Now that I’m planning out the final (well, hopefully final) version of my analysis chapters, I’m going back over all my notes and checking I haven’t msised anything out. I’m now square-eyed through checking out my last three years of blog entries. Phew. I think I need to take a break before I start going […]
The next section of my thesis deals with ‘improvable objects’, an idea introduced in Wells’ book ‘Dialogic Inquiry’. Wells credits the idea to Bereiter and Scardamalia in 1996 ‘This focus on an “improvable object,” as Bereiter and Scardmalia (1996) term it[…]’ so I go and read their chapter. Can’t find the term. Well, Scardamalia is […]
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 […]
I’m trying to tighten up my first analysis chapter – which was probably trying to do too much at once. It’s really difficult to do – partly because the chapter is about 16,000 words long, which makes it unwieldy to work with, and partly because I was rather pleased with how it flowed, so it’s […]
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?’
A placeholder posting. When writing my analysis chapters I should file the terms, theories and ideas which must be introduced at the beginning of my thesis.
These are probems related to being able to move ideas and discussion successfully forward through time. Students and tutors neeed to know How to locate information/discussion from the past How to retain relevant information not linked to assessment How to prioritise information/discussion to be moved forward How to return to a point new to them […]
I’m thinking about improvable objects at the moment. Or, rather, I’m thinking about a version of improvable objects. Because talk is ephemeral, improvable objects are things that groups of learners use to move ideas and knowledge through time. They might be documents that they are working on, or a model they are making, or a map […]
My original proposal for my PhD was about virtual international communities in primary schools. Why? Well, apart from the excellent, and convincing, reasons I gave at my initial interview, it was what I thought I was most likely to be accepted for. With a 25-year-old degree in English, and a 20-year-old masters in history I […]