* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment?

* How are these subject positions introduced or created?

* Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning?

* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?  

How would I answer these questions? Well, first of all I’ve got to find an online community which comes together in an asynchronous environment. It’s probably best if they only come together online, because then I have access to all the whole-community activity. The other activity of the comunity eg texts, emails, IMs, meetings, phone conversations I could catch either through interviews or through participant observation.

I’d probably want more than one community so I could generalise. On the other hand, this is potentially a vast set of data, so I don’t want to go wild and have lots of communities. What about one community on which I focus, and another three where I observe but don’t collect so much data? 

So, four OU courses which come together via First Class. They’d better be undergraduate, because postgraduate isn’t so generalisable. They’d better be in different disciplines, because that makes it more generalisable. If I want to be a participant observer it might be best to have a course that I’ll find relatively easy, so I don’t have to waste huge amounts of time doing the work. Or, another possibility, if I were tutoring on the course I’d have access to different sorts of data.

And position/identity has a very strong link with gender so I’d like to look at a mostly boy course and a mostly girl course, and perhaps at a level one / openings course where people aren’t used to being students, and a level three course where they’re used to learning.

And it;s probably better if they’re not being too reflexive, so not one of the courses on identity.