H809: Week Three reflections

I had been meaning to get this post out earlier but have been busy this week trying to submit a conference paper. But it's all in now, so will have to wait and see how it goes.

Students were asked to use academic search engines such as Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science (which you need to access through the OU library page, under databases but remember to sign in first) to find papers and evaluate their impact by checking how many times the papers had been cited. It seems that while this turned out to be a rather time consuming task and that not everyone got the same results, most people concluded that the last two readings didn't seem to have a huge impact and some students started to question whether number of citations was the only way to measure impact - surely having to read them for the course means they have an impact, despite not adding to how many times they have been cited?

There were two readings for this week; the first of which was "How can learning technologies improve learning?" (Laurillard, 1994). The main point that came out of the discussions about this was how important it was to consider the relationship between the context in which learning takes place and the outcomes which result from this learning. It isn't enough to simply ask whether technology x improves learning, but under what conditions does technology x improve learning, something H809 tutor Rhona highlights in her post and links to how to approach TMA1. JM has also posted on how the paper relates to the use of wikis. Another issue that came out of the forums is that technology can sometimes be an obstacle to learning, as students could end up spending too much time getting to grips with the software and not enough on the content they are supposed to be learning. This is actually quite relevant to my topic of research, because there does seem to be a distinction between learning how to play a game i.e. in terms of controls, and other skills that develop as a result of continued play e.g. problem solving, decisions making etc. Another interesting point raised about the paper was how the arguments within it are still valid today with respect to newer technologies (e.g. Web 2.0, virtual worlds), with a link being posted to a New Scientist article about the impact of podcast lectures.

Less was said about the second paper "Knowledge, society and perspectives on learning technology" by Oliver and colleagues (2007). I suspect part of the reason for this is that it continued the epistemological debate over positivism and other social perspectives, and also because we are getting closer to the first assignment deadline. Juliette Culver has posted quite a nice summary of both the papers, and her thoughts on them - from this and the forums it seems students appreciated how the paper outlined different perspectives and gave actual examples of how these would influence research in practice. There was also the suggestion that while quantitative approaches might be good for examining whether an effect takes place, qualitative approaches are probably more useful for explaining why the effect occurs (or not). The discussions on frameworks also link to the final activities for this week concerning the podcast about the impact of ICTs in education (you will need to be signed in to access this link). The podcast seemed to get people thinking about how important it is to consider philosophical perspectives, in addition to the other questions suggested in Week 1, when reading about research, as the approach adopted is quite likely to affect the methods and conclusions of the paper.

I think that covers the main events of the last week or so. If anyone has anything to add though, do please let me know. I'd also be happy to receive any feedback about how useful (or not!) these posts are, what I should be including in them, and about the timing of them.

H809: Thoughts on week two

Technically, I guess H809 is in week three, but it seems to make sense to post about the previous works activities (some of which are carrying on) rather than on trying to provide some sort of 'this just happened' account. I thought it would also be worth sharing some wikipedia links that came up in the forums for anyone who was having trouble with the stats reported in last weeks paper - the first concerns F-ratios, and the second ANOVAs. It might also be useful to look at the course wiki (sign in required) to see how some of the students have used it to integrate their different accounts of how technology has been used in education over the years. This activity will help prove useful further on in the course as we start to consider how to contextualise educational research. A link that might be useful for finding relevant articles was also posted in the cafe for Journals in the field of technology enhanced learning.

Week two's reading was ‘Using computer-based text analysis to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods in research on collaborative learning’ (Wegerif & Mercer, 1997). Juliette has a nice summary and some reflections on it here. Some interesting things that have come out of the forum discussions so far include the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods in terms of their level of abstraction, the strengths and weaknesses of different methods of both collection and analyses e.g. the fact that textual analysis of speech will miss out on non-verbal communication and about how adequate a control group comparison was (not very, it would seem in this case). On a personal level, I think I enjoyed reading this paper more than last week's one, and I especially liked the introduction section for providing a kind of pros and cons to quantitative and qualitative research. The promised solution to the divide between the two sounded promising but as the students discussions have indicated there are some issues about the control group used (where they subject to the same analyses or not) and about whether the computer-based textual analyses carried out really does address all the issues it set out to do.

I think the most interesting aspect of this paper is that it has got everyone talking about quantitative and qualitative methods, with students considering issues such as how different is positivism to evidence-based practice? The debate over quantitative vs. qualitative is a long one and unfortunately not an easy one to jump into. When I was doing the MRes last year, I found it helpful to think about how these approaches differ on an epistemological basis. Essentially, positivists view research as a way to uncover what is already there while constructivists argue that reality is socially constructed, and so "research findings are created rather than discovered" (Badley, 2002). One of this weeks references, Richard Pring's article "The false dualism of educational research" (the link is accessible only if you're signed into OU StudentHome), provides another interesting insight into the debate. The paper provides a really useful outline of the quantitative and qualitative approaches, especially in terms of their philosophical basis, but ultimately argues that this does not have to be an either/or issue. Instead, the author concludes that "the qualitative investigation can clear the ground for the quantitative--and the quantitative be suggestive of differences to be explored in a more interpretive mode" (p. 259; Pring, 2000). This doesn't mean that a researcher should always use both, but that she or he needs to consider methods in terms of what is most appropriate to address the research questions. There is a lot to get your head around in Pring paper, but it is well worth a read as it provides a really interesting account of the debate, and an alternative option. In addition, it was suggested in the forums that next weeks reading by Oliver et al. (2007) also helps to clarify some of these perspectives (specifically positivism and constructivism), though I haven't read this yet.

The reason all this is important from a research perspective is that no matter what area it is you are focusing on, once you've figured out a research question/problem, you're going to have to think about methods. And when you think about methods, you have to be able to defend the choices you make and this means being able to talk about what you rejected and why as well. At the moment it looks like I'm going to be adopting a case-study based approach because I'm not looking to prove a hypothesis, but to explore certain processes, and because I want an in depth account of these process. So I have to sacrifice breadth for depth in terms of my results. It looks then like I will be taking a more qualitative approach since I will be using observation and interviews. However, I have also been thinking about getting some more "objective" data, such as physiological measures e.g. galvanic skin responses. The idea here is to gather a variety of measures to explore an phenomenon in depth, which may eventually lead to a framework of some sort, which could then be tested for it's generalisability. As for whether I think reality is socially constructed or not? I think I've tried to avoid answering that in the past but I guess I do agree, up to a point. I'm going to go with Pring on this one, and say I think I agree that our interpretations of reality are constrained by it's own features, so we can still say that some constructions are more likely than others. Otherwise, a lot of research might seem somewhat futile and I'd be out of a job!