Rebecca's Research Blog

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?

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?

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

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?

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.

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?

I came to my data from the point of view of communities. How do communities learn together? Why is it valuable to learn as a member of a community? However, on closer examination, I’m not studying a community. My data comes from task-based groups (thanks for that insight, Etienne). True, they have been structured to draw on benefits of community learning and they do, in some ways, act as communities. But they’re not communities. If I want to go and study an online learning community, I should be looking at Schome, which is a far better example.

Setting community aside; what have I got? Well, as my supervisor said the other day – you’ve got talk, and that’s what’s interesting. But what I find really interesting is that that is just what I have not got. I have got no talk. No talk whatsoever. The students and tutors think they’re talking, they refer to themselves as talking, but they are not talking. Even when I interview them, they are not talking.

They’re communicating via text, and what you can do via text is very different to what you can do via speech. Yes, you can challenge opinions and defend opinions and access a range of opinions as you can in speech. But you can do that at the same time as you refer back to earlier stages of the argument. You can build on other people’s points or challenge each one separately. You can ponder what they have said for a minute, or two minutes, or half an hour.

And this is what I see throughout my work. In my data, and in my blogging data, and in my epistolary data and in my Schome data. Written conversation offers a new, and powerful, way of thinking together. But nobody’s using it for that reason. Everyone’s using it because it’s convenient and space- and time-independentor, in the case of blogging, because they enjoy it. Yes, if challenged, they may say that it supports reasoning and critical dialogue. But they don’t use it for that reason, and they don’t explain that reasoning to students, and nobody formally trains anybody in how to use textual conversation to support knowledge creation.

So why my data is interesting is because it shows that textual conversation is a powerful way of thinking together. And if that;s what is interesting about my data then that is what my research questions should be about (you knew I was going to get back to my research questions at some point, didn’t you? 🙂  )

When I was studying English, or history, I could curl up in bed with a textbook and feel relaxed and cheerful. It’s never been like that in IET. Apart from the odd easy read – like Howard Rheingold on virtual communities – it all feels like work. Interesting, but work.

I’ve just read Walter Ong’s 1982 book ‘Orality and literacy’ and reclaimed that lost sense of comfort. Yes, there are pages of references and the text swings across 4000 years and several continents. But they’re references I’m happy with. Been there, done that, struggled with that, understood that. I know why Jaynes felt that there was a significant gap between the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, how Robinson Crusoe relates to Tom Jones, why Anansi is important, why Ong is wrong in his references to Hebrew and why Sterne’s use of typography was significant.
I think this is why I struggle so much more with the psychological literature. I feel adrift with so few points of reference. Even my points of reference I only know sketchily. No matter how diligently I read the literature of pedagogy and education, my grasp of it never feels more than superficial when compared with my grasp of English literature.

One day I will achieve the ultimate research question – I will look at it and know it is right. Until then…

• How do task-based groups of learners identify and use the resources of asynchronous conferences to support their learning?
• What constrains their identification and utilisation of these resources?

Look, I’ve taken ‘communities’ out of my questions for the first time! Though they’re still there, really, because I’ll argue that one of the resources of an asynchronous conference can be community.

The things I really want to get in are:

• Some affordances are illusory. Asynchronous conferences are not any time, any place, anywhere – they are constrained by real-life limitations and it can be a problem to pretend that these do not exist. Additionally, people do not make use of the permanent record to inform the debate. There are perhaps three types of affordance to look at: affordances of the technology (any time, any place, any where), affordances of the medium (history, threading, icons) and affordances of the talk (reflective, comparing perspectives etc). Analysis should show: do they recognise these affordances, do they make use of these affordances, do these affordances exist, do they act as constraints?
• Learning in these conferences is related to education, organisation and affect. The organisational and affective issues are substantial and account for the majority of seemingly off-task behaviour. I need to read more on affect and follow up any references on organisational learning. Organisational learning relates to the previous section. Analysis should reveal which forms of organisation they have to develop in order to make use of the affordances which I have identified with the help of the literature. My pilot is useful here. What helps them with this organisation and what hinders them?
• The affective issues are related to community. These aren’t communities for a number of reasons, but they utilise the resources of other communities, and build elements of a community together. Establishing trust is important. Again, this relates to seemingly off-task discussion. This relates to all the literature I have read on community, and I need more on the subject of trust. Analysis should show occasions when trust allows them to learn togther, when lack of trust prevents them from learning together, and how they establish trust.
• And I want to write about the differences between conference talk, speech and written text – especially with references to fonts, point sizes and colours. I think this relates to Vygotsky’s description of speech completing the thought. Different types of speech deal with meaning in different ways. There must be some literature on this somewhere? Analysis in this section will be much more narrowly focused on two or three passages, showing how features such as colour, quoting and typeface are used to build meaning together. I could make a start on this analysis to see if it works.