I’m so used to Gill heading off to collect gadgets from around the university that I wasn’t surprised when she said she was going to pick up some tablets. Not until she said she was collecting them for her cats!
I didn’t know she was researching animals’ informal learning with mobile devices.
Oh – the other sort of tablets. LOL.
I’m changing my research questions again – this time more profoundly than usual.
Resources identified by Neil Mercer in’Words and Minds’ include:
Communities have the following resources:
History Members recall and reflect on shared experience
Collective identity Members use this to find meaning, purpose and direction for their own endeavours and relate these to others
Members use this to find meaning, purpose and direction for their own endeavours and relate these to others
Reciprocal obligations Members have responsibilities for each other and can expect access to each other’s intellectual resources
Members have responsibilities for each other and can expect access to each other’s intellectual resourcesDiscourse Fluency in the discourse is one of the obvious signs of membership. Language is reshaped to suit members’ communicative demands.
Fluency in the discourse is one of the obvious signs of membership. Language is reshaped to suit members’ communicative demands.Members recall and reflect on shared experience Members use this to find meaning, purpose and direction for their own endeavours and relate these to others Members have responsibilities for each other and can expect access to each other’s intellectual resources Fluency in the discourse is one of the obvious signs of membership. Language is reshaped to suit members’ communicative demands.
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 these to build a sense of togetherness and to create a context.
Read Van Oers and Hannikainen’s 2001 article in the International Journal of Early Years Education 9 (2), which privileges a relational approach and deals with how groups are sustained by togetherness.
Investigate how groups build contextual foundations for joint working, mobilise social and community resources and build a sense of mutuality and confidence in the group. This is not just off-task talk, they cannot do cognitive work without this relational work. Together they build contextual links, which is important for distance students who are limited by the bandwidth available.
The ‘approaches to study’ is a limited lens, which looks at how individuals learn. It is a cognitive schema. However, cognitive elements do not stand on their own. It is important to look at the salience and significance of other important aspects.
The group must negotiate their roles and actions in order to achieve things collectively. Their actions and learning are highly relational, not just resourced by course material. Learning is an interactional accomplishment.
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.
I’ve now worked out a method I’m happy with of archiving a FirstClass conference. It gives me access to the attachments and history of each posting, and provides for easy data sorting.
Theoretically, I could archive a conference in a day, if I worked late. However, the limitations are:
I decided to put all the data into an Excel file, so that it would be easily sortable. Although FirstClass conferences can be copied and pasted, the contents pages cannot be, so I had to type in all these details. I have columns for:
So far, so good. It’s time consuming, but it’s doable. However, I run into a problem when I come to paste in the text from each post. Excel interprets each return as a signal to move to a new cell. My organised table quickly becomes a terrible mess. There may be a way to get round this, but I’m not good enough at Excel to find it. I therefore paste it all into a Word table. It remains sortable and, if I work out a way to do it in Excel, it can all be pasted back in there. I shrink the other columns as far as possible, change all the text to 8pt, and view at 75%. I end up with 76 pages of very small type. By doing this I’ve lost the formatting – I don’t know which size the text was originally presented, but that doesn’t matter for my analysis and nobody appears to have used distinctive font sizes anyway.
There are more attachments than I expected. I download the Excel, Powerpoint and Word attachments into a folder and note at the bottom of the text field of my Word table which attachment goes with which post. My licence for SPSS has expired so I can’t currently download the three SPSS attachments.
Now, how do I pick up the History information which tells me who has read or downloaded a posting and when they did that? Again, this can’t be cut and pasted. I try the idea of entering it manually in abbreviated form, but that’s a lot of work for very little return. I settle on opening the History of nine postings at a time, arranging them on my screen and taking a screen dump. It’s slow, but manageable.
I make a number of false starts. I try picking up all the FirstClass postings and dragging them into a folder on my hard disk, but I only succeed in picking up aliases. I try cutting and pasting text consecutively into a Word document, but the header information won’t cut and paste. I try and fail to use the FirstClass archive function (don’t have the right permissions, and I’m not sure that I want to end up with a FirstClass archive).
Some sort of image would be good, so I buy and download SnagIt software which allows me to save rolling screens. I arrange the conferences according to date, author, title, size and take pictures of each. This works for most of the conferences, but one seems to have author search set as default and refuses to treat any other arrangement seriously. I’ve had this problem with FirstClass before and have failed to solve it. And its Help function is atrocious.
I start to take screen dumps of each posting in turn, but this is laborious, and I have to type in the title of each one, and I can’t quite see how I’d use these in future. I stop doing this. Time for a new approach.
A how-I-did-it list to remind me of how I did it when I come to write my thesis.
I’ve been archiving a FirstClass conference for the last two days. I’m drawing on my experience of the last two conferences I worked with – which were both archived by someone else. I had several problems with that data which I wanted to avoid here.
Emergence v design – a case study of an emergent community of practice in a blended learning community in postgraduate education Tim Savage, Trinity College, Dublin. https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Tim.Savage/scholar.htm
Once again, very relevant to me. I’m particularly interested in the idea of a blended community which brings together the online and the F2F, strengthening both.
Tim used an ethnographic approach and grounded theory to study a supportive online community which runs alongside a course and has done for five years. He looked at the differences between the design space and the community which emerges. He also looked at the processes of emergence – the impact of the online F2F blend.
The emergent community is neither face to face nor virtual. It is community with aspects of both. There was recognition of people’s online persona prior to F2F contact. The blended approach seemed to bring together a community more quickly than either an online or a F2F community would manage. People felt there was a lack of cliques. They had a sense of pride in the community. In-class groupings were more fluid than would have been expected if they had been based only on F2F contact. Cliques teded to exist only when people had met on previous courses. There was a strong commitment to the community a well as to the personal social network.