CMC Research...Blogs

This was one of the topics that we read in DP and I have to say that I had a new perspective when I was reading it this time based on my personal research interests.  I understand that for the purposes of this study that you were working with students and that IRB was used to explain that the students grades were not contingent upon participation in the research project, etc.  What other considerations were taken to protect the students/participants and the researcher/instructor?  I am now interested in conducting research using social media sites for my research, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.  It's not my desire to use this for my entire dissertation, but I am interested in having it as a piece of my data.  We've 'talked' previously about one of the issues with using FB posts as data is that participants login with a password and there is the question/issue of privacy in a public domain.  You mentioned that a difficulty that I might run across is the participants who don't sign consent.  Would I not be able to use any data from a page if one person didn't consent?  What if I started my own FB page on the subject and put a disclaimer on the page as one measure?

I had my first experience moderating a class on BB this past weekend and it made me think of your study.  There were different levels of participation from the more 'peacock-ing' students to the 'Well I better work at participation point' students to 'I wonder if the professor even knows I'm here' slugs.  It also made me think of my experience in Digital Tools with the classes we had via BB or Skype.  It was awkward and I know how that hindered by participation (along with confidence issues).

Accountability and displays of knowing in an undergraduate computer-mediated communication context (Lester & Paulus, 2011)

In this study, we draw upon elements of discursive psychology as we oriented to what was happening in the talk from the participants’ perspective in addition to what should be happening from the researcher/instructor perspective (1).

Our findings point to how students negotiate and at times resist doing being a knowledgeable student, using disclaimers, such as ‘I don’t know’ and script formulations to minimize accountability for their posts (1).

Activating prior student knowledge on a topic and encouraging reflection on new information are strategies that have long been considered useful for learning (Dewey, 1933).

A great deal of research has examined CMC discussions in educational environments, most notably asynchronous discussion forums, for evidence of learning, evidence of argumentation, collaborative knowledge building, and cognitive presence (2).

Friesen and Hug…suggest that researchers attempt to orient to the participant perspective of the discussions rather than the researcher’s perspective alone, shifting their focus from what should be happening (e.g. particular argumentation structures) in these environments to what is happening.  As Stokoe (2000) points out, there’s a long history of attempting to categorize, classify, and evaluate different kinds of classroom talk, yet’…good or successful educational discourse is’ an ‘abstract notion’ and often quite difficult to determine (p. 186).

DP assumes that ‘psychological phenomena can be investigated without seeking to fix their causal origin in a hidden and speculative mental of cognitive domain as conversational contributions and interactions are shown to possess a startling complexity and an explanatory self-sufficiency’ (Friesen, 2009:143).

‘knowing’ is understood as bound up and embedded within interactions, with language being understood as constitutive (3).

This study looks at undergraduate blogging conversations in the context of an introductory nutrition science course (3).

-situated within DP, which draws upon discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, and rhetorical psychology (4)

-focus on three broad themes from DAM: 1) action, 2) fact and interest, and 3) accountability (Edwards and Potter, 1993; Potter et al., 1993)

-approached data through 1)repeated readings; 2) selection organization, and identification of patterns, 3) generation of explanations; 4) noting variability and 5) reflexive and transparent documentation of our claims (4-5)

The purpose of this task was to provide an opportunity for students to 1) activate their prior knowledge on the topic of dietary supplements, 2) engage and interact with their peers, and 3) reflect on what they had learned. We assumed students may be motivated to post in the online blogging environment as they completed the task (4).

Publicly displaying knowledge is not an easy request for students (10). 

Students used discursive resources to downplay their personal accountability for the task (11).

Arminen (2005) discussed five basic patterns of classroom talk: lecturing format, pedagogic cycle, repair sequences, correctional activities and organized extra-curricular activities (11). 

Making learning ordinary: ways undergraduates display learning in a CMC task (Paulus & Lester, 2013)

The pedagogic cycle, also known as the initiate-respond-evaluate/feedback pattern involves students being asked a question to which they respond and subsequently receive an evaluation by the instructor.  This pattern can be used to maintain order and control in face-to-face classrooms where one authority figure is responsible for numerous students (54).

A DP perspective orients to psychological constructs, such as cognition and learning, as ‘objects in and for interaction’ (Potter, 2005: 789), and assumes that they are situated in and made visible through discursive practices (55).

By shifting the spotlight away from students’ private minds we, as analysts, instead ‘approach discourse (learning) as a social practice rather than mental expression’ (Edwards, 1999, 288).

For the purposes of this study, we were interested in exploring the construct of learning as a situated practice within the context of a CMC task designed to elicit learning displays from undergraduate students (55).

Sacks (1984) describe how people go about doing “being ordinary” in everyday life and will work to normalize any unusual or extraordinary occurrences.  Sacks argued that we go to great lengths to present our experiences in accepted, normal ways.  Asking students to write about (or verbally report) what they have learned is asking them to make public the ways in which they may be different from their peers, or to orient to something as not ordinary, rather than ordinary (56).

An extensive set of CMC data generated at a research university in the southeastern region of the United States (with IRB approval)

-undergraduates in large nutrition course

-required blogs

During this first step of analysis, we met regularly to read each post out loud, recording our individual and joint reflections about those sections within each post that we initially found most intriguing (Potter and Wetherell, 1987).

As we re-read, the following broad, discourse analytic questions sensitized our analytic process (Potter, 2004):

1.     What are the students accomplishing with their posts?

2.     How are they constructing their blog posts in order to achieve this?

3.     What discursive practices are being used to perform these tasks? (58)

Findings:

-learning as an extreme change of state (I was amazed)

-learning as a neutral assessment of news

-learning as denying a change of state

Arminen (2005) argued that a major institutional purpose of primary and secondary schooling is to develop the ability to react to new information (often presented through lectures) in a neutral manner rather than according to one’s personal experiences or preferences.  He suggested that it is instructor assessment and feedback via the pedagogic cycle that maintains student engagement in the absence of connections with personal experience (64-65).

As educators we should acknowledge that engaging in CMC conversations can be a delicate matter for students, and the more delicate the matter, the more attention needs to be given to preparing students to manage dilemmas presented by the tasks in ways that do not directly conflict with the pedagogical outcomes of such tasks (66).