Monthly Archives: April 2006

NVivo 7

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I’ve installed the new version of NVivo, which looks a whole lot better than the clunky old version I had before.

It still feels like a development version, though. Any researcher who worked with it for ten minutes would have given them a range of ideas for the Beta version.

Particularly the Help element. There’s next to no Help, except on fairly obvious points. So, after struggling against it for a whole day, I had to move on to the Tutorials. They’ve written these in QuickTime, although by the looks of them they used an earlier version known as Slowtime.

First… you click here………Now…. you double-click here……..Move your cursor over here (Yawn, did I fall asleep?)

And couldn’t they have programmed some key to mean Code? I don’t want to press esoteric key combos – I just want to code! (Grrr)

Still, at least it now imports Word files. Only problem is, due to my data going some way complicated FirstClass, Unix, Mac, PC route, it’s not quite a Word file but some mutant hybrid. (I can see the paragraph marks, you can see the paragraph marks, but can Find and Replace see the paragraph marks? No way.) 

And, boy, is it slow to open. Almost time to make a cup of tea while I’m waiting for it to crank its way into action.

Oh, and periodically it crashes and loses all your carefully constructed work.

Still, as I say, it’s a lot better than the old version.

What do I do with my data?

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Right, I’ve pulled my data to pieces, word by word. Not sure how useful that was. Time wil tell. Now I’ve read through the majority of my notes for the last six months, and I’ve made a list of ways to come at this data. I’ve listed them below so I won’t lose them.

Questions
Are they happy online?
How do they acknowledge / react to M?
Are they supported or hindered by the ‘real world’?
Where are their networks / weak ties?
Do I see them gaining trust and respect? Do they demonstrate reliability and ability?
What types of thing are praised by the group?
What forms of validation are there? Which ideas are valued and respected?
Which ideas and suggestions are ignored?
How do they work to establish identities?
Which stories are being rehearsed?
How embodied is it? (Interesting, but possibly irrelevant)
Are identities mobilised to support learning?
How is identity established?
What are the backstage areas, and how are they used?
When do people first model each online skill? Which are taken up?
Identities
Who creates the subject positions? OU? BPS? Students? Tutors?
Which identities/positions are readily taken up? Eg nervous, unsure.
Online identities: suckers, newbies, social loafers
Is this text or identity? How do they treat it?
Constructing identity via projection of beliefs / expectations / social states (Crook).
Approaches 

Follow the trajectories of individual students. When are they involved? Who with?
Key incidents: breakdown, Xmas, M, deadlines
Social network theory: Haythornthwaite
Prototype theory
Informality
Do their emotions relate to their engagement?
What informal relations do I see developing?
Is the effectiveness of the group in any way related to social interaction?
Playfulness / informality / nonsense / off-topic discussion.
Follow up
Lapadat – the advantages of asynchronicity. Are these borne out here?
Find out more about interpretative repertoires.
Weinberger on social scripts – I think this is like modelling behaviours. Check.
Do I see clarification / elaboration / interpretation? – other criteria CF Mercer.
Schrire on higher-order thinking. What evidence of that is visible?
Murphy’s graded classification of collaboration.
Burnett – who don’t they accept info from? Who gets ignored? M??
Learning community / Community of practice
What makes this a learning community or a CoP? Find a definition.
Seems to have all the aspects of a CoP except for being voluntary.
Do they articulate their purpose / goal? Is it the same for all of them?

Community or settlement?

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I’m still puzzling over the big issue for Internet community research ethics. Is what we see online a virtual identity,which should be treated according to the ethical standards of human subject research, or is it published text, in which case the relevant ethical standards relate to copyright and acknowledgement?

Quentin Jones article on cyber settlements and online comunities perhaps points a way forward here. In an online community people have identities, in a cyber settlement you find artefacts. It’s a subtle distinction, but I think it’s useful.

For example, in ‘my’ conference. If I look at how many people posted attachments in week three, or how many replies there were compared with new threads, I’d be looking at the artefacts of a cyber settlement. If I look at the content of the postings I’m looking at the online community.

Embodied

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I’m trying to decide whether the words in my conference are embodied or not. It’s surprisingly difficult. Is Santa embodied? What about heavens? Or mind? I’m writing this, so is writing embodied?

The distinction between virtual and real isn’t very clear when you come to think of it.

I guess all abstract nouns are virtual: goodness, health, opinion. But they’re pre-technology virtual. So health is abstract and therefore virtual, but it’s also embodied most of the time.

The Ancient Greeks used to personify all abstract nouns as gods. I guess if they’d been around today there’d have been a range of gods in the pantheon representing email and virtual community. This idea has been taken up to a certain extent by the Catholic church, where abstract nouns get patrons saints. I note that Saint Isidore of Seville is the proposed saint of Internet users despite his having died in the seventh century.

 OK, I’m rambling, enough already.