Maarten Dolk http://www.fi.uu.nl/nl/medewerkers/medewerkers/medewerker63.html gave an interesting talk about getting student teachers to develop narratives about events as a tool to construct meaning about mathematics education and to bridge the divide between theory and practice.

They showed a video clip from the classroom and asked six people to comment on it. Despite them running it several times, people still disagreed on what was physically happening (was that child counting in fives or was he really counting in tens) and what the children were doing (building a tower of Unifix cubes or measuring a desk). One story, many interpretations.

Lisa Gjedde talked on ‘capturing the meaning in interactive storytelling’. There were elements of the project which appealed to me, particularly the thinking of a personal question, then casting the electronic runes and interpreting the resulting video in the light of your own question. However, I won’t be going to any papers by Lisa again.

Spent the morning on a really fun activity. We met up at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in John Know House on the Royal Mile. I was expecting the centre to be a backroom somewhere but it’s an entire, well resourced building about midway up the Royal Mile. Seeing as storytelling in England tends to be confined to the upstairs rooms in pubs or to one-off events, this is even more impressive.

Anyway, we split into three groups and went for storytelling walks along the Royal Mile, taking digital photos as we went. Then we returned to base, shared stories and impressions and made a collage of the experience.

This seemed to tie in very well with Gill’s mobile learning. You can see the possibility for creating a really rich resource about the Royal Mile with different histories and stories and perspectives available at every point. Layer upon layer of different perspectives.

Also it made me think about why some stories/narratives endure. If a major role of narrative in education is to help us to remember things, then which stories help us to remember best? Which elements are the most important? Do we tend to remember things which make us uneasy?

Karen has been made a professor! My supervisory team is getting more distinguished by the minute 🙂

I really enjoy my blog, and I’ve been irritated that the damn probationary report has got in the way of my posting to it recently.

It just occurred to me that I spend a lot of time reflecting on the blog s and how we’ll be able to analyse them, and occasionally emailing other researchers and reading their blogs. Maybe I should be researching blogs, not online learning.

Having just struggled though my literature review I have this sense that everyone knows so much about learning and online learning. It’s really difficult to get a handle on it all. There are umpteen journals, so there’s more appearing every day. What I like about thinking about the blogging (and about epistolary interviewing, which I’m also thinking about at the moment) is that it’s fresh and new and untheorised and seems to open up so many possibilities.

Give me a choice on reading a book on blogging or a book on e-learning and I’d go for the blogging one straight away.

Well, I was booked to spend all day at Denise’s research day on e-assessment. I went this morning and, I must say, it was ver interesting.

But having been stressed out with deadlines all week, and expecting to be stressed out agin tomorrow when my supervisors have had a chance to pull to pieces my probationary report, what do I do? Do I get on with the mountains of work I’ve accumulated? No. I go and change the theme on my blog, watch a videocast and idly flick through my emails.

There seem to be a very few high-profile cases around which the discourse of Internet research ethics has been based. There’s ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ which Julian Dibbell wrote up in Village Voice in 1993. This has all sorts of ramifications but, from the point of view of research ethics, the message is – these are real people in cyberspace, and they can be harmed.

Then there’s the case of JennyMUSH, a form of MUD populated by survivors of sexual abuse. From a research ethics point of view, it’s not so much what happened in JennyMUSH, as the way that it then became a honeypot for researchers, with the result that it then became a much less safe place for participants to be. 

The Carnegie-Mellon cyberporn study became a big issue because of all the publicity it got – it was originally an unethical piece of research carried out by an undergraduate. He used deception to access private data to study usage of pornography on the Internet. Any ethical monitoring whatsoever would have knocked this study on the head – I’m not sure that it needed any new Internet rules to be introduced.

So, on the back of these three cases, we have a proliferation of ethical rules and codes and musings. I think it’s significant that the cases have connections to rape, to abuse and to (child and other) pornography. The bigger crimes – which have nothing to do with research ethics – are used to flavour the research ethics debate which leads, perhaps, to overkill. 

Otherwise, we have anecdotal evidence of people getting annoyed by researchers, but that’s about it. Some people began to feel less secure and more overlooked in their online world – but it could be argued that that’s a good thing, they now have a more accurate perspective on how cyberspace operates.