Rebecca's Research Blog

The thing about going to conferences is that your mind starts rushing around making connections between all the different things you’re hearing. At the U500 conference, where people are researching everything from the moons of Jupiter to the 15th-century viola, the opportunities for overlap are huge.

I’m currently into the applications of gaming software: how can it be applied elsewhere? Particularly, I guess, the way that if you reach certain targets in times of hours online or things achieved, you unlock new areas. Seems to me this might be really useful in keeping people involved in online learning enivoronments.

And I’m interested in mashups. Here’s the reference for the site which combinea Amazon wishlists, Googlemaps and some function of Yahoo to produce satellite pictures of the houses of people who recommend subversive books (must say I’ve read most of the books he uses an example and they’re not what I’d call subversive but, hey, it’s the principle of the thing)http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks

I just wrote a Visual Basic program to help me with my data analysis. How quantitative is that 😉

I’m picking out words and phrases in my data which are likely to be indicative of the appropriate coding, then I’m inserting a note by them with a suggested coding. It would be better if I could highlight the text in some way – underline it, or make it blue, but I couldn’t work out how to make Visual Basic do that for me.

Also, it’s an extraordinarily long program for what it does. It doesn’t have the elegance of a programmer who knows how to loop their program up tidily into sub-routines. Still, it functions. I can always learn a bit more later.

Well, I’ve written up my pilot study in the form of a 5000-word journal article. The idea is that my supervisors critique it, then it gets critiqued at my probationary review, then it emerges as a lovely fully formed article which I can send off for publication. The only slight snag is that, owing to pressure of time, I’m only halfway through the pilot study. According to my article I have this wonderful, validated research instrument. I suspect, when I actually finish the pilot, that I’ll have something that works a bit. In some cases. And not all of the time. Still, the difficult lit review bit is in place, and the justification of why I did the study. It’ll just be more interesting to other people if it actually works 🙂

 And my U500 conference abstract is written and my presentation prepared and practised. For the first time since (um, checks PDA) 28 March I’ve got my workload down to a manageable level and things look as if they’re on target, and nobody’s imminently expecting me to organise a birthday party.

of course, over the next month I’ll have to actually domy pilot study, write the other half of my probationary review, give my U500 conference paper, finish the now-three articles that I have sitting three-quarters written on my desktop, write a 32-page annual report for Bethany and Jacob’s school, arange to get the school CD copied 250 times, take over as chair of governors at Miriam’s school… I’m beginning to feel quite tired again. Good thing it’s the weekend.

I’ve installed the new version of NVivo, which looks a whole lot better than the clunky old version I had before.

It still feels like a development version, though. Any researcher who worked with it for ten minutes would have given them a range of ideas for the Beta version.

Particularly the Help element. There’s next to no Help, except on fairly obvious points. So, after struggling against it for a whole day, I had to move on to the Tutorials. They’ve written these in QuickTime, although by the looks of them they used an earlier version known as Slowtime.

First… you click here………Now…. you double-click here……..Move your cursor over here (Yawn, did I fall asleep?)

And couldn’t they have programmed some key to mean Code? I don’t want to press esoteric key combos – I just want to code! (Grrr)

Still, at least it now imports Word files. Only problem is, due to my data going some way complicated FirstClass, Unix, Mac, PC route, it’s not quite a Word file but some mutant hybrid. (I can see the paragraph marks, you can see the paragraph marks, but can Find and Replace see the paragraph marks? No way.) 

And, boy, is it slow to open. Almost time to make a cup of tea while I’m waiting for it to crank its way into action.

Oh, and periodically it crashes and loses all your carefully constructed work.

Still, as I say, it’s a lot better than the old version.

Obviously haven’t quite sorted out how to change my header!

Questions
Are they happy online?
How do they acknowledge / react to M?
Are they supported or hindered by the ‘real world’?
Where are their networks / weak ties?
Do I see them gaining trust and respect? Do they demonstrate reliability and ability?
What types of thing are praised by the group?
What forms of validation are there? Which ideas are valued and respected?
Which ideas and suggestions are ignored?
How do they work to establish identities?
Which stories are being rehearsed?
How embodied is it? (Interesting, but possibly irrelevant)
Are identities mobilised to support learning?
How is identity established?
What are the backstage areas, and how are they used?
When do people first model each online skill? Which are taken up?
Identities
Who creates the subject positions? OU? BPS? Students? Tutors?
Which identities/positions are readily taken up? Eg nervous, unsure.
Online identities: suckers, newbies, social loafers
Is this text or identity? How do they treat it?
Constructing identity via projection of beliefs / expectations / social states (Crook).
Approaches 

Follow the trajectories of individual students. When are they involved? Who with?
Key incidents: breakdown, Xmas, M, deadlines
Social network theory: Haythornthwaite
Prototype theory
Informality
Do their emotions relate to their engagement?
What informal relations do I see developing?
Is the effectiveness of the group in any way related to social interaction?
Playfulness / informality / nonsense / off-topic discussion.
Follow up
Lapadat – the advantages of asynchronicity. Are these borne out here?
Find out more about interpretative repertoires.
Weinberger on social scripts – I think this is like modelling behaviours. Check.
Do I see clarification / elaboration / interpretation? – other criteria CF Mercer.
Schrire on higher-order thinking. What evidence of that is visible?
Murphy’s graded classification of collaboration.
Burnett – who don’t they accept info from? Who gets ignored? M??
Learning community / Community of practice
What makes this a learning community or a CoP? Find a definition.
Seems to have all the aspects of a CoP except for being voluntary.
Do they articulate their purpose / goal? Is it the same for all of them?

I’m still puzzling over the big issue for Internet community research ethics. Is what we see online a virtual identity,which should be treated according to the ethical standards of human subject research, or is it published text, in which case the relevant ethical standards relate to copyright and acknowledgement?

Quentin Jones article on cyber settlements and online comunities perhaps points a way forward here. In an online community people have identities, in a cyber settlement you find artefacts. It’s a subtle distinction, but I think it’s useful.

For example, in ‘my’ conference. If I look at how many people posted attachments in week three, or how many replies there were compared with new threads, I’d be looking at the artefacts of a cyber settlement. If I look at the content of the postings I’m looking at the online community.

I’m trying to decide whether the words in my conference are embodied or not. It’s surprisingly difficult. Is Santa embodied? What about heavens? Or mind? I’m writing this, so is writing embodied?

The distinction between virtual and real isn’t very clear when you come to think of it.

I guess all abstract nouns are virtual: goodness, health, opinion. But they’re pre-technology virtual. So health is abstract and therefore virtual, but it’s also embodied most of the time.

The Ancient Greeks used to personify all abstract nouns as gods. I guess if they’d been around today there’d have been a range of gods in the pantheon representing email and virtual community. This idea has been taken up to a certain extent by the Catholic church, where abstract nouns get patrons saints. I note that Saint Isidore of Seville is the proposed saint of Internet users despite his having died in the seventh century.

 OK, I’m rambling, enough already.

Just to remind myself that, if I’m looking at online relationships, I might want to reread Haythornthwaite on social network theory.

There seem to be a very few high-profile cases around which the discourse of Internet research ethics has been based. There’s ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ which Julian Dibbell wrote up in Village Voice in 1993. This has all sorts of ramifications but, from the point of view of research ethics, the message is – these are real people in cyberspace, and they can be harmed.

Then there’s the case of JennyMUSH, a form of MUD populated by survivors of sexual abuse. From a research ethics point of view, it’s not so much what happened in JennyMUSH, as the way that it then became a honeypot for researchers, with the result that it then became a much less safe place for participants to be. 

The Carnegie-Mellon cyberporn study became a big issue because of all the publicity it got – it was originally an unethical piece of research carried out by an undergraduate. He used deception to access private data to study usage of pornography on the Internet. Any ethical monitoring whatsoever would have knocked this study on the head – I’m not sure that it needed any new Internet rules to be introduced.

So, on the back of these three cases, we have a proliferation of ethical rules and codes and musings. I think it’s significant that the cases have connections to rape, to abuse and to (child and other) pornography. The bigger crimes – which have nothing to do with research ethics – are used to flavour the research ethics debate which leads, perhaps, to overkill. 

Otherwise, we have anecdotal evidence of people getting annoyed by researchers, but that’s about it. Some people began to feel less secure and more overlooked in their online world – but it could be argued that that’s a good thing, they now have a more accurate perspective on how cyberspace operates.