A171 Start writing for the Internet, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 80 students – evenly balanced between males and females.
A173 Writing family history, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 180 students – mostly women. Also has an OUSA cafe.
T183 Design and the web, 10 points, starts May, runs for 10 weeks. About 400 students – evenly balanced between males and females.
I could do participant observation on one of these. In fact, these ten-point courses are quite good for me and for data collection, as they run four times a year so I could, theoretically, do four or five of these, one after the other.
This would be a substantial pilot, running May / June / July. To have something for my probationary assessment, I need to do something else.
For example, if Karen and Denise have records of a FirstClass conference which I could use, I could
(a) try out detailed discourse analysis on short sections of this
(b) analyse it for key subject positions. This would give me a basic framework for analysis of later data.
(c) find evidence of learning being supported and/or discouraged
(d) investigate the role of the medium / the staff in positioning students.
(e) use the experience to refine my research questions.
If possible, I could experiment with corpus analysis, using Denise and Karen’s conference data. This would give me a chance to find out more about this method, to get to grips with any relevant software and to start to build up a corpus. I’d like to know whether corpus analysis can be used to map changes over time – for example, in pronoun use, the use of technical vocabulary, or in the use of descriptors. Can it be used to look at the stage at which a supervisor makes a comment, or at what students responses to supervisors’ comments tend to be? Does it only work with millions of words of data, or can I pilot it with fairly small amounts of data?
Those pilots would use other people’s data and so they might not get ethical approval. In that case, I could probably try out discourse analysis methods on my U800 data or on some of the FirstClass cafes which are open to all. This would be more like a TMA than a pilot – so I’d like to do more than this, if possible.
I can’t see much point in piloting my interviewing unless I have access to a course conference.
Sounds good. I did one of the 10 point web application design courses (don’t remember which just now). They’re great fun, but a fair amount of work. In my experience, a 60 point course is alot of work. A 30 point course is more than half the work of a 60 point course and a 10 point course is more than a third of the work of a 30 point course. Still, as doing these courses counts as part of your research then go for it. They’re fun :).
BTW, Perry is doing some research based on H807. He wants to investigate the students’ experience of working with online course materials. May possibly be some overlap, and certainly something you might both usefully chat about.