Thoughts about Part 4 Draft 4


I have to admit to now feeling rather swamped and overwhelmed by so many thoughts. So I'm going to try and stand back a bit and consolidate from my own perspective. These are my thoughts.

 

1. We seem to have come to some agreement (Roy we need your thoughts here) from our exploration of forum and blog posts and the literature, that the reasons why people chose to Moodle or Blog in the CCK08 course are centred around 4 themes:

 

2. Matthias' most recent concept map (thanks so much for all your work on this and to John for the discussion), suggests that whilst technology and learning styles are themes to be considered, they will not be as significant as personal and conceptual connections

 

3. Matthias' most recent Cmap suggests that personal and conceptual connections are important to both bloggers and moodlers (as you would expect), but for different reasons. This is what we need to tease out in a questionnaire.

 

4. My recent thinking has been around the question - do we need to ground this research in a theoretical framework. I have only skimmed the many articles that John has posted (thank you John), but so far I have not come across any research into blogging which is grounded in theory. Or do we need a model to serve as a basis for our seletion of questions? Or is what we are doing by establishing themes  the beginnings of a formation of a model. So far we seem to have had most discussion about Kolb and Honey and Mumford's learning styles.

 

5. On the question of polarities e.g. convergent/divergent. I very much like the work on Wenger on this where he discounts polarities and talks about dualities. In other words people can expect, in their learning, to experience both convergent and divergent learning styles at different stages and times in the learning process. There's a lot more than this ih his 1998 book, Communities of Practice: Learning Meaning and Identity - but I'll just make this point now.

 

6. I think  we are in danger of coming to conclusions before we have the evidence. We can and should of course, hypothesise, but we should guard carefully against internal bias. As yet we just don't know if there is any commonality I meant to say difference here! Sorry! between CCK08 participants' reasons for choosing to blog or moodle. There might not be. This might be what the research proves, which would be interesting given the findings of other research papers. We must be rigorous in basing the research on evidence

 

What are your persepctives on these points? Are we nearly ready to start composing our questions based on Matthias' most recent Cmap - or are you still working on this Matthias?

I have to now go back to Part 4 Draft 4 think it all through - and do the same with the concept map and the literature. Many thanks John and Matthias for all your work on this.

 

Here is another Cmap, about Conceptual connections. 

 

 

Ok, this one is even more chaotic than the previous ones, and I feel really guilty having bothered Jenny with it on such a busy day (http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of/  ) ! So I'll try to provide a verbal description, as well:

Hope this helps.

Matthias, again this is marvellous, this greatly helps.  I will study the details later.  by John