Even the pawns have pawns

We had the first of our regular bi-weekly Thursday meetings. We discussed the feedback I had provided. I didn't get the sense that the student had had the time to internalize two dozen papers in the last week, but that's not surprising. He responded that my questions about his research question had been useful, and in particular, helping to clarify the meaning of one of the concepts he was unsure about.

We then discussed filling in some details of the upcoming meeting schedule. For the next meeting, the student would provide an empirical context piece about the commercial context of his work. For the meeting after that, he will figure out on paper which parts of the background theory he would like to use. My co-supervisor wanted to get a sense of the student's academic writing ability, and said as much.

My co-supervisor suggested that the student would get a lot out of my list of assorted reference from work since 2007. I shared my concern that the references I provided were generic (since the only details I have about the practical project were that it involved integrating or building middleware on open source and non-open source APIs), and encouraged the student to also look for literature on his own. I understand my co-supervisor's desire (that we discussed after the meeting) to try to keep the thesis work focused even if the commercial part of the work derails. I just hope that she, and whomever else will be reading the thesis in the department will have enough STS background to appraciate what the student would write if he fully embraced the Rogers, Schumpeter, Latour, etc. that were on my list!

Also, we discussed language credits. The student asked if he would get extra marks for writing in English. My co-supervisor responded no, I responded yes, in that I would show him how to edit in English, which would be a useful professional skill to have. My co-supervisor (for whom English is her fourth language after Finnish, Swedish, and German) said she would also gain from that act. We left it to the student to decide.

My co-supervisor shared some tips about how to note important things in papers to gather important points into the thesis outline. I mentioned similar techniques for PDFs. I had some thoughts about effective paper reading (not two paragraphs at a time when spare moments arise) but didn't have the reference handy.

I asked the student about his note-taking style, and in particular, why he had not been taking notes during our meetings. He mentioned that he does keep a notebook at his work site. (I don't know if the Finnish science education system teaches the importance of science notebooks.) My co-supervisor used the opportunity to point out the importance of keeping good notes for constructive/design research and to develop ideas. We discussed the difference between universities and technical schools. We're the ones that are supposed to draw from, and contribute to, broader "scientific" discussions and not just technical solutions. The student agreed to start keeping an academic research notebook.

I also asked about informed consent and permissions from the commercial stakeholders to the research. The client that the student's firm appearently has no interest in the student's academic work; the student's firm did. It was unclear how or if informed consent would be obtained by all stakeholders, but it's generally accepted in this part of the world that formal informed consent is not required for interview and participatory work in which the researcher has a substantial practical role. The student will investigate.

On Friday, the department chief emphasized that he wanted an additional 75 MScs to graduate by December, in order to gain some leverage with the faculty and university administration. That's approximately one MSc per FTE in the department which is aggressive but not unrealistic. I've told my co-supervisor that I could co-supervise an additional student if the workload would be comparable to the first.

200

A friend has emailed some comments and advice, for which I am appreciative. I intend to continue to '"guide" rather than "direct"'.

So far, the biggest challenge for me has been identifying the relevant core literature (MIS seems to rebrand/reboot itself into particularly superficial rabbit holes every 10 years or so, and I'm new to the way European MIS is done here) but thankfully I can repurpose the relatively stable innovation and STS literatures that helped me through my own Masters.

I am still a bit worried about the student's ability to relate the research and industrial work to any kind of theory formation for the broader discipline. I made sure to include Bijker and Kuhn on the list. I'm also around five years out of date on integrating enterprise transaction systems but very little appears to have changed there. I didn't see anything fundamentally new in the technical or business documentation about the platforms that the student aspires to integrate.

Because the student's research is based in an industrial setting I expect that the biggest delays will come from business and technical externalities. I've most recently cautioned the student about getting reliable documentation from all the business stakeholders, and about the potential technical pitfalls of implementing real-time systems on top of web protocols, but I'm willing to be happily surprised by some novel approaches.

I met informally with my co-supervisor this afternoon. She agreed that the staring literature I had sent and critique of the student's research question were appropriate. I would regret not pushing the student to produce top quality work, so my plan is to encourage (obviously and otherwise) the student to earn top marks even if we can't issue 5's ourselves. (Also I'd like to see what bureaucracy is required for the two of us non-"senior PhDs" to be able to do that, and perhaps get my co-supervisor recognised as a senior PhD.)

At the next meeting of all three of us, she has intends to show the student a method to read, organize, and relate literature to the evolving written thesis work. I'm interested in this as well since learning more about how MIS literature is organized may help my own work. (Since the program provides a suggested thesis guidelines and template, I shouldn't need to intervene much there.)

Also, I've signed up for a one-week science communication course offered in September by one of my supervisor's institutes. I've not seen a Finnish-style media release, so this should be interesting.

Research question

I will take as a sign of genuine interest that my MSc student emailed his research question at 9 p.m. on a Sunday. It is either a naive question, or very well packed.

Is it possible to implement a "real time" synchronisation between [system X] and [system Y]?

Well of course I know the answer already, but it's not that simple. I cannot go with the easy way and use the SOAP API in this case what is usually used in [system X] integrations. It has it's limits and is not suitable for this for various reasons.

I took a guess at unpacking it for an hour when I found it at 8:15 Monday morning, responding with an admittedly lengthy e-mail containing theoretical and practical questions to consider. Still not knowing much about his professional or academic experience, I tried to be clear that I would not expect to see all or even most of the questions addressed in a relatively short Master's thesis. I don't want to simply hand the student an outline for his thesis, but I also don't want to be too distant from his work. I also emphasised repeatedly the need to link his case study to the outside theoretical and practical literatures.

As of this writing, my co-supervisor had not responded to the student's message. I also don't quite know what to expect from her. She has supervised enough students to fill a cabinet of printed thesises, and almost certainly has different but as yet unstated expectations than I do. If we do conflict, I intend to meet her closer to her end of the middle since I'm still very unfamiliar with the local supervising customs and standards, as soon as I understand where that middle is.

Context...

[In response to the rediscovery of decadence of Western society...]

Remember that in the West the commercial state was chosen in reaction to the previous holy fiefdoms in which almost every individual was at daily risk of death from starvation, disease, war, and whims of the nobility. The West's most abusive commercial fiefdoms are far more humanitarian than the gentlest lords of the past or who govern two-thirds of the world's population today.

The ability to hate the powers that be for interfering with our Blackberries required over 400 years of empire-building and systematic exploitation of most of the world's population, at least the last 150 of which were widely broadcast to the beneficiaries, and _now_ is the moment that we choose realize that the implementation has not scaled well?

And the most serious complaints about the superstructure are that the abstract bit twiddlers are preventing individuals and communities from self-actualizing, despite the ability to communicate and collaborate with any of billions of individuals and communities in the free world at no personal cost? Or is the dissonance that some groups have successfully broken from the default parasitic mediocrity to rally as communities around different interpretations of freedom?

Followup: Chaos Monkey rolls: Random mains faiure

I'm told that the fuses are OK, but that a non-describable part of the fusebox may need replacing. The building superintendent has been notified and will hopefully come around to fix the problem before something catches fire.

Of note, almost everything structural or decorative is made of metal or concrete. I think the walls and celling are coated in asbestos (sealed under paint) as insulation. The most flammable item near electricity are the well varnished/laminated wooden kitchen cabinets (fire would have to clear 10 feet of open floor to get to my wardrobe).

Literature review

I shared a list of scholarly references today in the hope that they would be useful for the student's IS research. I had put it off yesterday because I didn't recall citing any significant MIS literature during my own Master's work about open source innovation. Hence, I thought I wouldn't be able to assemble such a thing without a full day of further research.

(My co-supervisor had also cc:ed me on some literature by an apparently big name in the design part of MIS... I will need to be conversent on this body of work. At first glance, MIS appears well poised to discover functionalism as a style.)

To my surprise, I found that I had cited generously from /ASQ/, /MISQ/, /AMR/, /HBR/, and various organizational, design, business communications, and /research/ information management literatures without thinking about it from an MIS perspective. I had also forgotten that my external examiner was from the research information systems part of a business school, and that several of my previous research collaborators are IS people who also study research and innovation systems. Perhaps I have osmosed something about MIS after all, and I expect to learn more from this supervising adventure.

In my e-mail to the student, I tried to make it clear that he was only to consider what might be useful, and not to attempt to read or cite all of the highlighted references I sent. My co-supervisor seems more hands on with supervising the student; I hope to offer a relief valve if that becomes required.

I had also debated whether to include references my other bodies of work (urban innovation systems, e-democracy, associative governance) since they have nothing to do with the student's research area concerning e-commerce APIs and integration. In the end, I left in the urban innovation systems since the student's topic could be usefully framed as a knowledge flow topic within/among some local technology clusters.

On Monday, the student is supposed to deliver a brief paragraph about how he might approach a research question. I don't expect that he will have read Schumpeter, Foucault, Norman, Glaser, Henderson and Clark, Leydesdorff, Rogers, Latour, or von Hippel over the weekend, but I'm willing to be surprised.

Summer recap

(Edited from an e-mail to some colleagues back home.)

The Finnish post-secondary system is more aggressive than I had anticipated. The deadline for spring PhD admissions (a complete literature review, research plan, and program timeline to be entered into a competitive review that seems to have an analogous role to the comprehensive examinations) was three weeks after my arrival in May (the department, faculty, and government paperwork did not fully resolve until July). I've extended the interdisciplinary pattern by acquiring a botanist and a computer security researcher as supervisors in addition to two from MIS.

I took seriously the local suggestion to prepare and submit a couple of manuscripts based on original research during the summer. A rebel international relations journal has accepted a paper of mine about the role of emergent internet organizations for publication in September. I've just returned from the first of several site visits in relation to long-term research infrastructures and networks (conveniently, the university's well-appointed northern research station is a key node). And I am co-supervising an MSc student as of yesterday.

I will be in the US at the end of September representing Finland a conference. That provides an opportunity to pass through the old research group for a visit, and also to sort out some NSERC bureaucracy.

Meeting the student

I met my MSc student at 8 a.m. in my co-supervisor's office. The student works at an IT consulting shop that does systems integration (CRM, POS, e-commerce, etc.) for (B|C)2(B|C) clients using the local region's incarnations of various parts of the stack.

I learned some more details about the MSc program from my co-supervisor. After approximately a year of study (which may start before the BSc is complete), students are allocated approximately four calendar months to dedicate to thesis writing. The institution offers no central support for writing or communications skills development. Students are expected to complete a ±50 page thesis that may arrive as chapters, or at once, for comments. My co-supervisor's approach is to do a lot of hand-holding (the kind that I would expect for a student's first undergraduate research paper). That's probably appropriate given the technical orientation of most of the students in this faculty.

I insisted on a timeline since the student expects to defend in December, and will see something that looks like a research plan on Monday. (The student is completing the last of his course requirements, and it is at this stage that supervisors are formally assigned.) I was surprised that the opponent ([external?] examiner) would only be given a week to review the completed thesis.

On evaluation of the thesis, we are to use a standard faculty grading template, which other departments within the same faculty may or may not use as their standard. I'm told that it's a very subjective template, and that some unwritten customs guide its use. Instead of the "outstanding essay" checkbox, the form has a column in which a rating of "5 - excellent" may be assigned to any component of the work. (At the low end is a check-box of "1 - sufficient".) The student expects to achieve an overall rating of 3 (for which there is no adjective), which is also the mode for MSc work. The student's main purpose for pursuing an MSc is for career advancement within his current company. He seems to get that there's more to information systems than just the technical components; a good sign. I will encourage the student to strive for a broader perspective than that, but I don't know how well the practical outcomes will stick, given the many competing demands and contingencies.

As just a PhD student, there are certain categories in which I sensibly could not assign a rating of 5 (e.g., "significance in discipline"), but I can assign a rating of 4 (supervisors who themselves hold only an MSc but are not pursuing a PhD may assign a maximum rating of 3. Only senior PhDs may give a rating of 5.

We are to help the student develop his research question based on his current work in industry in the upcoming weeks. The department places a high value empirical data in MSc work, to the point where some students mistakenly simply supply an entire thesis of data with no analysis.

Overall, the MSc here appears to combine the timeline of an honours BA or BSc with the empirical research and broader scientific impacts of an MA or MSc (or more).

After the meeting, I discussed with my co-supervisor some of the things I had learned from the meeting. I had mentioned that at Canadian universities, some academic unit had the function of an "effective writing centre" which was to ensure that students could communicate academically. My co-supervisor didn't know what to make of the concept, and couldn't identify one in any of the institutions in which she had been educated.

MSc Student

It has been suggested that I supervise an MSc student.

I know the value of a good supervisor to curious and courageous students. I've also had colleagues who have had find their own way with bad supervisors. I would like to become one of the good ones.

I would also like the opportunity to examine my own views and reflect on my own knowledge from some different perspectives. A long-term commitment would help me to do that. I also hope to learn a lot from this student, both about the research topic, and whatever contexts it is situated in. I'd also like to offer something from my random assortment of experiences that may be useful to the student, the university, and the broader community.

The opportunity arose because I casually responded that I had practical experience with a research topic belonging to a student who was seeking a supervisor. I did not know that holding a Master's degree qualified me to supervise MSc students. I have never supervised a student before.

At this point, I know little about how the MSc program works in this university or department, and my supervisor who has worked here for ±20 years is not aware of any reliable documentation. (Graduate programs were consolidated into one office two weeks ago!) Difficulty modifier: The thesis will be in Finnish.

I will meet this student, and the prospective co-supervisor, tomorrow at 8 a.m. We are proceeding on the understanding that I would primarily be responsible for the non-administrative parts of the supervising (since I will be away from time to time doing research work) while my co-supervisor would handle the bureaucratic stuff and teach me about supervision as we go along.

It is my intent that this blog will help me, as well as anyone else who finds it, become better scholars in some way.

I think I will find some time this weekend to read the PhD comics archives.

To those who've had good or bad experiences on either side of the student/supervisor relationship:

Please share with me your thoughts, advice, and experiences (both good and bad) so that I may learn from them sooner rather than later. I thank you, and the student (probably) thanks you for helping to ensure that this experiment goes well.

Chaos Monkey rolls: Random mains faiure

The apartment is protected by 4 old-school ceramic fuses. One for a 20 amp circuit, and three 10 amp circuits. Visual guesses of the circuit-to-fuse relationships suggests: Fridge, microwave, electric range, dish washer, and kitchen lights on the 20 amp fuse; bathroom and/or bedroom on one 10 amp fuse; the cluster of eight outlets in the living room corner on one 10 amp fuse; and the two linked sets of two outlets on the far wall on the final 10 amp fuse.

Problem: The outlets on the far wall no longer work, and only those outlets. Nothing has been plugged into them for nearly two weeks, and I've not changed the state of any of the apparent in-wall light switches, so I have no idea what caused the state change on that circuit. All the fuses in the 1950s-era fuse box are visually identical; and the fusebox makes noises whenever power consumption increases (fridge or microwave kicks in; running Windows in a VM...). It's possible that the nearby kitchen is serviced by two circuits, with the four failed outlets hanging as an extension, but all the kitchen outlets work.

I watched Finnish TV in the general lounge

It was remarkably like US Simpsons, US /Road Trip/, US /Glee/ infomercial....

Also there was a Spanish film about demons and a Great War resistance movement.

No word on the TV tax.

"Area of reindeer husbandry" - roadsign

(I'm at a field station this week. The following are photos from the trip.)


The reindeer are semi-domesticated. Tags behind the ears let the game wardens know which ranch each animal belongs to during culling season. Somehow, reindeer vs auto accidents are sufficiently regular and non-fatal that there is boring paperwork and compensation to the owner (in the form of a fine to the driver) for hitting one.




Road-side rural bus stop. Schedules accurate to the minute. At least 12 buses a day.





Main street in Leduc Oyen every little small town on the Greyhound Matkahuolto milk run.







Geothermal being installed to many of the two dozen hamlets en route. They were finishing up fibre pulls as well.





Revolving restaurant, space ship golf tee, and water tower.






Driving past Canmore^W Käylä.





Oulanka field station (not an ex-WWII prison camp, like KFS...)