Rebecca's Research Blog

I’m reading the Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky and trying to make sense of my notes on Boris Meshcheryakov’s chapter on Terminology in Vygotsky’s writings. Here’s my version of his explanatory chart (which I can’t persuade WordPress to render legibly) – and a worked example involving squirrels.

Natural form of behaviour. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, smile, go back to my computer.
Sign-mediated/social/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo that Gill took of a squirrel, smile, go back to my computer. (There’s a mediating sign, created by another but neither of us considered using it for this purpose).
Sign-mediated/social/higher. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo of a squirrel that Gill took to make me smile, smile, go back to my computer. (Gill has used signs to influence my behaviour).
Sign-mediated/individual/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go back to my computer. (One of my signs unexpectedly mediates my behaviour.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/external. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go to look for pictures of squirrels on Flickr. (I use a sign to modify my behaviour and thoughts.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/internal. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and start to devise in my head a funny card about a squirrel that I could create for Gill.
So that is six situations in which externally I do exactly the same thing (although my return to the computer is delayed in the final case) but my mental function is different.

Things I’m wondering as I read about Vygotsky:

(1) are scientific and everyday concepts mutually exclusive?

(2) what are examples of scientific and everyday concepts?

(3) do adults ever have everyday concepts or do we always fit things into a system of knowledge?

(4) In fact, how much of what Vygotsky says can be transferred form children to adults?

What I find particularly hard in reading Vygotsky is the gaps in my knowledge. It’s not just the obscure terms translated, or not translated, from the Russian. It’s not just that I haven’t read the philosophers and psychologists on whom his work builds, so there’s a yawning gap before him. It’s also that there’s a yawning gap after him.

I’m reading about the ‘forbidden colours’ experiment. Leonte’ev takes children of various ages and tells them that in the following interview they are not to mention two particular colours (eg red and blue) and that they are to mention all other colours only once. He gives them cards of each different colours, so they can use them as tools to mediate their memory (they won’t necessarily directly remember which colours they have mentioned, but their arrangement or use of the cards will jog their memory). Then he asks them a series of questions like ‘Have you ever been to the theatre’, interspersed with colour questions like ‘what colour is a tomato’, ‘what colour is the sky’. The older children get, the more likely they are to use the cards and to succeed in the task. In the accounts I am reading, Vygotsky appears to take this as evidence that you develop your ability to use mediating devices to support your memory.

But to me it doesn’t say that at all. It tells me that children develop a more sophisticated view of adults and of how adults behave. How many seven year olds, faced with a research scientist and asked what colour a tomato is are going to fail to say red? In their experience, adults who ask that sort of question get angry and think you stupid if you give them the wrong answer.

If you told them that in their computer game they couldn’t use the red or blue keys and they could use each colour key only once or they’d lose a life, they’d soon use mnemonic devices to sort that out.

So to me that experiment is profoundly flawed. Now, this may be my fault, because I haven’t understood it correctly, or because I have read incomplete accounts of it. On the other hand, it may be that everyone who has read of it thinks of it as a flawed experiment. I just don’t know. And it takes SO long to find out.

I usually blog what I have been doing but, in an effort to follow my supervisors’ advice and cut down on my non-PhD activity, I am now blogging what I have NOT been doing.

How come, if I have turned down at least five days of activity since my last supervision session that I still feel I ought to be working twice as fast?

What I have(n’t) done

∑ Withdrew from Open Learn reading group
∑ Decided not to join EDRU reading group
∑ Ignored the JURE 2008 call for papers
∑ Deleted all seminar invitations from CREET, IET and KMI unread
∑ Did not attend IET Board
∑ Turned down invitation to expenses-paid funding seminar in London
∑ Did not attend two days of Open Learn conference
∑ Did not sign up for OU’s postgraduate conference
∑ Turned down a morning’s paid work
∑ Cancelled two days of family holiday

I’ve just been reading an article which I think will be very important for the structure of my thesis, because it outlines the key elements of a sense of community. From what I have seen of my data, I think that where the learning goes wrong is when these elements of community go wrong.

McMillan, D. W. (1996). Sense of community. Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 4, 315-325.

‘I view Sense of Community as a spirit of belonging together, a feeling that there is an authority structure that can be trusted, an awareness that trade, and mutual benefit come from being together, and a spirit that comes from shared experiences that are shared as art.’
Two points of reference are constant in sense of community theory – the member and the community.
Spirit (membership). Us separated from them. Emotional safety that encourages self disclosure and intimacy. Sense of belonging, and confidence and acceptance, and loyalty and entitlement. Friendship, connection with others, and an audience.  The first task of a community is to make it safe to tell ‘the truth’. Can a member tell their truth, can the community accept this truth safely and can they respond with courage? People disclose more when they feel safe. Boundaries These make emotional safety possible. Boundaries have benefits for members. They allay fears about who can be trusted. They define the logistical time and place settings of the group. Boundaries also distinguish the appropriate subject matter for group discourse. Sense of belonging The member acts on faith that they belong. They bond with those whom they believe want and welcome them. The community responds to the individual’s faith with acceptance. Paying Dues Communities need to test new members. They need to know whether a member will make available the time, energy and financial commitment to be an effective member. With rights and privileges come responsibility.
Trust (influence) Trust develops through a community’s use of its power. The community must solve the problems rising from the allocation of power. People must know what they can expect from each other. This involves the development of community norms, rules or laws. A community must have a way to process information and make decisions. Decision makers must have authority. Authority should be based on principle rather than person. Group norms allow members and authority to influence each other reciprocally.
Trade Members find ways they can benefit each other and the community. Bonding begins with the discovery of similarities. Perceive homogeneity facilitates group interaction. Once differences are discovered and needs and resources inventoried, then bargains can be negotiated. The medium of exchange in a community social economy is self disclosure. The most risky and valuable self disclosures involve the sharing of feelings. They begin by sharing feelings that they have in common, they then share positive feelings about each other. Once they have a base of understanding and support, they can begin to share criticisms, suggestions and differences. A community cannot survive unless members make fair trades with each other.
Art (shared emotional connection in time and space) Spirit with respected authority becomes trust, which is the basis of creating trade. Together these elements create a share history that becomes a community’s story symbolised in art. This point links in with history and with developing a shared language. Symbols, stories and other symbolic expressions represent the part of a community that outlives its members. Art supports spirit, and thus the four elements of community are linked in a self-reinforcing circle.

Well, I’m working on my literature review, so I’m bound to tinker with my research questions, aren’t I?

Also, an initial pass over my data showed me that if I just look at the skills and resources that people use to learn together online, I’m going to end up with a list. And not a very interesting list, at that.

I’m trying to look at what it buys me to consider the students as a network or one of various types of community Network doesn’t feel quite right, and I’m not entirely sure why. Something to do with it not being completely people centred. Community of practice isn’t right, either, because you can’t really argue that six students and two tutors make up a community of practice.

So I think I’ve either got a community of learners or a learning community. Whichever, I need to look at what I gain by looking at them as a community. I get all the elements of what a community is – reason for being a community, history, language, boundedness, members…

Today’s research questions are therefore:

How do students mobilise the resources of their online learning community in order to build knowledge?

What constrains them from mobilising these resources?

(I could use ‘affordances’ instead of ‘resources’ but then I’d have to go into the whole ‘what are affordances and what do I mean by them? debate – and I’d get saddled with a word which I think will date fairly quickly.)

Networks are self-organising structures that lie somewhere between order and chaos.

Jones, C. (2004). Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks. ALT-J, 12, 1, 82-93.

I think I may have grasped the point of activity theory. It’s about looking for common units of analysis with which you can analyse and compare a great variety of stuations. I think.

Which leads me to ask what my unit of analysis is. I got caught up earlier in whether the unit of analysis in a FirstClass conference was the word, the sentence, the sense unit, the posting… I therefore lost sight of more theoretically linked units of analysis.

My supervisors have been trying to push me towards this by pointing out that it is contradictory to focus on the group and the individual and that my theoretical framework should lead me to focus on one or the other. Which I did take on board. But on reflection, I think they were making a much broader and more basic point than I had previously grasped. Which is often the case.

I’ve done three or four really serious versions of my pilot for my supervisors over the last 18 months, and it’s STILL not right 🙁

I know when I’ve rewritten it another couple of times there’ll be a time when it’ll be fab and I’ll be really pleased with it and it will make utter and complete sense in terms of my PhD – but I wish that time was NOW :-/

I have knocked my 21 interviews into more-or-less usable form. I now have about 27,000 words of interview response data which is a fair amount to work my way through.

To give me some initial pointers, I have made it all into tag clouds using the very user-friendly site tagcrowd.com

The picture below shows a tag cloud for all my interview data, including the frequency of the words in the tag cloud. Ignore the highlighting (Snag It put that in as it was doing the screen grab) it’s the size of the words which is important.

‘Group’ and ‘work’ are obviously key words, and the fact that this is an ‘online’ ‘course’. Moving beyond the obvious, though, I’m interested in the words which relate to constructing knowledge together: answers, asked,chat, collaborative, communication, discussion, experience….