Monthly Archives: May 2007

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.