Monthly Archives: June 2008

Continuing to talk the talk

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gerund.jpgIf 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.

So instead I’m taking out the words which suggest that learning is a noun rather than a verb. To paraphrase Molesworth, ‘no place for gerunds in my thesis’.

I’ve just spent some time removing the word ‘fact’ from my chapter, and I’m now vacillating about whether to remove the word ‘decision’ or to replace it with ‘decision-making process’.

Numbering pictures

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I’ve been wasting a lot of time numbering and renumbering the figures in my chapter – so I finally spent some time looking up how to it automatically. Go to the Insert menu and select Caption is the answer. Caption doesn’t come up automatically on my Insert menu – but it is buried within the system.

Phew. Job done. Now, why didn’t I bother to look that up weeks ago?

Oh, and as a follow-up, the Insert menu also allows you to add cross references. What a useful facility 🙂

Talking the talk

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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 wandered off towards a completely different metaphor for learning, in which ideas are things to be completed and transferred, rather than ongoing processes.

In order to help me pin my use of vocabulary down more successfully, they’ve set me to reading an article by Roger Säljö, specifically so that I can identify the appropriate sociocultural language. So the following are terms you can expect to see in my thesis 🙂

Appropriating concepts, appropriation, competence, conceptual constructions,  conceptual framework, conceptual resources, constituting a phenomenon, cultural resources,  discourses, discursive community, discursive nature of human knowledge, discursive patterns, discursive practices, dominant metaphor, enculturation, how individuals are positioned in relation to specific social practices, how individuals are able to identify the situationally appropriate referential meaning of a concept, how reality is constituted in social practices, linguistically mediated knowledge, linguistic tools, mediational means, mediated nature of human activity, paradigm, situatedness is fundamental, socialise, social practices, sociogenetic, transformation.

Analysis chapter one

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I’m trying to tighten up my first analysis chapter – which was probably trying to do too much at once. It’s really difficult to do – partly because the chapter is about 16,000 words long, which makes it unwieldy to work with, and partly because I was rather pleased with how it flowed, so it’s a wrench to pull it to pieces and start again.

I’m following a thread of postings in a FirstClass conference – and I’m quoting the first seven in the thread, so my argument has to be structured around those seven in chronological order – which imposes constraints on how I develop my argument.

My orginal versions addressed the questions

  • How do tutors and learners using asynchronous dialogue carry along and develop ideas across postings?
  • How do tutors and learners use asynchronous dialoue to build and maintain a collaborative group?

I’ve decided that these  are too wide, so I’ve narrowed it down to

  • How do groups use postings in asynchronous dialogue to make decisions?

My seven pieces of data are then going to support discussion of group summaries, typography, delicate objects, proposal patterns, challenges, failures and powerful synthesis.

I’ve now got more of an idea of what my supervisors meant about subsequent chapters ‘falling out’ of my initial analysis. Some of the things I have identified as important don’t fit in with discussion of decision making, so they need to be bumped on into another section. At the moment my second analysis chapter is going to be on how attachments are used to supplement postings and develop exploratory talk – and the third chapter is going to be something about the challenges of group trajectories/timescales clashing with individual trajectories/timescales.