Yearly Archives: 2007

Action research

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I’m not engaging in action research at the moment but, if I ever decide to take part in an action research study in the future, here are the methodological principles:

Methodological principles of action research

 

  1. Action research integrates research and action in a series of flexible cycles. The collection and analysis of data, the planning and introduction of strategies for change and the evaluation of these changes is an iterative process.
  2. Action research is carried out by a collaborative partnership of participants and researchers.
  3. Action research involves the development of knowledge and understanding of a unique kind.
  4. Action research has a vision of self transformation and has aspirations for greater social justice for all.
  5. Action research involves a high degree of reflexivity.
  6. Action research involves exploratory engagement with a wide range of knowledge drawn from other fields.
  7. Action research engenders powerful learning for participants through its combination of research and reflection.
  8. Action research locates any inquiry in its broader context.

Somekh, B. (2006). Action research: a methodology for change and development. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

 

Shifting ground

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I’m changing my research questions again – this time more profoundly than usual.

  1. Which key skills do members of an online learning community use to support their learning and teaching?
  2. Which key resources do members of an online learning community use to support their learning and teaching?

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.

Are students ever off-task online?

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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.

Interviews underway

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I’ve finally taken the plunge and got all my epistolary interviews with students and tutors underway. This was supposed to happen much earlier, but I got held up by the issue of which conferences could be archived which has really only just been sorted out.

I didn’t want to end up interviewing a random selection of people, so had to wait until I found out which conferences would be archived.

I’m now interviewing everyone on the four archived conferences who agreed to an interview. I’ve focused on another conference which hasn’t been archived, as the tutor wrote on their consent form that it had been an interesting group. I’ve also focused on another unarchived group, because lots of its members agreed to be interviewed.

Together with the interviews I did when I was expecting to interview other groups, that’s 22 in all. I’ve started 16 today, which is too many to have running at the same time – but I didn’t want to delay any longer.

Some of the students and tutors have given their OU email addresses. I know they use these when a course is running, but I’m worried they won’t check those mail boxes otherwise. It will be interesting to see whether everyone takes part in the interviews.

Two interviews with tutors from the last tranche petered out. I’ve decided to leave these, as the tutors were obviously busy and I don’t want to pester them.

Flickr badge

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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.

www.http://www.flickr.com”>www. style=”color:#3993ff”>flickr.com 

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from ebbsgrovehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/24707984@N00″>ebbsgrove>. Make your own badge here.http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne”>here.>

     

How to archive FirstClass conferences

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  1. Open the relevant FirstClass conference. Right-clicking on the column names in grey allows you to choose which columns will be displayed. Choose Attachments, Name, Last Modified, Kind, Subject. (Kind is just in there to aid the sorting process). Sort by Name by left-clicking on the grey Name column heading. Drag the columns into order. 

  2. In the main Snag-It window, set up a profile with the settings Input=Auto scroll window, Output=File, Effects = Space Formatted. (To do this, change the profile settings at the bottom of the screen, then press the big plus sign near the top right of the screen.) 

  3. Click Capture, and Snag-It will scroll down and pickup the entire window. This takes a couple of minutes. Then save it as a text file. 

  4. Copy all and paste into a Word document. Find and replace the double line spaces and the thousands of double spaces. 

  5. Now set it up to be converted to a table using commas to separate the columns. First, remove all the commas which are already there. Find and replace them with an obvious string such as %%%. 

  6. Take each author’s name. Find and replace the name with a comma after it. Use their full name rather than just their first name, otherwise you’ll run into problems when a name has been included in a subject line. 

  7. Convert the year of posting to the year followed by a comma. Replace the word in the Kind column with a comma, thus putting a division after all the times. 

  8. Go to the Table tab, and convert text to table, choosing the comma to sort the columns. 

  9. Replace the commas which were in the text originally, by replacing all the %%% with commas. 

  10. Paste into Excel, sort by the title column. Replace the numbered Re’s eg Re(2) becomes 2. Replace the remaining Re’s with 1 and put 0 by all other entries.  Delete bracketed numbers (1) and then Re: 
  11. Add a column and manually note which postings have attachments.
  12. Now for the laborious bit. Put it all back into Word ,on a landschape page in a small font. Add two columns and manually paste in all entries and the posting history.

Hoorah for Snag-It!

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Gill has just pointed out to me a brilliant feature of Snag-It. It will pick up text which could not normally be cut and pasted. So the menus on a FirstClass conference, which appear as text, but which I was having to copy across manually, can be picked up in a text capture grab of a scrolling window.

The conference I’m archiving at the moment has around 650 postings. I was having to copy all the authors across, which wasn’t too tricky, but then having to move dates, times and titles manually, which was time consuming, laborious and boring. Now it’s all done with a screen grab and a series of find and replaces. Far quicker.

Hoorah for Snag-It! Everyone should have a copy.

Time taken

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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 get bored. It’s very, very boring and, hey, the Internet is just a click away
  • I get RSI. Endless cutting and pasting. My fingers begin to tingle. I’ve swapped my mouse to the left to double my time, but there’s still a physical limit to how much can/should be done in a day.

More data archiving

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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: 

  • post author 

  • date of post 

  • time of post 

  • title of post 

  • whether the post has an attachment 

  • which place in a thread the post appears (eg ‘Test’ is in position 0, ‘Re: Test’ is in position 1, ‘Re (2) Test’ is in position 2 etc). This avoids a sort by title which ends up with all the Re’s clumped together 

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.

Still archiving my data

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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.