Since I haven’t been blogging much, I thought that it might be a good idea to give a short status report. The past year I have been doing a lot of teaching on different undergraduate courses. In addition, I have been an active member of Umeå Live, which also has included some blog activities on our common Umeå Live blog.
I’ve also tried to work on my thesis, but it’s been difficult to create enough free space in my calendar to actually make progress. However, I’m now in a position where I should be able to focus more on the thesis and I really look forward to it. I have a draft version of 8 chapters and will work on the last three chapters in Oct-Nov. Wish me luck!
Posted on 15 February, 2008, 11:36 am, by Daniel, under Community, Teaching.
Yesterday I was a guest speaker on a course at our department, called “Creating Experiences in Digital Media”. The course belongs to our undergraduate program on “Digital Media Production”.
I was asked to say something about success factors in relation to online communities, and although it’s not something that I usually talk or write about it was an appealing challenge to summarize my thoughts on this topic. Below you can find my PowerPoint slides (in Swedish). The message of my last slide is “Think community before technology”. I think that is true if you want to have success building an online community. However, my PhD work actually focuses on the real importance of technology and points out the need for an awareness of the complex relationship between social interactions and technical features in online communities.
Posted on 7 February, 2008, 4:53 pm, by Daniel, under Open Source, Teaching.
Right now I am teaching on an undergraduate course called “Openness on the Internet“. It is a distance course which means that all interaction between me and the students take place online, in our course management system (we use Moodle).
It’s the first time that I am giving this course and I have come to realize that it is really true that you learn when you teach. I knew this stuff before, but now that I’m teaching it something happens and it’s a great feeling to be absorbed in a partly new area of knowledge.
Free Cultureby Lawrence Lessig is among the litterature the students are supposed to read. I have also encouraged them to look at the excellent presentation he gave at an Open Source conference in May 2002. The presentation summarizes the message in Free Culture and has a great layout! You can find it here.