Social loafing seems to me to be definitely a position you can take within an online learning environment. However, as it’s not a term in common use, you couldn’t really have it as your identity. Even if it were in common use, would you identify yourself as a social loafer? Probably not. So here’s an example of a distinction between position and identity.
‘If we take someone’s words and make them our own, we position ourselves in relation to the other.’ (p38)
This is very relevant in online correspondence – particularly in email
Won’t say too much about this, as I’ve recalled Holland’s book to the library and I guess I’ll get round to reading it one day.
‘”Perhaps an AA member can/will tell the story of her life as an alcoholic only sith support of other AA members. The story lies within her zone of proximal development, if not within her sole capacity.'”
Holland and co point out that Vygotsky de-emphasises power, ownership and control in considering the ZPD. Participants are not equal – the ZPD is a place for struggle. They propose the concept of positionality to visualise individual stances in sociocultural worlds [it looks as if Rasmussen is saying that Holland et al came up with this in 1998. That can’t be the case? Can it? No, not according to Google].
Holland refers to the positional aspects of identity. Wonder whether everyone agrees with position and identity being separate? Or, would I be more correct in wondering whether positionality and identity are separate?
Rasmussen (p13) ‘Piaget explained that when a child experiences something new she will constantly try to fit this experience into existing known structures’. I think this depends on how she has been positioned, and how she has positioned herself. She may lump it in with existing UNknown structures – considering it something not knowable, or not worth knowing, or irrelevant or somebody else’s problem.
There are plenty of children in classrooms being exposed to new experiences who have positioned themselves/been positioned as stupid, or daydreamers, or footballers who are replaying a match in their heads. They do not process or, in some cases, even notice the new experience because of their positioning.
Thought I’d posted this before, but can’t find it. It’s is my list against which I judge learning theories. If they don’t apply to everything on this list, they’re incomplete.
* Early Years – learning through play
* ACE (accelerated Christian education): children are assessed on entry and progress at their own speed, working through booklets and doing the tests at the end of each one before they can move on to the next. They work mainly alone, but if they get stuck they put a little flag up in their cubicle and a supervisor helps out.
* Learning through observation – Gerald Durrell in My family and other animals. Gerald spends all day alone in the wilds of Corfu and amasses an enormous amount of zoological knowledge. He rarely meets anyone who encourages this or is prepared to show any interest. The people he encounters mostly speak another language and are from a very different culture.
* Gaining self knowledge through retreat and/or contemplation
* Learning skills through apprenticeship
* Traditional sushi chef training. ‘All you do the first couple of years is observe. You watch how the master filets fish, and you learn how to cook rice.’
* Learning through reading
* Learning through searching the Internet
* Learning to play a tune on the piano
* Learning languages through immersion
* Education in Saudi Arabia until the 1950s: kuttab schools specialising in memorising the Qu’ran
* Tai chi – learning wordlessly through physical moves.
Is there something deeper here about identities and position (must sort out what the difference is)? Is learning a continual repositioning of yourself, and a changing of the positions open to you? Is teaching a focused way of helping people to position themselves in more knowledgeable/educated/informed ways?
This may be too generic, because as time passes, whatever you do, you will lose some positions and move to others. You go to bed positioned as someone exhausted and wake up positioned as someone refreshed. You wait for a bus for half an hour and end up positioned as someone cold, wet and bored. Umm, it would refer to inanimate objects as well. One minute it’s positioned as a rock, the next minute it’s positioned as a seat, or a leaning post, or a back scratcher.
And animals (and even plants, in some ways) can learn things, but I’m not sure to what extent they can position themselves.
Hmm. Needs more thought.
‘According to the sociocultural perspective, human learning cannot be fully undestood without understanding human activity. In studying learning, therefore, one should focus on how tools, mental and material, are used in human activity and how humans construct knowledge and understanding by the use of tools. Moreover, the physical and social environments are considered integral to the learning activity. This conceptualisation of learning implies that it matters where the learning occurs.’ (Ingvill, p5)
Ingvill takes this to mean, from the point of view of ICT, that the important things are how it influences communication and how information is organised, stored, retrieved and interpreted. But also important, for me, is how identities are established. I think this is also true for the sort of classroom use of ICT that Ingvill was examining – the children who identify as expert users, or competent users, or unwilling users, or the ones that never get a chance to use the keyboard.
Ingvill says that ‘in studying an educational activity such as project work, it is essential to take into acoount that participants have existing and established relationships.’ That’s obviously true of her work in the classroom, but I wonder to what extent it would relate to an asynchronous conference? There may be pre-existing relationships from other courses. I suppose there are more likely to be generic relationships – people expect their relationship with the supervisor to be like past relationships, they expect students to be pretty much like other students they have encountered online.
Been reading Ingvill’s doctoral thesis: ‘Project work and ICT: studying learning as participation trajectories’
I’m thinking at the moment about my PhD as an exploration of how people construct their identities in online learning communities. Which identities help them to learn and which identities get in the way of learning? How can course designers and tutors encourage the good identities and discourage the bad identities? Of course, this takes me into yet another theoretical field, and I’ve got to do lots of thinking about what we mean by identities. looks like I’ll have to go back to discourse analysis theory 🙁
I’ve looked at Ingvill’s thesis from this point of view. She says (p3) ‘The prototypical classroom study, with or without ICT, tends to either take the teachers’ or the pupils’ perspective.’ This is a polarity I’d like to move away from. I think a lot of the time in the classroom, or the learning community or whatever, pupils are not acting as pupils, but as something else. I was watching a child in school last week who was actively not learning. His body posture was all set up so that the teacher wouldn’t challenge him – sitting up straight, arms folded neatly in front of him, eyes facing the teacher. But he wasn’t looking at the teacher. In his head he was away somewhere else.It wasn’t that it was a difficult lesson or a boring lesson (the class were discussing what they had enjoyed during the year) – he just wasn’t there as a learner.
Ingvill argues ‘that it is through reoccurring participation in different settings and contexts that people appropriate and make sense of knowledge and create understanding’. I’d argue that they don’t or can’t do any of those things unless they are positioned correctly. This links with constructivism, where ‘learning is tied to the learner’s way of making sense of what happens through actively constructing a world’. Constructing world must included constructing your own identity in that world. In an asynchronous conferencing, you construct that identity or that position together with everyone else who has access to the conference (whether they are active or not).
Quentin Jones (1997)
Virtual communities, virtual settlements and cyber-archaeology: a theoretical outline
JCMC 3(3)
Defining a cyber-settlement and a virtual community
Cyber settlement is a cyber-place that is symbolically delineated by a topic of interest and within which a significant proportion of interrelated group-CMC occurs. A virtual community is a set of social relationships forged via a virtual settlement.
A cyber settlement requires:
* Minimum level of interactivity Interactivity is the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of earlier messages. This demand for interactivity means that an email list which distributes information is not a virtual community.
* Variety of communicators More than two communicators. This excludes database queries and interactions.
* Virtual common-public-space where a significant portion of interactive group-CMCs occur This excludes private communications which go through no common space. Without this notion, the notion of virtual community loses its value because it is indistinguishable from many other forms of CMC.
* Minimum level of sustained membership