Monthly Archives: November 2007

Research questions

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One day I will achieve the ultimate research question – I will look at it and know it is right. Until then…

  • How do task-based groups of learners identify and use the resources of asynchronous conferences to support their learning?
  • What constrains their identification and utilisation of these resources?

Look, I’ve taken ‘communities’ out of my questions for the first time! Though they’re still there, really, because I’ll argue that one of the resources of an asynchronous conference can be community.

The things I really want to get in are:

  • Some affordances are illusory. Asynchronous conferences are not any time, any place, anywhere – they are constrained by real-life limitations and it can be a problem to pretend that these do not exist. Additionally, people do not make use of the permanent record to inform the debate. There are perhaps three types of affordance to look at: affordances of the technology (any time, any place, any where), affordances of the medium (history, threading, icons) and affordances of the talk (reflective, comparing perspectives etc). Analysis should show: do they recognise these affordances, do they make use of these affordances, do these affordances exist, do they act as constraints?
  • Learning in these conferences is related to education, organisation and affect. The organisational and affective issues are substantial and account for the majority of seemingly off-task behaviour. I need to read more on affect and follow up any references on organisational learning. Organisational learning relates to the previous section. Analysis should reveal which forms of organisation they have to develop in order to make use of the affordances which I have identified with the help of the literature. My pilot is useful here. What helps them with this organisation and what hinders them?
  • The affective issues are related to community. These aren’t communities for a number of reasons, but they utilise the resources of other communities, and build elements of a community together. Establishing trust is important. Again, this relates to seemingly off-task discussion. This relates to all the literature I have read on community, and I need more on the subject of trust. Analysis should show occasions when trust allows them to learn togther, when lack of trust prevents them from learning together, and how they establish trust.
  • And I want to write about the differences between conference talk, speech and written text – especially with references to fonts, point sizes and colours. I think this relates to Vygotsky’s description of speech completing the thought. Different types of speech deal with meaning in different ways. There must be some literature on this somewhere? Analysis in this section will be much more narrowly focused on two or three passages, showing how features such as colour, quoting and typeface are used to build meaning together. I could make a start on this analysis to see if it works.

Vygotsky and squirrels

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vygotsky.jpgI’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 window, see the squirrel, smile, go back to my computer.
Sign-mediated/social/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo that Gill took of a squirrel, smile, go back to my computer. (There’s a mediating sign, created by another but neither of us considered using it for this purpose).
Sign-mediated/social/higher. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo of a squirrel that Gill took to make me smile, smile, go back to my computer. (Gill has used signs to influence my behaviour).
Sign-mediated/individual/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go back to my computer. (One of my signs unexpectedly mediates my behaviour.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/external. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go to look for pictures of squirrels on Flickr. (I use a sign to modify my behaviour and thoughts.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/internal. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and start to devise in my head a funny card about a squirrel that I could create for Gill.
So that is six situations in which externally I do exactly the same thing (although my return to the computer is delayed in the final case) but my mental function is different.

Forbidden colours – is it just me?

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What I find particularly hard in reading Vygotsky is the gaps in my knowledge. It’s not just the obscure terms translated, or not translated, from the Russian. It’s not just that I haven’t read the philosophers and psychologists on whom his work builds, so there’s a yawning gap before him. It’s also that there’s a yawning gap after him.

I’m reading about the ‘forbidden colours’ experiment. Leonte’ev takes children of various ages and tells them that in the following interview they are not to mention two particular colours (eg red and blue) and that they are to mention all other colours only once. He gives them cards of each different colours, so they can use them as tools to mediate their memory (they won’t necessarily directly remember which colours they have mentioned, but their arrangement or use of the cards will jog their memory). Then he asks them a series of questions like ‘Have you ever been to the theatre’, interspersed with colour questions like ‘what colour is a tomato’, ‘what colour is the sky’. The older children get, the more likely they are to use the cards and to succeed in the task. In the accounts I am reading, Vygotsky appears to take this as evidence that you develop your ability to use mediating devices to support your memory.

But to me it doesn’t say that at all. It tells me that children develop a more sophisticated view of adults and of how adults behave. How many seven year olds, faced with a research scientist and asked what colour a tomato is are going to fail to say red? In their experience, adults who ask that sort of question get angry and think you stupid if you give them the wrong answer.

If you told them that in their computer game they couldn’t use the red or blue keys and they could use each colour key only once or they’d lose a life, they’d soon use mnemonic devices to sort that out.

So to me that experiment is profoundly flawed. Now, this may be my fault, because I haven’t understood it correctly, or because I have read incomplete accounts of it. On the other hand, it may be that everyone who has read of it thinks of it as a flawed experiment. I just don’t know. And it takes SO long to find out.