Sociocultural perspective (7.2.06)

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‘According to the sociocultural perspective, human learning cannot be fully undestood without understanding human activity. In studying learning, therefore, one should focus on how tools, mental and material, are used in human activity and how humans construct knowledge and understanding by the use of tools. Moreover, the physical and social environments are considered integral to the learning activity. This conceptualisation of learning implies that it matters where the learning occurs.’ (Ingvill, p5)

Ingvill takes this to mean, from the point of view of ICT, that the important things are how it influences communication and how information is organised, stored, retrieved and interpreted. But also important, for me, is how identities are established. I think this is also true for the sort of classroom use of ICT that Ingvill was examining – the children who identify as expert users, or competent users, or unwilling users, or the ones that never get a chance to use the keyboard.

Creating relationships (7.2.06)

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Ingvill says that ‘in studying an educational activity such as project work, it is essential to take into acoount that participants have existing and established relationships.’ That’s obviously true of her work in the classroom, but I wonder to what extent it would relate to an asynchronous conference? There may be pre-existing relationships from other courses. I suppose there are more likely to be generic relationships – people expect their relationship with the supervisor to be like past relationships, they expect students to be pretty much like other students they have encountered online.

Identities and positioning (7.2.06)

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Been reading Ingvill’s doctoral thesis: ‘Project work and ICT: studying learning as participation trajectories’

I’m thinking at the moment about my PhD as an exploration of how people construct their identities in online learning communities. Which identities help them to learn and which identities get in the way of learning? How can course designers and tutors encourage the good identities and discourage the bad identities? Of course, this takes me into yet another theoretical field, and I’ve got to do lots of thinking about what we mean by identities. looks like I’ll have to go back to discourse analysis theory 🙁

I’ve looked at Ingvill’s thesis from this point of view. She says (p3) ‘The prototypical classroom study, with or without ICT, tends to either take the teachers’ or the pupils’ perspective.’ This is a polarity I’d like to move away from. I think a lot of the time in the classroom, or the learning community or whatever, pupils are not acting as pupils, but as something else. I was watching a child in school last week who was actively not learning. His body posture was all set up so that the teacher wouldn’t challenge him – sitting up straight, arms folded neatly in front of him, eyes facing the teacher. But he wasn’t looking at the teacher. In his head he was away somewhere else.It wasn’t that it was a difficult lesson or a boring lesson (the class were discussing what they had enjoyed during the year) – he just wasn’t there as a learner.

Ingvill argues ‘that it is through reoccurring participation in different settings and contexts that people appropriate and make sense of knowledge and create understanding’. I’d argue that they don’t or can’t do any of those things unless they are positioned correctly. This links with constructivism, where ‘learning is tied to the learner’s way of making sense of what happens through actively constructing a world’. Constructing world must included constructing your own identity in that world. In an asynchronous conferencing, you construct that identity or that position together with everyone else who has access to the conference (whether they are active or not).

Quentin Jones (10.1.06)

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Quentin Jones (1997)

Virtual communities, virtual settlements and cyber-archaeology: a theoretical outline

JCMC 3(3)

Defining a cyber-settlement and a virtual community

Cyber settlement is a cyber-place that is symbolically delineated by a topic of interest and within which a significant proportion of interrelated group-CMC occurs. A virtual community is a set of social relationships forged via a virtual settlement.

A cyber settlement requires:

* Minimum level of interactivity Interactivity is the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of earlier messages. This demand for interactivity means that an email list which distributes information is not a virtual community.
* Variety of communicators More than two communicators. This excludes database queries and interactions.
* Virtual common-public-space where a significant portion of interactive group-CMCs occur This excludes private communications which go through no common space. Without this notion, the notion of virtual community loses its value because it is indistinguishable from many other forms of CMC.
* Minimum level of sustained membership

Caroline Haythornthwaite (2000) (10.1.06)

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Haythornthwaite, C., Kazmer, M. M., Robins, J. and Shoemaker, S. (2000)

Community development among distance learners: temporal and technological dimensions

JCMC, 6 (1)

Student quotes include this:

“I’ll have to tell you that it has been one of the most stressful times in my whole life… I started to have a lot of anxiety…. Just wondering if what I was posting sounded okay or if it sounded so bad… Finally I just had to take time off work.”

Another example of a very strong negative reaction to an online learning community.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue1/haythornthwaite.html

Caroline Haythornthwaite (1998) (10.1.06)

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Haythornthwaite, C. (1998)

A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners

Information Research, 4, 1

* Communication frequency is associated with the maintenance of more relations and the use of more media.
* Patterns of media use are highly influenced by the media established by the instructor for class interaction
* Email is important for pairs who communicate more often.
* Actor positions in collaborative work, exchanging advice and socialising relations are similar, but this position does not correlate with their position in an emotional support network.
* Different actors are involved in the emotional support network than in other networks
* Group interaction patterns become less flexible over time.
* An individual’s perception of their own sense of belonging to the class is most strongly correlated with their centrality in exchanging advice networks.

http://informationr.net/ir/4-1/paper49.html

Social network theory (10.1.06)

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This is an analytical approach I could consider using. It might be useful for Gill as well?

Social network theory holds that behaviour is affected more by the kinds of ties and networks in which people are involved than by the norms and attributes that individuals possess. It examines patterns of ties to see what patterns emerge from their interactions.

In social network terms, pairs maintain relations (such as working together or friendship) and ties (a bond between two people based on one or more relations). The more relations a pair maintains, and the more frequently or intensely they maintain them, the stronger or closer the tie.

Pair-level bonding contributes to the sense of belonging to a group that is necessary to sustain the group as an entity rather than as a set of individuals. Feelings of belonging and community lead to greater commitment of group efforts, greater co-operation and greater satisfaction with group efforts.

One measure of an individual’s place in a network is their centrality – how well they are positioned to receive and disseminate information to all other members of the network. A star has access to information circulating the entire network, can influence others and the flow of information. The other end of the scale is isolation. The isolate does not maintain connections and thus does not receive communications. They can be cut off from information or receive it late.

Centrality can be measured by counting the number of others with whom an actor maintains relations. Can also be measured by closeness – the distance from each person to each other person. Central actors are closer to all others than are other actors. This means they are more likely to hear information available on the network. A third measure is betweenness, the extent to which an actor is situated between others (so information must pass through them to get to others). These measures assume communication flow along the shortest path. You can gauge centrality in a more complex fashion by looking at all the routes information can take and weighting them.

Chidambaram and Bostrom (1997) reviewed the literature and suggested that a well-developed group is cohesive, manages conflict effectively, balances tasks and socio-emotional needs. A well developed group may be judged by its outcomes.

Groups do not emerge fully developed. They begin their association, develop, experience crises, attend to deadlines, execute their tasks and conclude their association. They get to know each other and their technologies over time, learning how to interact with each other and how to use technologies in an appropriate manner. They develop, defining and redefining their network structures.

Learning theory (6.1.06)

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I’m having trouble with learning theory. It looks good on paper, and then I think about what it means in practice and it often seems to unravel very quickly.

For example: learning is ‘a community process of transformation of participation in sociocultural activities’ (Rogoff , Matusov and White 1996). Sounds good, doesn’t it? Learning as participation, learning as community, learning as verb.

So, if I go out into a field and observe ants for six hours, that’s not learning (CF My family and other animals), but if I go into a pub and am initially quiet but then hit the man next to me, that is learning?

What I find particularly strange about this is that I was watching My family and other animals with the kids at Christmas and discussing why Gerry’s mother can’t recognise how much he is learning on Corfu. She sees him learning Greek and biology and taxidermy and feels he’s running wild and must be put in a classroom with a tutor and a book of problems in mathematics in order to gain an education. Her definition of learning ruled out sitting for hours on your own in a field, and I think Rogoff and White’s does too (though for different reasons).

H807 Satvan (12.12.05)

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One last comment on a case study – Gill, have a look at the Gloucestershire satvan. It looks whizzy, exciting and high-tech, and it lets you do your learning down the pub!

Right – that’s enough about case studies. Gill, let me know if you want me to blog anything more quotable on any of them.

H807 Case study: Learning without boundaries (12.12.05)

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We have to study this case study, so I thought I’d better put in some notes on it.

It’s a very first-world view of learning without boundaries as it requires a huge amount of technology, infrastructure and technical support.

I think it’s the only one of the case studies to pick up on the use of MP3 players and podcasts.

It does seem to get very over-excited about new technology. It appears that the university of the future will have dumped every previous technology. We’ll never read a book, write a word or see a printed piece of paper again. Everything we do will be in our e-portfolio and available to the university authorities. We’ll spend our day from the time we get up to the time we’re asleep linked in with university technology.

I think that this case study, like many of them, glosses over the problems of PDAs. Particularly how difficult it is to input substantial amounts of text, the need for frequent upgrades, the implications if you lose a gadget which contains all your information, the problems if everyone has a different model…