Session Information
16 SES 01 B, Self-Regulated and Collaborative Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
Post-modern turn in society requires its citizens to develop capacities and collaborative competences to resituate their activities in collective unities and to successfully communicate their actions within these multiple local and global communities (Bruhn, 2005). In education, the concept of community continues to possess a positive image (e.g. van den Besselaar et al., 2005; Steinfield et al., 2007) and also, the optimistic premises how communication technologies may enable learning communities to grow have been widely discussed. Yet, much of the research methods for studying technology-rich learning orderings have the emphasis on searching for commonalities and representing coherence in data (Strijbos et al., 2006). However, to reach an empirical understanding of the complexity of novel social learning orderings and, at the same time, accepting partialities and heterogeneities of the empirical world, we need methods that can address and elucidate the complexities of situations as grounds of modern education rather than aiming at simplifications (Clarke, 2005; Lather, 2001). That is, we should broaden our perspective to be more sensitive to the different actors (human and nonhuman e.g. technologies) and to different perspectives (individual and collective) in collective activities under our focus, with the orientation toward processual analysis. The paper presents a method designed to locate and analyze critical patterns of collective activity, used to study what constitutes to successful communal activities to flourish in the context of technology-rich higher education. The method aims at bringing the full complexity of the collective in the situation of inquiry with an equal focus on the individual, collective and nonhuman elements in the situations. The method used in this study involves different phases. First, to help to frame the key elements/perspectives that characterize the collective activity, the study follows an extension of grounded theory approach (Charmanz, 2001; 2006) as situational analysis (Clarke, 2005). Utilizing ethnographic data collected (textual materials, observation data) critical patterns in regard to successful collective activity are located by creating social worlds (Clarke, 2005). In brief, social worlds are cartographies of the collective activity that aim at understanding its elements and their relations as the primary goal. Social worlds thus lay out the collective actors, arenas of commitment and discourse together with nonhuman elements. Through cartographies we may see individuals acting as individuals and, as members of the collective, providing a perspective through which both the partiality and situatedness are assumed. Also, we may see social formations and discourses produced and circulating in them. The cartographies thus allow the actions among different perspectives of the social activity (individual and collective) and also, nonhuman elements (technologies) to become visible and documented. In the second phase, social worlds serve as a basis for interviews with the key actors. Social worlds are researchers’ readings of the situation of concern- their understanding and interpretation (Clarke, 2005).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bruhn, J. (2005). The sociology of community connections. New York: Springer. Charmaz, K. (2001). Grounded theory. In R. M. Emerson (Ed.). Contemporary field research: Perspectives and formulations (pp. 335-352). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage. Clarke, A. (2005). Situational analysis: Grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lather, P. (2001). Postbook: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography. Signs, 27, (1), 199-227. Pöysä, J. (2006). In search for the conceptual origin of university students’ community in a confluence of on- and offline learning environments: Ethnographies in technology-rich, multi-sited fields of study. Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Instructional Psychology and Technology CIPT (Doctoral thesis). Steinfield, C., Pentland, B., Ackerman, M. & Contractor, N. (Eds.) (2007). Communities and technologies. Dordrecht: Springer. Strijbos, J.W., Martens, R.L., Prins, F.J. & Jochems, W.M.G. (2006). Content analysis: What are they talking about? Computers & Education, 46, 29-48. van den Besselaar, P., De Michelis, G., Preece, J. & Simone, C. (Eds.) (2005). Communities and technologies. Dordrecht: Springer.
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