I’ve heard from a friend that there is an interesting rumour spreading in my circle of friends. She had talked to someone who was under the impression that I would not have to write a traditional dissertation, but that my blog would fill this purpose instead. As much as I wish this were true, unfortunately, this is not the case. Attempting to present my thesis as a collection of articles seems to meet enough scepticism in certain contexts. My blog should be a nice complement to my thesis, though; a way of being able to trace the development of my ideas over the years.

I’ve been doing some thinking of innovative ways of presenting my thesis before. Considering that scholars in my field of research often talk about a broadened view of the notion of text to include multimodal representations such as images or even threedimensional space, it seems only natural that we should experiment with new ways of disseminating our results. Unfortunately, it is a question of time as well. I’m just about exactly in the middle of my PhD now, and I’m afraid I won’t have much time for experimenting. I would love to be inspired by others’ efforts, though, so if you have any examples of innovative theses, please share them!

I’ve had two papers accepted for conferences in May. One is a conference in Bordeaux on “the Language of Communication Mediated by Information and Communication Technology” (my CMC colleague Stephanie Hendrick also had a paper accepted there, so it appears as if we will be going there together!), and the other is on Conversation Analysis (ICCA06). If I find some time before Friday, I would also like to send in an abstract for the Swedish conference Netlearning, which is also in May. In addition, I’m working with some colleagues to come up with suitable topics for the EUROCALL conference in Granada in September, where the deadline for submissions is January 31.

I’ve written earlier about the network here at Umeaa University for doctoral students researching interaction in digital environments that we started last year. Excitingly, our group has now received some money to initiate planning of a doctoral student conference, which should also hopefully take place in late summer/early fall this year. I will post more information about this later on. On a side note, but in no way insignificant information: one of our network members, Elza Dunkels, will be giving a keynote on her thesis topic, youth net cultures, at Netlearning in May!

Make sure to inform me if you plan to attend any of these conferences, so that we can schedule a get-together!

I have been invited to give a talk at a seminar on flexible language learning, organized by the Goethe-Institut and the Swedish National Centre for Flexible Learning (CFL) in Norrkoeping on Friday. The topic of my presentation will be “Language and presence in oral communication at a distance”. To me, there is an interesting paradox here, in that one could argue that by scheduling activities, which is indirectly what I am promoting, the course automatically becomes less flexible. I’ve been trying to find some sources concerning this, and one paper I’ve found was presented by Cynthia White at the Independent Learning Conference in 2003. Here, she discusses how the way we view distance learning has shifted over the last few decades, in that originally distance language education focused on individual independence whereas today more and more educators tend to focus on learner autonomy in relation to collaborative control. Further, she argues that these two ways of viewing distance education not necessarily have to compete, but that a most courses that strive for learner independence, in fact, also include some activities that foster collaborative control.

In my opinion, flexibility is also about giving the students the opportunity to choose between different activities depending on their learning styles. Many of the students that take part in the real-time oral discussions that we arrange in our distance course claim that they learn much more from being able to discuss these issues with their classmates than they would from working individually on the different tasks.

Another advantage that I see with scheduling real-time activities is that it can allow for the dispersed group of students to experience a stronger sense of presence. Of course, there are ways of creating a sense of presence also in asynchronous discussions. However, I believe that real-time interactions can add much to the distance education context, by allowing for a stronger sense of belonging to a group. In not making these sessions compulsory, you are still allowing for flexibility.

I have previously posted pictures of chandeliers in salt, so I thought I would continue on the theme of chandeliers in odd materials and post these pictures of a chandelier in ice from a recent visit to the icehotel.