Rebecca's Research Blog

If you look at the list of sociocultural terms I listed a couple of posts back, you’ll observe that they’re not words which you’d expect to hear in day-to-day conversation. They also prove to be difficult words to use in a thesis, and I’ve been struggling to use any of them in my current chapter.

So instead I’m taking out the words which suggest that learning is a noun rather than a verb. To paraphrase Molesworth, ‘no place for gerunds in my thesis’.

I’ve just spent some time removing the word ‘fact’ from my chapter, and I’m now vacillating about whether to remove the word ‘decision’ or to replace it with ‘decision-making process’.

I’ve been wasting a lot of time numbering and renumbering the figures in my chapter – so I finally spent some time looking up how to it automatically. Go to the Insert menu and select Caption is the answer. Caption doesn’t come up automatically on my Insert menu – but it is buried within the system.

Phew. Job done. Now, why didn’t I bother to look that up weeks ago?

Oh, and as a follow-up, the Insert menu also allows you to add cross references. What a useful facility 🙂

My supervisors pointed out that, if I’m writing my thesis from a sociocultural perspective, I need to use the appropriate discourse.

I do start off doing this, and then I start to use synonyms to stop it getting bland and repetitive. But, of course, the synonyms aren’t exactly synonyms and, before I know it, I’ve wandered off towards a completely different metaphor for learning, in which ideas are things to be completed and transferred, rather than ongoing processes.

In order to help me pin my use of vocabulary down more successfully, they’ve set me to reading an article by Roger Säljö, specifically so that I can identify the appropriate sociocultural language. So the following are terms you can expect to see in my thesis 🙂

Appropriating concepts, appropriation, competence, conceptual constructions,  conceptual framework, conceptual resources, constituting a phenomenon, cultural resources,  discourses, discursive community, discursive nature of human knowledge, discursive patterns, discursive practices, dominant metaphor, enculturation, how individuals are positioned in relation to specific social practices, how individuals are able to identify the situationally appropriate referential meaning of a concept, how reality is constituted in social practices, linguistically mediated knowledge, linguistic tools, mediational means, mediated nature of human activity, paradigm, situatedness is fundamental, socialise, social practices, sociogenetic, transformation.

I’m trying to tighten up my first analysis chapter – which was probably trying to do too much at once. It’s really difficult to do – partly because the chapter is about 16,000 words long, which makes it unwieldy to work with, and partly because I was rather pleased with how it flowed, so it’s a wrench to pull it to pieces and start again.

I’m following a thread of postings in a FirstClass conference – and I’m quoting the first seven in the thread, so my argument has to be structured around those seven in chronological order – which imposes constraints on how I develop my argument.

My orginal versions addressed the questions

• How do tutors and learners using asynchronous dialogue carry along and develop ideas across postings?
• How do tutors and learners use asynchronous dialoue to build and maintain a collaborative group?

I’ve decided that these  are too wide, so I’ve narrowed it down to

• How do groups use postings in asynchronous dialogue to make decisions?

My seven pieces of data are then going to support discussion of group summaries, typography, delicate objects, proposal patterns, challenges, failures and powerful synthesis.

I’ve now got more of an idea of what my supervisors meant about subsequent chapters ‘falling out’ of my initial analysis. Some of the things I have identified as important don’t fit in with discussion of decision making, so they need to be bumped on into another section. At the moment my second analysis chapter is going to be on how attachments are used to supplement postings and develop exploratory talk – and the third chapter is going to be something about the challenges of group trajectories/timescales clashing with individual trajectories/timescales.

A placeholder posting.

I am going to file here the interesting things which I find in my data but do not include in my thesis. These can then be mentioned in my viva when I am asked ‘What next with this research?’

A placeholder posting. When writing my analysis chapters I should file the terms, theories and ideas which must be introduced at the beginning of my thesis.

I’m just reading through the epistolary interviews which I carried out last year. This technical problem still makes me laugh 😀

“I am unfortunately unable to use the letter next to q and e on the computer(keyboard problems!) (that means the letter after ‘v’ in the alphabet is going to be typed as *!! if that is okay)

The live chats *ere used to discuss both *ork in progress and and focussing on decisions that *ere to be made …..”

This is a reference post – to remind me how to do something fiddly if I have to do it again.

I have JPG pictures of some of the FirstClass postings which make up my data. As I’m making reference to colour, highlighting, typography and layout I have to keep them as pictures rather than copying the text across. But that involves changing all the names, the course names, the group names and identifying details – plus numbering all the lines so that my data analysis is clear.

I’ve put the line numbers in boxes with height 0p7 and width 0p8.68. The numbers are Times bold, 6pt on 7.2pt, with inset spacing 0p2 all around them. The step-and-repeat measurements change from posting to posting but generally the first gap is 1p2, other gaps in the heading are 1.0, the gap from header to greeting is 1p8, the gap between paragraphs is 1p2 and the text is 0p8. When editing FirstClass postings, remember that they’re mostly written in Arial.

These are probems related to being able to move ideas and discussion successfully forward through time. Students and tutors neeed to know

• How to locate information/discussion from the past

• How to retain relevant information not linked to assessment

• How to prioritise information/discussion to be moved forward

• How to return to a point new to them but dealt with by others in the past

• How to mark which past postings they are responding to

• How to mark and fix decisions

• How to come in on a debate late

• How to stop fragmentation into parallel lines of communication

• How to preserve any synchronous chat

• How to judge how hard others are working

• How to distinguish quickly between different people’s comments

• How to make decisions quickly

• How to catch up quickly if absent

I’m thinking about improvable objects at the moment. Or, rather, I’m thinking about a version of improvable objects.

Because talk is ephemeral, improvable objects are things that groups of learners use to move ideas and knowledge through time. They might be documents that they are working on, or a model they are making, or a map they are drawing.

Asynchronous dialogue is not at all ephemeral, but you still need something similar to move ideas and knowledge through time – otherwise everyone gets lost in the overwhelming mass of postings.

In the case of the conferences I’m studying, they have a project proposal form. In successive versions of this attached document, the group agrees on their research question, theoretical framework and methodology.

I’ve been trying to think of a term for this sort of object, a term which points to shared ownership and its temporal nature. I just came upon a comment by one of the course participants – this draft is a bit of a camel (a horse made by a committee!).

Maybe that’s the term I need. All asynchronous groups of learners should aim to have one or more refined camels!