Category Archives: Research progress

Reconsidering

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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 back over the minutes of my last 60 supervision meetings!

It sounds boring – but it’s very helfpul, because it provides me an overview of the past three years – of where I got ideas from, of the ideas I’d forgotten, and of the ideas that make more sense as I return to them from a different perspective.

Referencing

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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 spelled wrong in the reference, so maybe the date’s wrong. If it’s a term introduced by  Bereiter, maybe he reuses it in his later book (2002). Nope. Maybe it’s in Bereiter and Scardamalia’s earlier book? Nope. Maybe it’s in one of their earlier articles? Nope.

So, naturally, I google it. And find that this blog is number one hit for “improvable object”. So not much help t/here. Lots of people cite Wells 1999 and Bereiter and Scardamalia 1996. Maybe I missed it? Then I find the 2002 book in Google books. It definitely doesn’t mention improvable objects. Finally I track down a downloadable PDF of the 1996 chapter and do a word search. No improvable objects, but only ‘improvable human constructions’ – in this case, mathematical ideas. I can see a strong connection between the two phrases, but they’re not the same.

I must have wasted about four hours on this. The original mis-phrasing of the reference was compounded by subsequent writers not bothering to check. Grrrr.

Continuing to talk the talk

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gerund.jpgIf 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.

So instead I’m taking out the words which suggest that learning is a noun rather than a verb. To paraphrase Molesworth, ‘no place for gerunds in my thesis’.

I’ve just spent some time removing the word ‘fact’ from my chapter, and I’m now vacillating about whether to remove the word ‘decision’ or to replace it with ‘decision-making process’.

Talking the talk

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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 wandered off towards a completely different metaphor for learning, in which ideas are things to be completed and transferred, rather than ongoing processes.

In order to help me pin my use of vocabulary down more successfully, they’ve set me to reading an article by Roger Säljö, specifically so that I can identify the appropriate sociocultural language. So the following are terms you can expect to see in my thesis 🙂

Appropriating concepts, appropriation, competence, conceptual constructions,  conceptual framework, conceptual resources, constituting a phenomenon, cultural resources,  discourses, discursive community, discursive nature of human knowledge, discursive patterns, discursive practices, dominant metaphor, enculturation, how individuals are positioned in relation to specific social practices, how individuals are able to identify the situationally appropriate referential meaning of a concept, how reality is constituted in social practices, linguistically mediated knowledge, linguistic tools, mediational means, mediated nature of human activity, paradigm, situatedness is fundamental, socialise, social practices, sociogenetic, transformation.

Analysis chapter one

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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 wrench to pull it to pieces and start again.

I’m following a thread of postings in a FirstClass conference – and I’m quoting the first seven in the thread, so my argument has to be structured around those seven in chronological order – which imposes constraints on how I develop my argument.

My orginal versions addressed the questions

  • How do tutors and learners using asynchronous dialogue carry along and develop ideas across postings?
  • How do tutors and learners use asynchronous dialoue to build and maintain a collaborative group?

I’ve decided that these  are too wide, so I’ve narrowed it down to

  • How do groups use postings in asynchronous dialogue to make decisions?

My seven pieces of data are then going to support discussion of group summaries, typography, delicate objects, proposal patterns, challenges, failures and powerful synthesis.

I’ve now got more of an idea of what my supervisors meant about subsequent chapters ‘falling out’ of my initial analysis. Some of the things I have identified as important don’t fit in with discussion of decision making, so they need to be bumped on into another section. At the moment my second analysis chapter is going to be on how attachments are used to supplement postings and develop exploratory talk – and the third chapter is going to be something about the challenges of group trajectories/timescales clashing with individual trajectories/timescales.

Problems for students in asynchronous environments

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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 but dealt with by others in the past

  • How to mark which past postings they are responding to

  • How to mark and fix decisions

  • How to come in on a debate late

  • How to stop fragmentation into parallel lines of communication

  • How to preserve any synchronous chat

  • How to judge how hard others are working

  • How to distinguish quickly between different people’s comments

  • How to make decisions quickly

  • How to catch up quickly if absent

Refined camels

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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 they are drawing.

Asynchronous dialogue is not at all ephemeral, but you still need something similar to move ideas and knowledge through time – otherwise everyone gets lost in the overwhelming mass of postings.

In the case of the conferences I’m studying, they have a project proposal form. In successive versions of this attached document, the group agrees on their research question, theoretical framework and methodology.

I’ve been trying to think of a term for this sort of object, a term which points to shared ownership and its temporal nature. I just came upon a comment by one of the course participants – this draft is a bit of a camel (a horse made by a committee!).

Maybe that’s the term I need. All asynchronous groups of learners should aim to have one or more refined camels!

Open or malleable?

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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 wasn’t the most obvious candidate to be funded to research educational technology. So I built on my PGCE (hey, only 10 years old) and my school governing experience to put together a proposal. And the international element? Well, travelling abroad has to be one of the perks of PhD research 😉

So, what happened? I am still interested in the virtual international school communities – and involved in one via the Schome project. But in my PhD work? Well, first of all the international bit went. Lots of international travel is fine when you’re footloose, but when you have three small children who need to be at school, and Brownies, and Cubs, and swimming etc it begins to appear as more of a chore. And then I shifted focus from primary schools to higher education, because studying higher education fits in more with my department.

But I stuck with virtual communities for a long time. Until Etienne Wenger said that what I had in my data wasn’t a community, but a group.

And now here I am studying asynchronous dialogue, with the emphasis on the asynchronicity. And I’m very pleased with how it’s going (OK, a lot of it is still a confusing muddle, but I’m relatively sure that I’ve found the end of the string and will be able to unravel the tangle of data and theories). I’m even, tentatively, beginning to critique the touchy-feely concept of learning communities.

But I can’t help noticing that my work is now very well aligned with that of my supervisor, whereas my pilot project was aligned with the very different work of my MRes supervisor. Am I sensibly open to expert guidance, or am I just malleable?