Researchers write all the time, writing is the means through which we work on and work out our ideas. We don’t just write up – we have not found a transparent truth which we then just put into words. Writing is a representation – we make choices and what we choose to write is a […]
If you look at the list of sociocultural terms I listed a couple of posts back, you’ll observe that they’re not words which you’d expect to hear in day-to-day conversation. They also prove to be difficult words to use in a thesis, and I’ve been struggling to use any of them in my current chapter. […]
My supervisors pointed out that, if I’m writing my thesis from a sociocultural perspective, I need to use the appropriate discourse. I do start off doing this, and then I start to use synonyms to stop it getting bland and repetitive. But, of course, the synonyms aren’t exactly synonyms and, before I know it, I’ve […]
In the last month my entire thesis has undergone a radical rethink, as I have moved completely away from community, to consideration of temporality in the context of asynchronous dialogue. I think this is the right move to make – I’ve got excellent data to support a study of temporality, and it fits in with […]
Not so much a blog post, as a thinking process. When I pointed out in my lit review that a key thing about asynchronous dialogue was, um, it was asynchronous, I didn’t realise I’d then get tied up in a whole new debate about time scales, and learning trajectories and how you study the temporal […]
I’m reading the Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky and trying to make sense of my notes on Boris Meshcheryakov’s chapter on Terminology in Vygotsky’s writings. Here’s my version of his explanatory chart (which I can’t persuade WordPress to render legibly) – and a worked example involving squirrels. Natural form of behaviour. I look out of the […]
I’ve run into a real problem with the idea of ‘comunity of practice’. What is the difference between a CoP and a community? Lots of people just take the CoP idea as is, and run with it. People who critique the ideas seem to do so in terms of thinking the model through – do […]
OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth See […]
Reading Guy Claxton on ‘Learning to Learn’. He’s taking a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) approach. He says that the student is: ‘learning in the context of, and with the aid of, a host of culturally constituted tools – books, symbols, computer graphics – which afford or invite certain approaches to the learning task and […]
‘According to the sociocultural perspective, human learning cannot be fully undestood without understanding human activity. In studying learning, therefore, one should focus on how tools, mental and material, are used in human activity and how humans construct knowledge and understanding by the use of tools. Moreover, the physical and social environments are considered integral to […]