If 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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not so much a blog post, as a thinking process. When I pointed out in my lit review that a key thing about asynchronous dialogue was, um, it was asynchronous, I didn’t realise I’d then get tied up in a whole new debate about time scales, and learning trajectories and how you study the temporal […]
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 […]
I’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 […]
Things I’m wondering as I read about Vygotsky: (1) are scientific and everyday concepts mutually exclusive? (2) what are examples of scientific and everyday concepts? (3) do adults ever have everyday concepts or do we always fit things into a system of knowledge? (4) In fact, how much of what Vygotsky says can be transferred […]
I’m revisiting my pilot study as I rewrite the conference paper which I based on it. I’ve realised that not all my data was coded using the final coding scheme, so I’m doing a quick code. I’ve realised that what I’m looking for really affects my coding. I’m not particularly interested in course materials and […]
I’ve run into a real problem with the idea of ‘comunity of practice’. What is the difference between a CoP and a community? Lots of people just take the CoP idea as is, and run with it. People who critique the ideas seem to do so in terms of thinking the model through – do […]
This is an extract from my supervision minutes from last December. It contains a lot of points which are important to the development of my research, so I’ve put it here to remind me of these. Examine the resources used by students – local resources and broader social resources – and at how they use […]