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).