A171 Start writing for the Internet, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 80 students – evenly balanced between males and females.<\/p>\n
A173 Writing family history, 10 points, starts May, runs for 12 weeks. About 180 students – mostly women. Also has an OUSA cafe.<\/p>\n
T183 Design and the web, 10 points, starts May, runs for 10 weeks. About 400 students – evenly balanced between males and females.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This would be a substantial pilot, running May \/ June \/ July. To have something for my probationary assessment, I need to do something else.<\/p>\n
For example, if Karen and Denise have records of a FirstClass conference which I could use, I could
\n(a) try out detailed discourse analysis on short sections of this
\n(b) analyse it for key subject positions. This would give me a basic framework for analysis of later data.
\n(c)\u00a0find evidence of learning being supported and\/or discouraged\u00a0
\n(d) investigate the role of the medium \/ the staff in positioning students.
\n(e) use the experience to refine my research questions.
\nIf 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\u00a0whether 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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I can’t see much point in piloting my interviewing unless I have access to a course conference.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-questions","category-research-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}