Rebecca's Research Blog

I’m struggling with the ethics of Internet research at the moment, which is more complicated than you might think. Depending on how you conceptualise the Internet, you need to apply different forms of ethical thinking.

If you view the Internet as a virtual space populated by human actors, then you need a human subject approach to ethics, with informed consent a big issue. If, on the other hand, you see the Internet as an accumulation of texts, then your concern is with data protection, copyright and intellectual property rights.

Blogs and newspapers may highlight this dilemma. A newspaper is in the public domain – you can research it as much as you like, unless you appropriate so much of it for yourself that you breach copyright. A blog, on the other hand, can be viewed as an online persona. It’s in the public domain, but it may have been written primarily for family or friends.

On the other hand, a blog may have been written to publicise a version of the news. To treat it as a person means limiting your study of it, and thus privileging the version of the news put out by a large or multinational company. Thus, ethically speaking, some blogs should be treated as manifestations of online identity and others should be treated as public-domain texts. But which blogs are which?

I spoke to Robin Goodfellow the other day. He suggested:

Investigating which identities are readily taken up in a FirstClass conference.

Considering the role of the researcher in the co-construction of identity. Which stories are being rehearsed and which discourses are being reproduced?

I’m felling pleased with myself, as I’ve managed to knock together 5000 words, which looks like a first draft of half of my literature review. It’s full of holes, and it misses out the really difficult areas (learning theory and various discourse analysis views on identity) but I can see that it might all fit together eventually.

As a result, I’ve tinkered with my research questions once again. So, just to archive how they fluctuate, here they are:

• Which are the key identities available within a learning community which comes together in an asynchronous online environment? 

• How are these identities introduced or created? 

• Which of these identities are mobilised to support learning, and which to discourage learning? 

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

Remember to consider the links between prototype theory and interpretative repertoires.

Just talked to Steve Godwin about doing participant observation on a second-year astronomy course.

He had a pretty laid-back approach to the ethics of this. I suspect this is because the Mellon Project proposal went to the Student Research Project Panel as a whole, and specific elements of it weren’t explored in great detail.

Steve suggests an informal meeting with the course team, being clear about aims and objectives and offereing to share the results of the research with them.

He observed how he did some activities, making a sound recording of his thoughts while he worked through them. He’s also looked at the ratio of posters to people on the course to readers, and considers that this sort of surface data can be accessed ethically as there is no potential for harm.

He posted a request for people to interview on the course conference, and carried out seven half-hour interviews which were informed by his experiences of the course.

Might be worth interviewing Steve about his experiences of identity online, as he specifically mentioned things about being put off at the start by the number of postings, and by people’s signatures which identity other courses they have studied.

Working on the draft of a draft of a literature review. It’s such a mound of material that it’s really hard to arrange sensibly. I’ve got three and a half thousand words, which I guess is about a third of a literature review, but I keep getting lost in it.

I’ve done a fairly coherent intro, though I assume it’ll be completely rewritten in time. There’s a section on identity which is pretty interesting, though it doesn’t even touch on the nuts and bolts of identity construction in discourse. And there’s a bit about how online learning communities are constructed which I suspect I’ll tear up and start again at some point.

I’ve got an outline in Powerpoint, and an outline in Word, and a pencilled outline on one sheet of paper, and a whole series of piles of snippets of papers which is supposed to give me a physical framework, and I’m still meandering all over the place.

Spose it would help if I’d read all the material about education and learning that I need for part one. Then I’d have something more substantial to hang it all on.

Oh well, back to social loafing theory…

I’m tinkering with my research questions. I’ve mostly reverted to identity from subject position, partly because it’s more comprehensible, partly because it’s sexier, and patly because it fits in with the idea of learning as transformation of identity. I’ve got a tentative title and hypotheses as well.

I’ve thrown in a short definition of a successful virtual community, although this is obviously going to need a lot more work.

Who do you think you are: The roles of identity in virtual learning community.
Research questions:
Once it is accepted that virtual learning community exist, it is important to ask how such communities can be designed and administered to support learning as a transformative process which changes identity. This research therefore asks:
* Which are the key identities to be found within a learning community which comes together in an asynchronous online environment?
* How are these identities introduced or created?
* Which of these identities are mobilised to support learning, and which to discourage learning?
* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?

Hypotheses:
* Learners have multiple identities within this type of community, many of them products of the online environment.
* Learners must work hard to establish their identities and those of others. This work is not accomplished in the same way as it would be offline.
* The environment, the community design and the participants all introduce certain subject positions.
* A successful virtual learning community will engage in a high level of exploratory talk and knowledge creation. Participants will show evidence of identity change in line with the aims of the community.
* In a successful virtual learning community, the majority of commonly available subject positions will be mobilised to support learning.
* In less successful virtual learning communities, this will not be the case.
* Design and administration of virtual learning communities exert a major influence on the subject positions mobilised within those communities, and on how and why those subject positions are mobilised.

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.

Well, there’s a lot of discourse analysis here.

* Corpus analysis. I put the text of all four conferences into a data base and pull out subject positions in some way.

* I follow the trajectory of individual students. I’d like to supplement this with interviews.

* I look at the whole conference, pull out interactions which I think are particularly salient and analyse them in depth. Perhaps do this with particular emphasis on interventions from tutors/moderators.

* I also need to find evidence of learning being supported and discouraged and I think I need to refer here to Neil Mercer’s work on exploratory talk. Can I see the students building knowledge? Do they think they are learning?

* I need to look at whether this is a learning community. Do the participants perceive it as such? Does it behave like a learning community.

* I think it’s important to look at what’s happening backstage. Who’s lurking, how are they lurking (I think I can access this through message history). How are they linking up outside FirstClass? This needs interviews and participant observation.

* Epistolary interviews make sense here: I’m interested in this method, the whole research project is about online interaction. These could be backed up by face to face and telephone interviews.

* I’d like to interview the course team and the techies about the nuts and bolts of building this community. Which features are inherent in FirstClass? What does the Open University require? Where did they get their experience of working with an online learning community? I think this is important from the point of view of making this applied research.

* I’d like to look at the subeject positions assigned / created by the OU. How has the OU classified these students for its own research purposes? Which classifications have the students had to fit into to be at the Open University / on this course? Which subject positions does the OU push students into? This would require analysis of course and OU literature, and of material held by the survey office.

* 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.