H809-21. 2009 words

+ a lot of dissatisfaction with my section on Activity Theory = the current state of TMA 02.

H809-20. Nightmare

I have cut down my original ambitious outline to just two theories, and still I am running into trouble with the word count. I have just started discussing the second theory and the paper is almost 1500 words long! This was after I ruthlessly chopped up the already tiny bit of background of sociocultural theories I felt able to get away with.

It is really difficult to write a good paper while panicking about the word count. It makes you second guess every single word you put on the page and seriously interrupts the flow of ideas. I am spending most of my time trying to pare down previously written paragraphs to free up space.

H809-19. Days of stress come to a sudden halt

I have had a rotten, throbbing headache for the past three days. Every time I thought about the assignment, it got worse.

What a relief then to read the clarification of the assignment posted by our course chair...

Now I can focus on writing a good paper rather than a stretched-thin, superficial and unconvincing one.

I might even get to enjoy next week's Turkish holiday and extended weekend.

WAY-HEY!!!

H809-18. 2000 words: no way, my son

I have written merely the introduction, described the wiki task and very briefly introduced sociocultural theories, and this is already more than 500 words!

I am confused by the contradictions between Daisy's and Vic's advice: Vic gives a suggested outline to deal with all three theories, and Daisy says to deal with a, b OR c. While following Daisy's advice would result in a paper that does not fulfil the criteria of showing how different positions change the research design, following Vic's would result in an extremely long or extremely superficial paper, both of which would be penalised for different reasons.

Well, I guess the university is closed for Easter. I really want to get this paper done, but I have been stopping and starting because I cannot get a definitive answer as to how to write it. This timetable practically encourages us to leave work until the last week when I prefer to work in advance...

H809-17. Very tentative research questions

I stand corrected: the most challenging part of this assignment is not the ludicrous word limit, but rather the generation of appropriate research questions. Here are some fairly feeble attempts, which came about only after days and days of reading and brainstorming. All feedback is most welcome, the more critical the better!

Sociocultural theories

-How did the wiki participants collectively solve the problem of initially setting up the wiki task?

(I'm not sure if this really qualifies as a sociocultural question; I suppose I was trying to focus on the situated nature of learning. There was a bit of confusion at the beginning of the task when some pages were overwritten. We sorted this out together through communication on the wiki and in the course forum.)

Later note: I have just read Nardi's description of situated action, and I now think this is an entirely appropriate research question. She mentions that the focus of study is the situated activity of practice, and that intricately detailed, temporal accounts of how activity unfolds in response to contingency should be given.

-How does screen-based composition re-mediate what gets done?

(This is from Crook & Dymott but it is not context-specific enough in its present formulation, and I have no idea how I would investigate it.)

COPs

-How can this wiki community be characterized and described in terms of people, purpose and policies?

(Here I could apply Jones & Preece's sociability framework, but I think this question is far too general, and I cannot really see why we would want to know this. It needs something further.)

-How successful was this wiki community?

(How do we define 'success'? Only 10 students have contributed so far, although there is no real deadline. Again, I'm not sure how much answering this question is going to tell us.)

Activity Theory

-What are the contradictions between subjects, objects and tools in the activity system which could help to account for the low rate of participation in the course wiki task?

(This was the approach taken by Scanlon and Issroff, which seems relevant here. This is the only question I am halfway satisfied with.)

H809-16. TMA 02 shaping up

After re-reading all the papers for this block and adding to my notes, and with useful input from other students' forum and blog posts, I think I more or less have a handle on this assignment.

-I want to start with sociocultural theories, since they seem to overarch both COPs and AT. I want to first use the Oliver et al. paper to contrast positivist and constructionist approaches. Then I will go on to describe situated, distributed and mediated learning, and contrast Tolmie and Crook & Dymott to show the different ways in which context can be conceptualised (Tolmie takes a more positivist approach). I haven't come up with any research questions for this section yet. I have also located the paper by Brown et al. on situated learning, which I haven't read yet, and perhaps I can incorporate this somehow. I could also use something from the learning theory databases which we used when contributing to the wiki in Week 7. It would be much better if I had time to properly research and read Vygotsky and other primary sources, but never mind.

-I will next deal with COPs. Jones & Preece mention a continuum between COIs and COPs; it seems to me our wiki is nearer the COP end. I found a useful paper by Johnson (2001) which reviews all COP studies up to that point, the majority of which were case studies. This will be a within group study as opposed to comparing two groups to see which is more successful. I have drafted some research questions, but they are still too general to apply to our course wiki. The main weakness of any proposed study would be that it does not examine the development of the community over time. Jones & Preece, by contrast, conducted a 2.5 year study into Bob's Bulletin Board.

-Finally, I will tackle Activity Theory. Actually, Crook & Dymott refer to writing as an activity system, so AT will have already been prefaced to some extent. A paper by Scanlon and Issroff (2005) shows how AT allows us to explore underlying contradictions in learning environments, which helps us to account for relative learning successes or failures. I found this paper very interesting and see how it could be applied to my blogging projects with my students. I am even considering designing something along these lines for my ECA. I cannot really come up with any research questions for AT, though, beyond describing the activity system itself.

Vic suggested picking out key similarities and differences in the three approaches, and this will lead towards the conclusion.

The biggest challenge, as ever, will be condensing these down into a paper of just 2000 words. I feel this essay needs at least 3000 words to do it any justice. In all my postgraduate education, I have never had to write such short essays.

At this point I have to praise the foresight of the designer of the course schedule - we have Easter week and an additional week to focus on this. I started working on it two weeks ago and still have a long way to go.

H809-15. Initial thoughts on Activity Theory

I was doing quite well with this paper until I reached the 6 steps, and from then on my eyes just kept crossing. I found some of the steps to be virtually indistinguishable (e.g. 2. Analyze the activity system and 3. Analyze the activity structure). The list of questions did not seem to end. And when I thought about asking some of those questions about our course wiki, I just had to suppress a hysterical laugh...

A couple of other points I found puzzling:

1) Data collection methods: historical materials - no examples were given and this means nothing to me.

2) Points of view: tools - call me stupid, but how the hell can you analyse the point of view of a tool?! Here's my chance to learn a new skill!

I am now musing on the question from our course notes:

How might you use activity theory to evaluate the effectiveness of a CLE in a learning context?

Clearly that is leading us toward the TMA, but I'm like the proverbial horse at the water trough just now.

H809-14. Antsy

No access to the student web site all day, it just refused to load...

:(

H809-13. Flummoxed

The more I read about learning theories, the more confused I get...NONE of these papers seems to draw the boundaries clearly. Here is but a wee example of how my thinking is made flabby: Conole et al. (2004) say that most learning theories can be mapped to three broad approaches: behaviourism, sociocultural and constructivism (18); Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy (1999) lump together CLEs, sociocultural theories and Activity Theory. It was suggested by the course notes for Week 7 that the main outlines were behaviourism, cognitive and sociocultural (and this was the only explanation that made sense to me). I am just at sea.

H809-12. Meditations on the social

I finished the Crook and Dymott paper the other day. I found myself getting strangely excited the further I got into their argument. The course web site is down at the moment so I cannot access the questions we are supposed to answer, so I will just jot down a few things that were meaningful to me here.

I think there were two main reasons I was attracted to this paper:

1. I found the Tolmie paper practically unreadable. Although his comments on context were valuable and his writing style fluid, I just could not understand how his research design enabled him to prove his conclusions. In particular, I was completely unconvinced by his assertion that gender had had a marked effect on dialogue.
   
2. I found many things in the Crook and Dymott paper which relate to my teaching practice.
   

Vocabulary items which I found myself repeatedly underlining:

• site
• system
• forms of the word 'distribute'
  
• re-mediation

"Guns are not artefacts with some singular nature. They derive whatever properties are ascribed to them from how they enter into cultural practices" (98).

This week as part of our gender theme, I showed my classes the MEF documentary "Tough Guise", which is about the construction of violent masculinity as a norm in American culture. I could therefore rewrite the above sentence as "Men are not artefacts with some singular nature. They derive whatever properties are ascribed to them from how they enter into cultural practices." Interesting cross-over!

"The undergraduate coursework essay writer is embedded in rich contexts" (100-101).

This is something I need to reflect further on as a Freshman English instructor. I think we do tend to view our students as individuals in this respect rather than as 'individuals-acting-with-mediational-means'(and our marking criteria most likely reflect this). My students have a research paper draft due on Monday, so this is a good time to develop more awareness of this point.

"the dialogue cultivated by a piece of written work is an interesting but neglected dimension of a student's developing literacy practice" (109).

Apart from educational technology, my other main research interest is feedback practices, and I firmly believe in the above statement. I am currently doing some case study research with one student in which I examine some of the aspects of the interpersonal in understanding and acting upon feedback. I am also preparing a response to the feedback I received on TMA 01. This is of course made much lengthier and more difficult by the completely online nature of this course.

I also really liked the idea that technology does not just influence practices, but that it actually shapes those practices - I think this is a nice way of breaking out of this maddening behaviouralist stimulus-response cage.