Yearly Archives: 2008

Refined camels

Leave a reply

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!

Almost comic

1 Reply

The amount of times I change my research questions is verging on the ridiculous. Still, I will get there. I know they’re out there somewhere, waiting for me to find them. I think these ones are pretty close:

Main question

How is asynchronous dialogue used to build shared knowledge over time?

Sub-questions

How do tutors and learners using asynchronous dialogue carry along and develop ideas across postings?

How do tutors and learners use asynchronous dialogue to preserve and utilise elements of their discussion?

Which techniques do tutors and learners use to link the past with future and present activity?

Wow! Google Books

2 Replies

I must admit, I couldn’t see much point to Google Books. After all, who’s going to read an entire book online? But now I’m a convert.

So many of the relevant books in my field are now online that it’s really speeding up my work. For example, I’ve got Neil Mercer’s ‘Words and Minds’ by my side and I want to reference where he introduces the term ‘cohesive ties’. I pull up the book on Google Books, type ‘cohesive ties’ into search, and there it is, highlighted on the page for me.

OK, not a brilliant example, because Words in Minds is clearly arranged, well indexed and not that long. But Vygotsky! Six massive volumes sitting on the windowsill next to me. Now, in what circumstances did he use the term ‘cultural-historical’? Using the physical books, that’s a LOT of work. Using Google Books, it’s a breeze.

And having the physical books by my side helps, because Google Books usually doesn’t have every page in a book, but it still searches every page. It finds my word on pages 90 and 120 but can’t show me those pages. I pick up the book and flick to those pages. Perfect and complete indexing. How good is that?

What is context?

Leave a reply

Mercer, N., & Edwards, D. (1989). Common knowledge: the development of understanding in the classroom: Routledge.

Context is ‘everything that the participants in a conversation know and understand, over and above that which is explicit in what they say, that contributes to how they make sense of what is said’ (p63). Continuity is ‘the development of such contexts through time’.

The continuity of common knowledge does not develop unproblematically. Explicit back references are made when commonlaity is in doubt. People who are engaged in working out common understandings tend to resort to direct talk about mental processes and the conversation when there appear to be disagreement, mismatches or incongrutities in understanding.

Open or malleable?

1 Reply

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?

Going around in circles

Leave a reply

In the last month my entire thesis has undergone a radical rethink, as I have moved completely away from community, to consideration of temporality in the context of asynchronous dialogue. I think this is the right move to make – I’ve got excellent data to support a study of temporality, and it fits in with lots of my other interests – from history to English language, it all has the potential to jigsaw together.

 BUT… I’ve only got six months to go. Six. Count them. And they include the summer holidays and the Easter holidays, and the inevitable period when my thesis is out being reviewed by someone as yet unidentified. And temporality is a huge field to be taking on – especially when no one really seems to have dealt with temprality in the context of asynchronous dialogue.

Time for analysis

1 Reply

Not so much a blog post, as a thinking process.

When I pointed out in my lit review that a key thing about asynchronous dialogue was, um, it was asynchronous, I didn’t realise I’d then get tied up in a whole new debate about time scales, and learning trajectories and how you study the temporal aspect of classroom talk. This is scarily wide ranging. The article I’ve just read goes from the nano second (chemical synthesis, on a scale of 10 seconds to the power of minus five) to the 32-billion-year time scale (universal change, on a scale of 10 seconds to the power of 18). The semester, should you be interested, is fairly central in this scale (10 seconds to the power of seven, or four months in regular speak), Actually, the course I’m studying ran from November to February, which puts it about midway between chemical synthesis and universal change. Hmmm, I think I need to narrow my focus 🙂

The Martini affordances of asynchronous dialogue – any time, any place, anywhere – tie in with a temporal analysis, because people tend to claim that you can do it any time. But, of course, you can’t. In fact, my groups are all weaving together extremely different timetables. They’re in different timezones, they’re at work from six till midnight, they’re out pumping iron, they’re leafing through the articles in their lunch hour, they’re online while the baby is asleep, or in the few minutes before the library closes, or before they collapse for the evening with a glass of wine. This in comparison with the F2F residential school, where everyone has dropped everything to spend a week on a group project. So, in the background, is always the regular routine – the things which people just can’t get out of doing, especially when they can go online anytime.

Then there’s the several-year timescale. They’ve done one or more other OU courses, they’re probably signed up for a few in the future, they’re training for a career, they’re looking forward to further qualifications. This course is a small segment of the time in which they become psychologists.

There’s the course timescale, or the section of it I’m focusing on, the first few days when they meet for the first time and put together their project proposal.

And there are the individual postings – the pieces which are put together to make up the project proposal.

And there is the Project Proposal Form, the improvable object which they move through those few days, changing it a little or a lot, focusing on finishing it and getting it to the right place at the right time. I think if I justfocus on that as the improvable object, I miss something about the group as an improvable object. They start with  a number of individuals, who have been put together on a list, and they end the few days as a group working together. I think perhaps I’m interested in both of those. And, indeed, if I look at the things that students and tutors set as goals, some of them are things like, critique the last version, or add final details to the PPF, but some are things like get to know each other’s strengths or just, enjoy the weekend.

And, of course, the postings also carry forward through time, and they are also developed and improved as people copy them and quote them. Hmm. This might be where part of my typographical analysis comes in. So I might focus on improvable objects, and I might set the timescales section as background description rather than as analysis? And I have to keep making sure I’m linking back to asynchronous dialogue (AD). How does AD help with this, and how do these improvable objects support the learning with AD? Would they be possible or similar with F2F or synchronous dialogue?