I’m just reading through the epistolary interviews which I carried out last year. This technical problem still makes me laugh 😀
“I am unfortunately unable to use the letter next to q and e on the computer(keyboard problems!) (that means the letter after ‘v’ in the alphabet is going to be typed as *!! if that is okay)
The live chats *ere used to discuss both *ork in progress and and focussing on decisions that *ere to be made …..”
The amount of times I change my research questions is verging on the ridiculous. Still, I will get there. I know they’re out there somewhere, waiting for me to find them. I think these ones are pretty close:
Main question
How is asynchronous dialogue used to build shared knowledge over time?
Sub-questions
How do tutors and learners using asynchronous dialogue carry along and develop ideas across postings?
How do tutors and learners use asynchronous dialogue to preserve and utilise elements of their discussion?
Which techniques do tutors and learners use to link the past with future and present activity?
I must admit, I couldn’t see much point to Google Books. After all, who’s going to read an entire book online? But now I’m a convert.
So many of the relevant books in my field are now online that it’s really speeding up my work. For example, I’ve got Neil Mercer’s ‘Words and Minds’ by my side and I want to reference where he introduces the term ‘cohesive ties’. I pull up the book on Google Books, type ‘cohesive ties’ into search, and there it is, highlighted on the page for me.
OK, not a brilliant example, because Words in Minds is clearly arranged, well indexed and not that long. But Vygotsky! Six massive volumes sitting on the windowsill next to me. Now, in what circumstances did he use the term ‘cultural-historical’? Using the physical books, that’s a LOT of work. Using Google Books, it’s a breeze.
And having the physical books by my side helps, because Google Books usually doesn’t have every page in a book, but it still searches every page. It finds my word on pages 90 and 120 but can’t show me those pages. I pick up the book and flick to those pages. Perfect and complete indexing. How good is that?
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 lots of my other interests – from history to English language, it all has the potential to jigsaw together.
 BUT… I’ve only got six months to go. Six. Count them. And they include the summer holidays and the Easter holidays, and the inevitable period when my thesis is out being reviewed by someone as yet unidentified. And temporality is a huge field to be taking on – especially when no one really seems to have dealt with temprality in the context of asynchronous dialogue.
I came to my data from the point of view of communities. How do communities learn together? Why is it valuable to learn as a member of a community? However, on closer examination, I’m not studying a community. My data comes from task-based groups (thanks for that insight, Etienne). True, they have been structured to draw on benefits of community learning and they do, in some ways, act as communities. But they’re not communities. If I want to go and study an online learning community, I should be looking at Schome, which is a far better example.
Setting community aside; what have I got? Well, as my supervisor said the other day – you’ve got talk, and that’s what’s interesting. But what I find really interesting is that that is just what I have not got. I have got no talk. No talk whatsoever. The students and tutors think they’re talking, they refer to themselves as talking, but they are not talking. Even when I interview them, they are not talking.
They’re communicating via text, and what you can do via text is very different to what you can do via speech. Yes, you can challenge opinions and defend opinions and access a range of opinions as you can in speech. But you can do that at the same time as you refer back to earlier stages of the argument. You can build on other people’s points or challenge each one separately. You can ponder what they have said for a minute, or two minutes, or half an hour.
And this is what I see throughout my work. In my data, and in my blogging data, and in my epistolary data and in my Schome data. Written conversation offers a new, and powerful, way of thinking together. But nobody’s using it for that reason. Everyone’s using it because it’s convenient and space- and time-independentor, in the case of blogging, because they enjoy it. Yes, if challenged, they may say that it supports reasoning and critical dialogue. But they don’t use it for that reason, and they don’t explain that reasoning to students, and nobody formally trains anybody in how to use textual conversation to support knowledge creation.
So why my data is interesting is because it shows that textual conversation is a powerful way of thinking together. And if that;s what is interesting about my data then that is what my research questions should be about (you knew I was going to get back to my research questions at some point, didn’t you? 🙂 )
When I was studying English, or history, I could curl up in bed with a textbook and feel relaxed and cheerful. It’s never been like that in IET. Apart from the odd easy read – like Howard Rheingold on virtual communities – it all feels like work. Interesting, but work.
I’ve just read Walter Ong’s 1982 book ‘Orality and literacy’ and reclaimed that lost sense of comfort. Yes, there are pages of references and the text swings across 4000 years and several continents. But they’re references I’m happy with. Been there, done that, struggled with that, understood that. I know why Jaynes felt that there was a significant gap between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, how Robinson Crusoe relates to Tom Jones, why Anansi is important, why Ong is wrong in his references to Hebrew and why Sterne’s use of typography was significant.
I think this is why I struggle so much more with the psychological literature. I feel adrift with so few points of reference. Even my points of reference I only know sketchily. No matter how diligently I read the literature of pedagogy and education, my grasp of it never feels more than superficial when compared with my grasp of English literature.
One day I will achieve the ultimate research question – I will look at it and know it is right. Until then…
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:
Well, I’m working on my literature review, so I’m bound to tinker with my research questions, aren’t I?
Also, an initial pass over my data showed me that if I just look at the skills and resources that people use to learn together online, I’m going to end up with a list. And not a very interesting list, at that.
I’m trying to look at what it buys me to consider the students as a network or one of various types of community Network doesn’t feel quite right, and I’m not entirely sure why. Something to do with it not being completely people centred. Community of practice isn’t right, either, because you can’t really argue that six students and two tutors make up a community of practice.
So I think I’ve either got a community of learners or a learning community. Whichever, I need to look at what I gain by looking at them as a community. I get all the elements of what a community is – reason for being a community, history, language, boundedness, members…
Today’s research questions are therefore:
How do students mobilise the resources of their online learning community in order to build knowledge?
What constrains them from mobilising these resources?
(I could use ‘affordances’ instead of ‘resources’ but then I’d have to go into the whole ‘what are affordances and what do I mean by them? debate – and I’d get saddled with a word which I think will date fairly quickly.)
I have knocked my 21 interviews into more-or-less usable form. I now have about 27,000 words of interview response data which is a fair amount to work my way through.
To give me some initial pointers, I have made it all into tag clouds using the very user-friendly site tagcrowd.com
The picture below shows a tag cloud for all my interview data, including the frequency of the words in the tag cloud. Ignore the highlighting (Snag It put that in as it was doing the screen grab) it’s the size of the words which is important.
‘Group’ and ‘work’ are obviously key words, and the fact that this is an ‘online’ ‘course’. Moving beyond the obvious, though, I’m interested in the words which relate to constructing knowledge together: answers, asked,chat, collaborative, communication, discussion, experience….
   