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.