A placeholder posting.
I am going to file here the interesting things which I find in my data but do not include in my thesis. These can then be mentioned in my viva when I am asked ‘What next with this research?’
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 form children to adults?
Met Chris at the Designs for e-learning conference in London last week and his work is really relevant to what I am doing.
What’s more, his presentation (of which he’s sent me a copy, thanks Chris) provoked a series of interesting questions. I therefore won’t blog about his presentation, as I have the full details of that elsewhere, but just note down some pointers from the Q&A session which may prove useful in future.
Is the difference – in educational terms – that networks are used for the exchange of skills and resources but have less power to create knowledge and transform people and identities? Must investigate.
I was just sending the first part of my email interviews out to students, when I thought I should check the link to my web page.
I’d forgotten that I’d tried out my Flickr badge there. It works very effectively but lots of my Flickr pix were taken at the Guinness factory when I went to the CAL conference at Dublin.
Thought I’d better not give the impression that I’m obsessed with alcohol on my home page. I’d use the badge in this blog, but I can’t work out how to do that. Something to do with the template, I guess. I’ve pasted it below for when I have the time to sort it out.
A CAL blog to check out http://speedchange.blogspot.com/
Also, see Gill’s blog in the blog roll.
Jin Tan presented a poster on blogging, so I’ll look out for CAL comments on her blog http://jin-thoughts.blogspot.com/
I’ve finished one entire interview!
Epistolary interviews do take a long time – this one took three and a half weeks, but there’s lots of very good and thoughtful data coming in, so I’m happy about that.
Must sort out my data collection in a bit more detail, though. I have several groups in which all the students have agreed to be archived, and a few where all the students and one tutor have agreed, but only one group where everyone has signed up. I’m going to chase seven groups and hope I get a few extra responses.
I also need to decide exactly who I’m going to interview and how and start getting in touch with absolutely everyone. Oh, and I need to contact the course manager to sort out more about archiving.
My supervisors asked me to note in my blog / journal that I should consider my interview questions carefully as I am carrying out my interviews, and I should remember that I can change the questions to elicit the best possible data.
I ought to consider teaching in the online environment. Could start by breaking this down into the different roles generally encompassed by the term ‘teacher’ in this sort of environment. Most of them can be passed on to someone else, but perhaps they all need to be done for successful learning to take place?
‘Educators are in the business of making value judgements about what kinds of minds people need.’
I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this list in future.
Just been reading Guy Claxton, and that reminded me of the importance of emotion in education. Could I do an emotional analysis of the conference? Is it emotion that moves the students on, or does emotion get in the way of doing anything?
I think, when a student gets upset about the deadlines, that stimulates the rest of the group to move things on. However, it’s not a very emotional group – or they don’t express much emotion anyway, so perhaps this wouldn’t be useful.
According to my word-by-word breakdown (knew it would come in handy sometime) positive emotions include happiness, sympathy, confidence, enjoyment and negative motions include anxiety, paranoia, frustration, fear, distress, exhaustion, dread, confusion, vulnerability and stress. Seems to be a clear bias towards the negative emotions here, especially as the happiness tends to be because they all wished each other happy Christmas!