Shifts in the power structure of the conference. Who are the members expecting to have power? When do they take power? When do they have power passed to them? When is power forced upon them? How does this happen? Why does it happen?
I’m reading Ann and Kim’s article on affective issues in collaborative learning. They quote Crook extensively and say he uses an ecological metaphor which promtes an approach whereby the investigator pays particular attention to both the features of the interaction and to the ‘character of the resources that collaborators act around – much as ecologists need to study how organisms interact with each other within their natural habitat.
Perhaps I should be doing this?
And these are my research questions as framed in my probationary report…
This research will consider the affordances of asynchronous online communities in higher education, asking how they can be utilised to support rather than to impede learning. It will also examine ways in which learners participate in a virtual environment. The main research questions which will drive the work are:
So, my supervisors said that the last set of research questions were questions for an entire career, not for something as narrow as a thesis. Now I’m down to:
How do virtual learning communities based in asynchronous online conferences support higher-education learners in the co-construction of knowledge?
How are self-presentation, identity and community relations implicated in online learning in these communities?
I like to keep tabs on my research questions, so before I delete this week’s set, I’ll post them here.
This what I proposed in the draft of my probationary report:
What are the key characteristics of a virtual learning community?
Which characteristics of a virtual learning community support learning?
Which characteristics of a virtual learning community impede learning?
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?
I spoke to Robin Goodfellow the other day. He suggested:
Investigating which identities are readily taken up in a FirstClass conference.
Considering the role of the researcher in the co-construction of identity. Which stories are being rehearsed and which discourses are being reproduced?
I’m felling pleased with myself, as I’ve managed to knock together 5000 words, which looks like a first draft of half of my literature review. It’s full of holes, and it misses out the really difficult areas (learning theory and various discourse analysis views on identity) but I can see that it might all fit together eventually.
As a result, I’ve tinkered with my research questions once again. So, just to archive how they fluctuate, here they are:
Working on the draft of a draft of a literature review. It’s such a mound of material that it’s really hard to arrange sensibly. I’ve got three and a half thousand words, which I guess is about a third of a literature review, but I keep getting lost in it.
I’ve done a fairly coherent intro, though I assume it’ll be completely rewritten in time. There’s a section on identity which is pretty interesting, though it doesn’t even touch on the nuts and bolts of identity construction in discourse. And there’s a bit about how online learning communities are constructed which I suspect I’ll tear up and start again at some point.
I’ve got an outline in Powerpoint, and an outline in Word, and a pencilled outline on one sheet of paper, and a whole series of piles of snippets of papers which is supposed to give me a physical framework, and I’m still meandering all over the place.
Spose it would help if I’d read all the material about education and learning that I need for part one. Then I’d have something more substantial to hang it all on.
Oh well, back to social loafing theory…
I’m tinkering with my research questions. I’ve mostly reverted to identity from subject position, partly because it’s more comprehensible, partly because it’s sexier, and patly because it fits in with the idea of learning as transformation of identity. I’ve got a tentative title and hypotheses as well.
I’ve thrown in a short definition of a successful virtual community, although this is obviously going to need a lot more work.
Who do you think you are: The roles of identity in virtual learning community.
Research questions:
Once it is accepted that virtual learning community exist, it is important to ask how such communities can be designed and administered to support learning as a transformative process which changes identity. This research therefore asks:
* Which are the key identities to be found within a learning community which comes together in an asynchronous online environment?
* How are these identities introduced or created?
* Which of these identities are mobilised to support learning, and which to discourage learning?
* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?
Hypotheses:
* Learners have multiple identities within this type of community, many of them products of the online environment.
* Learners must work hard to establish their identities and those of others. This work is not accomplished in the same way as it would be offline.
* The environment, the community design and the participants all introduce certain subject positions.
* A successful virtual learning community will engage in a high level of exploratory talk and knowledge creation. Participants will show evidence of identity change in line with the aims of the community.
* In a successful virtual learning community, the majority of commonly available subject positions will be mobilised to support learning.
* In less successful virtual learning communities, this will not be the case.
* Design and administration of virtual learning communities exert a major influence on the subject positions mobilised within those communities, and on how and why those subject positions are mobilised.