed.

My hostess also has quite a few books in German, which is great for me since I can take this opportunity to practice also my third language (working with the German team here has also provided many occasions for German practice). A very interesting read, not least for a linguist like myself, is Bastian Sick’s Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod: Ein Wegweiser durch den Irrgarten der deutschen Sprache, which comprises columns on recent trends and do’s and don’ts in the German language previously published in the Zwiebelfisch column in Spiegel Online. Swedish readers will find similarities between Bastian Sick’s writings and those of Fredrik Lindstroem, even though it appears that Lindstroem’s scope is somewhat wider.

Speaking of books, I am now off to get a tour of the new library here at the OU. Should be interesting.

Yesterday I visited the KMI here at the OU. Having used FlashMeeting on some different occasions over the last year, I have had some online correspondence with one of the developers of this platform, Peter Scott, and now I had the chance to see him and the fascinating institute where he works in physical reality (having seen both via webcamera before).

Pete took me on a tour of the lab and told me about some of their many interesting projects and tools, like the video blogging service FlashVlog that they have developed, and a project in which they syndicate RSS feeds from students in schools throughout England (Making the News). I was also shown some different versions of Hexagon. The most interesting one from my point of view is the coffee room with spatial sound, since there are some interesting overlaps here between the spatial affordances of this environment and of the graphical virtual environment Traveler which I am looking at in my study.

Most of my visit was spent discussing FlashMeeting. Pete showed me some new features that I did not know about and let me have a glimpse of the impressive archive of sessions that they now have. I was also shown some statistics concerning contributions etc., and was pleased to hear that these statistics come with your recording. This should be very useful for me, since this semester we plan to arrange student sessions in FlashMeeting, recordings of which I will use for my research. We also had a discussion concerning the type of material you use as basis for research, and how natural interactions of course are to prefer. This is quite tricky for me to achieve with my limited material, but I hope that the student sessions this spring will at least take me one more step in the right direction. There also seems to be some potential areas in which we could collaborate, so I will certainly give that some more thought over the Christmas break.

Read some more about this in the HUMlab blog.

The ability of blogs to attract search engines has always amazed me. When I look through the information gathered by my tracker, I sometimes find the most remarkable things (like “good salesmanship in restaurant”!). I am always happy to see when people find me while searching for topics related to my research. Here are some examples from my last 20 search engine hits: “one advantage to online communication” (Number 1!); “the role of blog in communication” (among the top 10 hits); “emerging communication technology” (among the top 20 hits); “communication technology influence on language” (among the top 40 hits).

Among the last 20 hits there are also some that are not really work related, like “communication problems in England” and “ADVANTAGE OF MORNING WALK” (both among the top 20). It is obvious that this relates to what I have recently blogged about (not that I think I have mentioned communication problems in England?), but I would like to know more about how this works. Could anyone explain exactly what it is that I do/my blog does to end up highly ranked when people search for these things?

(On a side note, the thought of someone coming to my blog to learn about the advantages of morning walks makes me giggle! Well, as a big proponent of morning walks I wouldn’t mind telling you about them, but for the time being I will refer you to some previous posts/pictures on the topic instead.)

On Monday morning I had a very interesting experience as I gave a presentation for a group of students at the Informatics Department (the HCID Group) in Lund via web camera. The topic of my talk was, very appropriately, Close at a distance: Presence in a digital age. The notion of presence has always played a role in my research but from somewhat different perspectives, and it was great fun to try and pull all the strings together in one presentation. I started off by giving some examples of computer applications which in different ways can allow for people to experience a sense of presence (VR, advanced presence indicators like Hexagon, MSN Messenger, blogs etc.) and in so doing I also went over some of the different definitions and causes of presence (perceptual stimuli, immediacy, intimacy, immersion through text etc.). I then referred to how presence relates to my own work and talked about how under some circumstances you want a high degree of presence, whereas under others the opposite is to prefer. The talk ended with examples from my research in Traveler and from our experiences from the Moblogging Jokkmokk Project (here, I mainly referred to Part II of the paper that Stephanie Hendrick and I wrote for BlogTalk 2.0).

Of course the situation itself was very interesting with the notion of presence in mind. I believe that one way of achieving a higher degree of co-presence is by simply creating a dialogue, but as you all know it is difficult enough to get feedback when speaking in front of a larger audience, and I expected that it would be even more difficult here. I had two video links from the class room, but the audience was quite spread out, so I prepared a little experiment for the participants. I asked their teacher to prepare green and red slips of paper, of which the members of the audience received one each. I then instructed them to use these slips to, for instance, answer yes/no or to show agreement/disagreement. This turned out to work quite well, and even though they ended up using them only for answering my questions relating to previous experiences etc. it certainly added a sense of stronger involvement from their part, which made me feel more comfortable as a speaker.

The only thing that went wrong during the presentation was when my screensaver suddenly switched on and my computer was locked. Without thinking about how they maybe still could hear me, I said some well chosen words, only to find out when I returned to the conference that I had been perfectly audible the whole time. On top of it all, we used FlashMeeting for this session, and here, they record everything happening in the video conferencing environment for research purposes, which means that this little incident is even caught on tape .

Before I came here to the OU, I received an email from Anne Hewling, who is writing a PhD about intercultural interaction online. She had read in my blog about my visit here and remembered that in connection to the CATAC’04 conference I had blogged some comments on her presentation there (the final result of which is now available in the current issue of the JCMC journal). She suggested we should get together, and today we met for lunch.

In her article she discusses how the essentialist view of culture as based on nationality is not sufficient when analyzing intercultural interaction online, and refers to how it is better to view online culture as something which emerges in negotiation between participants. Even though I have decided to not go through with my original plan to include the part of my thesis which was designated to deal specifically with intercultural communication online, there are many links between Anne’s work and my research. Let me illustrate this by referring to a point that was made during my seminar yesterday. One of the participants reflected upon how the affordances of the platform I demonstrated (Traveler) caused people to align in a certain way in order to best be able to view and hear each other, and he felt it was a pity that culture-specific communicative behaviour concerning proximity in this case was inhibited. An appealing way for me to think about this is that the conventions caused by the communicative affordances are, in fact, part of the culture that Anne suggests that we are negotiating online.

Apart from discussing what influence the material qualities of the technology has on the activities that take place online (here we did not completely agree – I ascribe relatively high prominence to the design features of particular applications, whereas Anne seemed to think it was more important to focus on underlying factors, such as internet connection and servers etc.), Anne told me about a project in which she is involved where they are evaluating different blog and wiki platforms (PROWE), and she mentioned a platform called ELGG, which seems quite promising (here’s Anne’s own blog in ELGG).

Anyway it was a lovely lunch in the typical British local pub (can’t you almost hear me speaking with a broad British accent here?) and I think we both enjoyed getting the chance to speak to someone with a genuine interest in these types of questions. See what a little blogging can do .

Tomorrow at 11 am I will be presenting my research at the INTELLECT research forum here at the OU. Here’s the abstract:

Close at a distance: Conversational interaction, presence and anonymity in virtual space

Therese will first give a brief background to her PhD project, in which she investigates how the communicative affordances of different media affect conversational structures. She will then move on to a description of one of her case studies, in which students of English at a distance have met in the graphical three-dimensional environment Traveler to discuss literature and culture without the teacher present. She will report on findings concerning their conversational interaction and will also touch upon the notions of presence and anonymity. Further, Therese will initiate a discussion on research methodology, especially in relation to the second part of her study in which she wants to take into consideration also the multiple choices that modern communicative situations afford their participants.

If you happen to be in the area, please do stop by!

In a comment to my previous entry on which ethical and legal protocols I should follow in my research I received a tip from P-O Agren working at the Informatics Department at my university regarding an article that he had written about ethics in cyberspace back in 2000 (in Swedish). I have read it over the weekend, and it is a quite thought-provoking article, raising some interesting questions without serving a whole lot of final answers. Even though the scenarios he discusses are quite different from the one I have in mind, there is one thing in particular that I would like to pick up on.

P-O describes how, according to Swedish law, not only documents that are sent into the university but also those produced there are to be seen as public documents. One consequence of this is that it could be impossible to protect the anonymity of your informants. Another is that it would be possible for other researchers to demand access to your material before you have had a chance to work with it yourself. The third, and in my view, most interesting consequence is that this law could also make it possible to collect data without informed consent. Since everything that is logged on your computer at the university (without you recording or gathering it), for instance all text files that are sent in an IM conversation, would become public according to this law as soon as it was transferred to your computer, you could argue that you are only working with public. P-O then posts the question of whether it would be ethically right to do so, and whether in that case you should you inform people afterwards. Here, he refers to Hermerén 1996 (Kunskapens pris. Forskningsetiska problem och principer i humaniora och samhällsvetenskap), who claims that when performing observational studies, it is sometimes (but rarely) possible to not ask for informed consent in advance, but to do so afterwards instead. However, P-O then points out that that this will be difficult to achieve when dealing with synchronous interactions online.

I find this interesting in relation to my ethical dilemma. Since I will be gathering the material with the intention to use it for my research, I could not use the argument concerning the public status of material which accidentally has been saved on my computer. However, it would be very interesting for me to know whether it is still true today that under certain circumstances it would be enough to ask for consent after the material has been gathered.

Another interesting issue which P-O touches upon concerns whether we should view text in cyberspace as regular text or if you see the interaction that takes place there as a conversation that happens to be in text. If you choose the latter approach and protect the anonymity of your informants it could be argued that you are breaking copyright laws.