I think there were two main reasons I was attracted to this paper:
- 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.
- I found many things in the Crook and Dymott paper which relate to my teaching practice.
- site
- system
- forms of the word 'distribute'
- re-mediation
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.
3 comments:
Hi Sonja,
I enjoyed the Crook and Dynott paper too. It reminded me very much of a fascinating book that I read a year or two back called The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper.
I'm still trying to grips with all of this properly though (as you may have gathered if you have seen my forum post!). What was it exactly that bothered you about Tolmie's assertions about gender and the design of his research?
Hi Juliette,
Thanks for your comment.
As for Tolmie, first of all I guess I just find his language maddeningly vague. For example:
"For FM pairs, differences between individuals over predictions and explanations also led to an avoidance strategy, *except that here it took the form of ceding control for the input of predictions on a rigid turn and turn about basis.* The level of dialogue was substantially below that in the MM and FF pairs, and *learning seemed to be a function of private reactions to on-screen responses.*"
* = place I find vague
The first statement I marked makes no sense to me; the second statement just seems completely unsupported. And why does he attribute differences to gender? Since the students knew each other (I guess), couldn't personalities have played a bigger role? I know he is summarising the results, but I think it leaves an outside reader in the cold.
And I am NOT a fan of measuring learning by way of pre and post tests. He talks about context; surely different contextual factors affect the outcomes of these tests! Even simple ones like hunger, tiredness, etc. Also for me, learning happens over time; we all know students can take a test within a short time period of learning something new and do very well, only to completely forget everything later.
I have to confess that I assumed that the vagueness was just because he was summarising research described elsewhere. There were definitely points where I would have liked slightly more details even so (such as what was meant by 'on-task performance' in the shadow formation task) rather than having to track down the citations.
I certainly agree on the difficulties of pre-test/post-tests. I suppose I was wondering if one might be able to argue that those were actually irrelevant to the argument that he was trying to make about a relationship between types of dialogue and gender combinations. I suppose I'm trying to figure out whether I just think research in authentic settings is more valuable than lab-style research on the whole or whether I actually disagree with his argument about context. His second example, interestingly wasn't a lab experiment.
I think the problem is somehow that he is conceptualising context as a set of variables that have an impact whereas things are actually more complex than that, but I can't work out how to express that in a less vague way!
Post a Comment
I appreciate your feedback!