Yearly Archives: 2006

Ethics

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Just talked to Steve Godwin about doing participant observation on a second-year astronomy course.

He had a pretty laid-back approach to the ethics of this. I suspect this is because the Mellon Project proposal went to the Student Research Project Panel as a whole, and specific elements of it weren’t explored in great detail.

Steve suggests an informal meeting with the course team, being clear about aims and objectives and offereing to share the results of the research with them.

He observed how he did some activities, making a sound recording of his thoughts while he worked through them. He’s also looked at the ratio of posters to people on the course to readers, and considers that this sort of surface data can be accessed ethically as there is no potential for harm.

He posted a request for people to interview on the course conference, and carried out seven half-hour interviews which were informed by his experiences of the course.

Might be worth interviewing Steve about his experiences of identity online, as he specifically mentioned things about being put off at the start by the number of postings, and by people’s signatures which identity other courses they have studied.

Literature review

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Working on the draft of a draft of a literature review. It’s such a mound of material that it’s really hard to arrange sensibly. I’ve got three and a half thousand words, which I guess is about a third of a literature review, but I keep getting lost in it.

I’ve done a fairly coherent intro, though I assume it’ll be completely rewritten in time. There’s a section on identity which is pretty interesting, though it doesn’t even touch on the nuts and bolts of identity construction in discourse. And there’s a bit about how online learning communities are constructed which I suspect I’ll tear up and start again at some point.

I’ve got an outline in Powerpoint, and an outline in Word, and a pencilled outline on one sheet of paper, and a whole series of piles of snippets of papers which is supposed to give me a physical framework, and I’m still meandering all over the place.

Spose it would help if I’d read all the material about education and learning that I need for part one. Then I’d have something more substantial to hang it all on.

Oh well, back to social loafing theory…

Questions and hypotheses

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I’m tinkering with my research questions. I’ve mostly reverted to identity from subject position, partly because it’s more comprehensible, partly because it’s sexier, and patly because it fits in with the idea of learning as transformation of identity. I’ve got a tentative title and hypotheses as well.

I’ve thrown in a short definition of a successful virtual community, although this is obviously going to need a lot more work.

Who do you think you are: The roles of identity in virtual learning community.
Research questions:
Once it is accepted that virtual learning community exist, it is important to ask how such communities can be designed and administered to support learning as a transformative process which changes identity. This research therefore asks:
* Which are the key identities to be found within a learning community which comes together in an asynchronous online environment?
* How are these identities introduced or created?
* Which of these identities are mobilised to support learning, and which to discourage learning?
* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?

Hypotheses:
* Learners have multiple identities within this type of community, many of them products of the online environment.
* Learners must work hard to establish their identities and those of others. This work is not accomplished in the same way as it would be offline.
* The environment, the community design and the participants all introduce certain subject positions.
* A successful virtual learning community will engage in a high level of exploratory talk and knowledge creation. Participants will show evidence of identity change in line with the aims of the community.
* In a successful virtual learning community, the majority of commonly available subject positions will be mobilised to support learning.
* In less successful virtual learning communities, this will not be the case.
* Design and administration of virtual learning communities exert a major influence on the subject positions mobilised within those communities, and on how and why those subject positions are mobilised.

Doing a pilot study

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A171 Start writing for the Internet, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 80 students – evenly balanced between males and females.

A173 Writing family history, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 180 students – mostly women. Also has an OUSA cafe.

T183 Design and the web, 10 points, starts May, runs for 10 weeks. About 400 students – evenly balanced between males and females.

I could do participant observation on one of these. In fact, these ten-point courses are quite good for me and for data collection, as they run four times a year so I could, theoretically, do four or five of these, one after the other.

This would be a substantial pilot, running May / June / July. To have something for my probationary assessment, I need to do something else.

For example, if Karen and Denise have records of a FirstClass conference which I could use, I could
(a) try out detailed discourse analysis on short sections of this
(b) analyse it for key subject positions. This would give me a basic framework for analysis of later data.
(c) find evidence of learning being supported and/or discouraged 
(d) investigate the role of the medium / the staff in positioning students.
(e) use the experience to refine my research questions.
If possible, I could experiment with corpus analysis, using Denise and Karen’s conference data. This would give me a chance to find out more about this method, to get to grips with any relevant software and to start to build up a corpus. I’d like to know whether corpus analysis can be used to map changes over time – for example, in pronoun use, the use of technical vocabulary, or in the use of descriptors. Can it be used to look at the stage at which a supervisor makes a comment, or at what students responses to supervisors’ comments tend to be? Does it only work with millions of words of data, or can I pilot it with fairly small amounts of data?

Those pilots would use other people’s data and so they might not get ethical approval. In that case, I could probably try out discourse analysis methods on my U800 data or on some of the FirstClass cafes which are open to all. This would be more like a TMA than a pilot – so I’d like to do more than this, if possible.

I can’t see much point in piloting my interviewing unless I have access to a course conference.

 

Resesarch methods

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Well, there’s a lot of discourse analysis here.

* Corpus analysis. I put the text of all four conferences into a data base and pull out subject positions in some way.

* I follow the trajectory of individual students. I’d like to supplement this with interviews.

* I look at the whole conference, pull out interactions which I think are particularly salient and analyse them in depth. Perhaps do this with particular emphasis on interventions from tutors/moderators.

* I also need to find evidence of learning being supported and discouraged and I think I need to refer here to Neil Mercer’s work on exploratory talk. Can I see the students building knowledge? Do they think they are learning?

* I need to look at whether this is a learning community. Do the participants perceive it as such? Does it behave like a learning community.

* I think it’s important to look at what’s happening backstage. Who’s lurking, how are they lurking (I think I can access this through message history). How are they linking up outside FirstClass? This needs interviews and participant observation.

* Epistolary interviews make sense here: I’m interested in this method, the whole research project is about online interaction. These could be backed up by face to face and telephone interviews.

* I’d like to interview the course team and the techies about the nuts and bolts of building this community. Which features are inherent in FirstClass? What does the Open University require? Where did they get their experience of working with an online learning community? I think this is important from the point of view of making this applied research.

* I’d like to look at the subeject positions assigned / created by the OU. How has the OU classified these students for its own research purposes? Which classifications have the students had to fit into to be at the Open University / on this course? Which subject positions does the OU push students into? This would require analysis of course and OU literature, and of material held by the survey office.

Research questions

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* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment?

* How are these subject positions introduced or created?

* Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning?

* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?  

How would I answer these questions? Well, first of all I’ve got to find an online community which comes together in an asynchronous environment. It’s probably best if they only come together online, because then I have access to all the whole-community activity. The other activity of the comunity eg texts, emails, IMs, meetings, phone conversations I could catch either through interviews or through participant observation.

I’d probably want more than one community so I could generalise. On the other hand, this is potentially a vast set of data, so I don’t want to go wild and have lots of communities. What about one community on which I focus, and another three where I observe but don’t collect so much data? 

So, four OU courses which come together via First Class. They’d better be undergraduate, because postgraduate isn’t so generalisable. They’d better be in different disciplines, because that makes it more generalisable. If I want to be a participant observer it might be best to have a course that I’ll find relatively easy, so I don’t have to waste huge amounts of time doing the work. Or, another possibility, if I were tutoring on the course I’d have access to different sorts of data.

And position/identity has a very strong link with gender so I’d like to look at a mostly boy course and a mostly girl course, and perhaps at a level one / openings course where people aren’t used to being students, and a level three course where they’re used to learning.

And it;s probably better if they’re not being too reflexive, so not one of the courses on identity.

Identity

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Reading: Identity and deception in the virtual community
Judith S Donath
in ‘Communities in Cyberspace’, eds Marc A Smith and Peter Kollock pp 29-59

I’m interested in the part on how environment influences what you know and what is knowable of others identities. It affects how you create that identity, and what sort of first impression you can make. Maybe I need to look at how identities can be established in First Class.

I’m interested in the ideas that first impressions are lasting impressions – that you tend to hang on to your first impression even in the face of other evidence. I need to get Aronson’s book ‘The Social Animal’ out of the library.

New Group Blog

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We’ve got a new group blog up and running. It should be able to import all our old group blog from Blogger, but that’s proving complicated and it keeps timing out with its connection.

Of course, the minute I can’t post to it I think of all sorts of things to post in it. I’ve just been reading a PhD thesis about writing a PhD thesis and I’m full of thoughts about being a student that should go in the group blog.

Welcome to my new blog!

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Although this is entry number 50, the previous ones have all just been transferred from my previous blog.

Why transfer them? Well, this is an Open University research blog, so it won’t close down if I leave AOL (though presumably it will close down if I leave the OU. However, as it’s now in a more transferable format, I should be able to move it over to another site with fewer problems than making the move from AOL). Also, it should be easier to sign up new readers, including my supervisors. And I like the new category utility, though when you have a lot of categories it becomes a little fiddly to use.

It has been laborious moving all the posts and comments over, but it has given me a chance to read through my research blog carefully and remind myself about the things that were intersting me a few months ago.

http://journals.aol.co.uk/rebeccadan/PhDBlog/

Identities noted by Rasmussen (7.2.06)

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These are the main positions that Rasmussen identifies in her observations. They mainly refer to the 2 teachers and 5 pupils.

She wasn’t focusing on positioning and identity, so this is presumably only a few of the more obvious positions. I can see that some of them would actively support learning, while others would act to block learning.

Girl. Boy.
Explorer [of knowledge]. Presenter [of knowledge]. Evaluator. User.
Participant. Leader. Member. Active member.
Authority figure. Teacher. Facilitator. Supervisor. Shepherd.
Group leader. Someone in charge. Mouse controller. Spokesman. Main director.
Peripheral participant. Active participant. Participant.
Constructor. Interpreter.
Student. Pupil. Learner. Main agent of their learning. Peer.
Insider. Outsider. Observer. Monitor. Audience.
Teaching team. Focus group. Friend. Girl unit.
Quiet pupil. Strong character. Patient. Responsible pupil. Low achiever.
Person who has read. Person who has just copied. Person who can’t answer. Lazy.
Local authorities [role play]. Immigration officer [role play] Traveller [role play]
Soldier [role play]. Civilian [role play]. Central actor.
Black person [role play]. White person[role play]. Norwegian.
Family member. Group member. Partner.
Media consumer.
Advanced ICT user.
Grown up.

Rasmussen notes: ‘individual pupils’ positionality within the groups revealed that although there are close connections between teachers’ and pupils’ interactions, there is no such thing as a direct relationship. Rather interdependency was constructed in different ways.’ (p224)