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Jaap Bosman

Rhizomatic Learning: Cheating as Learning » Ralfe Poisson - 1 views

www.ralfepoisson.com/...-learning-cheating-as-learning

cheating learning convention

shared by Jaap Bosman on 13 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Jaap Bosman on 13 Jan 14
     
    Some remarks on cheating as a strategy. Hacking as cheating and cheating as gain an advantage. Cheating as removing the limitations of convention.
Vanessa Vaile

Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups  and other web services | ... - 0 views

francesbell.wordpress.com/...-groups-and-other-web-services

power ethics boundaries PFR #rhizo14

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 17 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • This is rhetoric, perhaps even rhizorhetoric, at it’s best
  • I want to frame my comments in the distinction between reductionist thought and complexity thought, a habit of mind I attribute to Edgar Morin’s book On Complexity
  • tension between a reductionist understanding of power and a complexity understanding
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Steven Luke’s short article about power
  • I find the fourth view, the one from Foucault, to be the most engaging, as it approaches a complex view of power
  • first three views of power assume a Classical, simple (not simplistic, but not complex, either) epistemology
  • “‘Power’ in its most generic sense simply means the capacity to bring about significant effects: to effect changes or prevent them.”
  • The One-dimensional View posits two agents disjoined from one another, and power occurs when one agent prevails in some way over the other agent
  • too simple, too explicit and over
  • The Two-dimensional view adds agenda control by the more powerful agent, and finally, the Three-dimensional view adds social influence
  • it also encompasses being able to secure their dependence, deference, allegiance or compliance, even without needing to act and in the absence of conflict.
  • the successive views move in the direction of complexity, but they are always limited by a Classical epistemology that posits disjoined, discrete agents interacting in deterministic ways across or through clear boundaries, either in accordance with or in violation of some social contract or rules.
  • its affordances are outweighed by its limitations
  • This is where Foucault’s view of power comes into play, and note that it’s the only unnamed view
  • complexity is often nameless, even unnameable
  • power is the flow of energy, matter, information, and organization throughout a complex, multi-scale system
  • an agent is formed and informed by the flows of energy, information, and organizational structures of the systems within which the agent lives and functions
  • we are not discrete entities, independent of an enclosing ecosystem
  • those flows all implicate power
  • Power is the weave of the fabric we are all woven into, and it is difficult, often impossible, to isolate any single thread of power and to trace it back to a single cause.
  • what does this mean for how we should decide who is in Rhizo14 and how we should behave there?
  • the more open the use and sharing of information, the more important it is to clarify how we expect that information to be used
  • Clarity has great affordances, but it also has its blindness
  • This is a fine example of a clear, classical social contract. Independent agents agree on boundaries and behaviors between themselves
  • This assumes discrete agents with clear boundaries, a simple view of power and reality
  • A complex view of power and reality—my view—says, however, that Frances is already part of the Rhizo14 group and the document
  • Likewise, I suspect that Frances has herself been in/formed by the Rhizo14 discussion
  • circular causality, a core mechanism of complex systems with their complex flows of power
  • Power as flows of energy, information, and organization have already woven us together in ways that I do not know how to disentangle.
  • really only a very small part
  • request not to be part of the group leaves me with some sticky issues
  • most views of plagiarism are based on the simple view of relationships among agents and social contracts
  • ole authorship is a reductionist’s fiction, a useful fiction perhaps, but perhaps becoming less useful as online, open spaces emerge
  • How to behave in an open community, then, where flows of power are unavoidable and many are uncontrollable, even unknowable
  • if we don’t confront this problem, then we will continue to apply the old social contracts. I don’t think those social contracts alone can address the issue
  • interested in learning how this group will write this document. Like all good ethnographers, I think I can learn most by living and functioning within the group, by helping to write it. I want to define the process from the inside
Vanessa Vaile

Reading Writing Responding: PLN, a Verb or a Noun? - 1 views

readingwritingresponding.blogspot.com.au/...pln-verb-or-noun.html

pln rhizo14

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 05 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • +Alec Couros' simple suggestion made during an interview with the +Ed Tech Crew that everything can be a resource online.
  • So often we limit ourselves by seeing PLN's as something made - contained and organised - rather than something continually evolving, changing growing and adapting.
  • s I have suggested previously,  PLN's often form themselves organically. PLN's are rhizomic. There is no central root system. There is only one connection leading to another.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • everyone in our lives has a point of knowledge to share, if recognised
  • Solutions for today can so often be found in adapting and extending ideas from the past.
  • A part of this is limiting ourselves by failing to recognise the connections in our lives and what they may have to offer.
  • One way in which we restrict these connections is by deciding what it is we want to know, before we have even asked the question.
  • Sometimes the best answers I get from my PLN are from those who I didn't expect.
  • everyone does have an opinion and something to add to the discussion. In my view, education is much better from incorporating wider range of voices and perspectives
  • post about mandated technology in schools. Guhlin calls for a infinite plurality
  • rather than collective uniformity, where everyone does this or uses that
  • a plurality of diversity that builds relationships among diverse partners to achieve common goals
  • plurality in regards to PLN, it is about capturing a range of perspectives
  • a PLN is that it is not something that we build, rather a PLN is something that we grow and nurture.
  • There are a number of ways in which a PLN can be nurtured. This includes engaging in dialogue, posting comments, as well as sharing ideas and resources.
  • the most important thing that we can do, whether it be in person or online, is to listen and simply be there
  • Connecting is a Mindset, not just a Thing Done
  • How are you sharing this with others?
  • In the end, you don't measure the success of a blog by the amount of hits it gets
  • Being connected is a mindset, a way of being and a way of doing, not something static, that is a thing done and complete
  • Vanessa Vaile on 05 Sep 14
     
    "everything can be a resource online. By approaching resources in this way, our understanding moves away from being an actual object, lets say a textbook, to a resource as being a way of seeing something. In this sense, a resource stops being a noun, something named, ordered and categorised, and instead becomes a verb, a way of approaching something, interpreting it, questioning it. In much the same way, PLNs can be thought of in much the same way. "
Terry Elliott

Rhizomatic learning, knowledge and books | Jenny Connected - 0 views

jennymackness.wordpress.com/...c-learning-knowledge-and-books

shared by Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
Vanessa Vaile liked it
  • don’t throw out your books
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      Perhaps it is not the books themselves but the power we grant them just because they are books. There are lots of reasons why we did this: they were the best technology available for carrying information, they are the tools of power for status quo and revolutionary alike, they have are now the traditional, default method. Yet we are at the beginning of an age which has other methods that are even more ubiquitous. The mobile device is becoming preeminent because it not only carries words but also images, moving and static, and sounds, ours and others. It is immediate and easily reproducible.
  • Are we going to ignore or throw away our books and so throw away our history? Doesn’t our past inform our present and future?
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      No, we are not going to do that, however we are going to put them in their place. To situate them in the power context, into their new community alongside images and sounds and the digital hierarchy of tools.
  • Iain MacGilchrist’s book – The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      I am a real fanboy of MacGilchrist's book. If you hadn't brought him up, I would have. ;-)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • he traces how the left hemisphere has grabbed more than its fair share of power
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      Yes and what has been the instrument of that power grab--books. Cormier's distrust comes from the valorization of yet another master of the holist part of our mind. Books are colonizers aren't they?
  • We need books, but we also need to engage with them critically. We need text, but we also need to be able to see its limitations. We need abstraction, but we also need embodied learning. We need to exercise both the left and right hemispheres of our brains.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      I say give books the comeuppance they deserve. Who is the boss of the mind? Mine is reactionary sloganeering here, so let me be less molotov. I, meaning my whole self, am the boss, the master. I am weary of being told and of accepting as writ (holy irony that) that the written word is supreme. I find myself revolting (please no Henny Youngman jokes) against words by my frail attempts to use tools that are decidedly not books--zeega, vine, photography, video, soundcloud, augmented reality--to wrestle control from literacy and return to orality.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 06 Feb 14
       
      On your side Scott would agree that it is not books who are at fault. Please let us not shoot the messenger. It is our use of books and our abdication to their organization, to their legibility that is our downfall.
  • Vanessa Vaile on 10 Feb 14
     
    Reader Response theory comes to mind here too. I see where this is both coming from and headed but my own attitude is, like anyone else's, still very much influenced by my personal reading history. I was an only child and, in a time when families moved much less than now, we moved often because of my father's work with a geophysical crew. I didn't spend entire school year in one place or even the same state until the 5th grade -- did not fall behind because my mother taught me to read early and my father made maths fun with cards, dice and dominoes. Add that all that up -- books spoke to me, were my family and friends. FYI Terry, my father was a storyteller and master punster
wayupnorth

The Internet and Education - OpenMind - by Neil Selwyn - 0 views

www.bbvaopenmind.com/...the-internet-and-education

education internet edtech

shared by wayupnorth on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • First, is the potential of the Internet to offer individual learners increased freedom from the physical limitations of the real world.
  • Secondly, the Internet is seen to support a new culture of learning—i.e., learning that is based around bottom-up principles of collective exploration, play, and innovation rather than top-down individualized instruction
  • Thirdly, the capacity of the Internet to support a mass connectivity between people and information is felt to have radically altered the relationship between individuals and knowledge.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Fourthly, the Internet is seen to have dramatically personalized the ways in which people learn—thereby making education a far more individually determined process than was previously the case.
  • self-directed, non-institutional learning are initiatives such as the hole-in-the-wall and School in the Cloud
    • wayupnorth
      wayupnorth on 14 Apr 14
       
      But will the majority of children/youth access these learning opportunities, or will they - as I have observed in hosting a community access point - gravitate toward entertainment? What learning experiences can be developed that will grab a young person's attention when watching Tupac and gang fights are available? Is there something that will motivate them to provide well-considered comments on Youtube and Facebook?
  • the most successful forms of Internet-based education and e-learning being those that reflect and even replicate pre-Internet forms of education such as classrooms, lectures, and books.
    • wayupnorth
      wayupnorth on 14 Apr 14
       
      really?
  • elping already engaged individuals to participate further, but doing little to widen participation or reengage those who are previously disengaged
  • wayupnorth on 14 Apr 14
     
    It remains for teachers to figure out how to leverage the opportunities of the internet for their learner's advantage. It is not enough to rely on the internet to "do it for you". The internet is still not a teaching machine. Best practice (Jim's version): teach content creation, collaboration, and reasonable dialogue - globally if possible.
Kevin Hodgson

The Essence of Peopling - 4 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...the-essence-of-peopling

shared by Kevin Hodgson on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • “People”
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      To talk about  "people" is to objectify and alienate. Making nouns of anything is a way to separate them from the world.
  • “peopling”
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      "Peopling" on the other hand is about human folk connecting to the world--subjectifying and unshackling the word.
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      to people?
  • The first part of this essay is an account of innermost peopling – the social, self-conscious nature of human cognition. The second part of this essay moves outward, connecting cognition to the rituals and social information flows that make up the most important parts of our environment.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • In Others in Mind: The Social Origins of Self-Consciousness (one of my favorite books of all time), Philippe Rochat presents a social model of human cognition,
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Social model of human knowings v. Cartesian knowing
  • Rochat, in contrast, models human cognition as fundamentally social in nature. Each person learns to be aware of himself – is constrained toward self-consciousness – by other people being aware of him. He learns to manage his image in the minds of others, and finds himself reflected, as in a mirror, through the interface of language and non-verbal communication.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      We learn to become self-aware, we are "constrained" toward that goal by other folk.  Other folk are our first mirrors through non-verbal then oral and then written "interfaces".
  • infinite recursion
  • infinite recursion
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      We see ourselves through the constraining influences of other people, through the 'peopling' of others.  Others people us.  It is a limited recursion.  I think this has significance in #rhizo15. How? We are all seeing ourselves through the eyes of others.  How accurate is that subjective view?  Sometimes it is off by degrees of magnitude.  For example, I see some pretty effusive praise for stuff that by its nature is half-baked.  Yes, some is very good for a first draft, but most goes little past the initial draft and into further revision.  I expect further recursion, further refinement through reciprocal action, sometimes I get it, mostly I don't. Part of me take no offense while another part is deeply disturbed that the responses I get are so cursory.  And the cursory nature of most responses,  the desultory considerations of others we have come to respect become the default.  And, worse, they become internalized as the default mutual mental modeling.  Shallow of necessity, quick by force of circumstance, and a bare reciprocal exigency.  
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      How much of that is on other people? How much of it is on us? How inviting are we to gather up ideas, particularly those who challenge our thinking? That "infinite" word in there .. that's a lot of recursive thinking going back and forth, toppling on itself ...
  • The self is not unitary and separate from others; peopling occurs in the context of mutual-mental-modeling relationships, which continue to affect each person when he is alone.
  • Each person’s self is spread out among many people, simulated in all their brains at varying levels of granularity. And each person has a different “self” for each one of the people he knows, and a different self for every social context.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Therefore, we have different subjective reflections from among different folk.  Each reflection is a unique self simulated by another's mind.  The same is true for social context.  We have a Rhizo15 self created by our Rhizo15 folk.  My question here is whether it is in any way an objective measure and does that matter?   Should any of us care about the simulations of others?  Should we rebel and subvert these simulacra because they are not 'us'?  It is hard to argue for this position simply because this acceptance of the peopling of others seems quite natural.  It is natural for us to consider this subjective and recursive view from others as the real deal.  Or is it just the default view?  Can we generate another way toward identity that is a balance between outer and inner subjectivity?
  • The self at work is different from the self at home with close friends, or in bed with a spouse. And none of these are the “true self” – rather, the self exists in all these, and in the transitions between them. There can never be one single, public self; to collapse all these multiple selves together would be akin to social death.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      We are many selves.  No one reflection gets them all not even our own. Especially not our own.
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      This reminds me of how to think of our students -- of their lives outside of our classroom,our building ... what literacies are authentic for them?
  • Mentally maintaining one’s identity in relation to others, including one’s accurate social status and relationships in each case, is the core task of being human.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Powerful assertion here.  And the proof is in asking what happens when we do not maintain that identity.
  • a huge portion of our internal cognitive machinery, of which we are not normally aware, is concerned with the ordinary function of maintaining one’s own identity and that of others
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      I wonder how much of our cognitive load is spent maintaining (breaking down and building up) identity, the metabolism of identity?
  • Baumeister and Masicampo posit that interfacing between identities – both within a single mind, and between minds – is the purpose of conscious thought (Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface). And just as Rochat proposes that we are “constrained toward consciousness” by others, Kevin Simler says that we “infect” each other with personhood.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Three views of this social model of cognition: 1. Baumeister and Masicampo: conscious thought is the transport mechanism for moving between inner identity and outer identity. 2.Rochat: we become conscious because of others, 'constrained by folk' in order to be. 3. Simler: we infect each other with consciousness through the interaction of identity.
  • There is a profound irreconcilability or dissonance between first-and third-person perspectives on the self once objectified and valued. This dissonance shapes behaviors in crucial ways, as individuals try to reconcile their own and others’ putative representations about them. These two representational systems are always at some odds or in conflict, always in need of readjustment. It is so because these systems are open, and they do not share the same informational resources: direct, permanent, and embodied for the first-person perspective on the self; indirect, more fleeting, and disembodied for the third-person perspective on the self. A main property of this dissonance is that it tends to feed into itself and can reach overwhelming proportions in the life of individuals. More often than not, this dissonance is a major struggle, expressed in the nuisance of self-conscious behaviors that hinder creativity and the smooth “flow” of interpersonal exchanges. Others in Mind, p. 41
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      I have never seen the problem of identity so succinctly put.  And it explains why there is and can be no permanent solution to the conflict here except perhaps the meditative one of observing the breath and making that identity.
  • People are able to accomplish this feat of mutual simulation by use of two tools: language and ritual. Ritual allows for the communication of information that language can’t convey – hard-to-fake costly signals of commitment, dependability, harmoniousness, and cooperative intent.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      So how do we play this infinite game of mutually modelling each other's identities to each the other? Language and ritual Language for the easy stuff and ritual for the hard stuff. So what are the #rhizo15 rituals?
  • If humans are somehow calibrated to expect a constant flow of social information, then the sparseness of ritual and social participation in modern environments might trigger a cascade of rumination.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      The sparseness of ritual environment in rhizo15 is very painful to me.  The sparseness of feedback from language is just as painful, but the lack of ritual makes it even more so.  Dreadfully more so.  In fact I am on the edge of withdrawing all the time.  I think it is the ritual that will save me.
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      So bring on the salve of ritual to rhizo15.
  • A very simple example is greetings. “Greeting everyone you see” is a candidate for a ritual universal, a part of the ritual atmosphere that displays good fit with peopling
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 1: greeting everyone, every day.
  • (with some caveats).
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 2:"Serene Social Sloth Sunday, a made-up internet holiday in which we avoid posting "outrage porn" 
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 3: Breaking Bread Together
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 4:  Share natural spaces through YouTube, make part of any group meeting e.g. Hangout.  
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 5: "With joy and zest, publicly celebrate milestones and recurring events. Affirming shared history, we nourish community, crystallize a sense of accomplishment, and build group identity by unifying our stories and common goals. Can be planned and ritualized, or as spontaneous as a group cheer."  Celebrate | Group Works. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2015, from http://groupworksdeck.org/patterns/Celebrate
    • Terry Elliott
      Terry Elliott on 19 Apr 15
       
      Ritual 6:  Feedforward with the imagination.  In other words project your self into the future and 'recall' all that 'happened' from the beginning of #rhizo15.  In a way I think this defines what rhizomatic learning is.  Each of us creates identity for the group by being who we are with the voices we have.  Why not imagine that forth along with others instead of relying solely upon the weekly proddings of one person identified as 'teacher/leader'.  Feedforwardings would allow us to compare rhizomatic identities. and from there decide where we might go as a group as well as individually.
  • Information about the self from the first-person perspective tends to be inflated and self-aggrandizing; information about the self from the third-person perspective, projected into the minds of others, tends to be deflated and self-deprecatory.
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      Intriguing ...
  • A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment.
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      Interesting, since the "internet highway" was an early metaphor for technology and online elements .. and now we are working on ways to slow down, be more reflective, plant flowers along the ugly underpasses of the freeway
  • “we’re here to fart around together.”
    • Kevin Hodgson
      Kevin Hodgson on 22 Apr 15
       
      Is this a motto of Rhizomatic Learning communities? Ha
  • In conclusion, drink tea, together with your friends; pay attention to the tea, and to your friends, and pay attention to your friends paying attention to the tea. Therein lies the meaning of life.
  • Vanessa Vaile on 20 Apr 15
     
    There are also linguistic differences...for example, the verb vs noun thing does not work the same in Spanish (and perhaps to some extent in other Romance languages as in English, where verbs are the power words. Syntax and the role of particles-prefixes are other factors.
Scott Johnson

Blurring the Boundaries? New social media, new social research: Developing a network to... - 1 views

eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3168

rhizo14 research social media

shared by Scott Johnson on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Scott Johnson on 28 Mar 14
     
    Woodfield, Kandy and Morrell, Gareth and Metzler, Katie and Blank, Grant and Salmons, Janet and Finnegan, Jerome and Lucraft, Mithu (2013) Blurring the Boundaries? New social media, new social research: Developing a network to explore the issues faced by researchers negotiating the new research landscape of online social media platforms. NCRM Working Paper. "On a practical level, some of our network members were struggling with the constant stream of social media data, finding it difficult to keep pace with their participants as they moved on in their conversations and discussions. Digital overwhelm might become counter-productive to reflective social science if researchers are not skilled at managing data flows. Similarly, gathering massive datasets requires a computing power outside of the grasp of many independent researchers or students. The increasing emphasis on 'big data' runs the risk of access to datasets being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of researchers and organisations. An alternative perspective sees this as an opportunity for researchers to come together in creative, cross-disciplinary collaborations, Either way, social researchers will need to find ways of convincing those who own social media sites about the merits of extending, or at least continuing, some freely accessible datasets. The politics of social media research will become an increasingly important agenda for social scientists to engage with. Despite the strengths that social media offer in terms of providing an accessible platform for some marginalised groups, other hard-to-reach populations like the elderly, the poor and those with limited literacy remain more difficult to reach online." Page 12
Vanessa Vaile

The literature on CAE (Collaborative Autoethnography) Reflecting Allowed | Reflecting A... - 0 views

blog.mahabali.me/...-collaborative-autoethnography

collaborative autoethnography ethnography rhizo14 rhizomatic learning blog-post

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 30 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • collaborative autoethnography
  • Mainly this article (Geist-Martin et al) and this book (Chang et al)
  • plans to read this open access book on (non-collaborative) autoethnography
  • ...78 more annotations...
  • open access article by Ellis et al on autoethnography (only skimmed it)
  • Disclaimer: I’m not a methodological purist, I’m an omnivore & a quilt-maker. I don’t even think ethnography believes in methodological purity; the researcher is the instrument even more so if it’s auto
  • So what was MY question?
  • how are people experiencing rhizo14?
  • I am interested in sub-topics of making connections and building community]
  • Why am I interested?
  • I would like to understand how other experienced this MOOC
  • it’s important to note the diverse ways in which the course was perceived by different people
  • I’m interested in what didn’t work. But I am also interested in what did work, and for whom.
  • this knowledge to help influence future designers of connected courses by highlighting the participant experience
  • it will always be partial
  • Geist-Martin et al cite Ellis (2004, p. 30) on autoethnography, and it captures how I feel about this approach
  • “The goal is to practice an artful, poetic, and empathic social science in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodies the complexities of concrete moments of lived experience”
  • collaborative autoethnography rejects the traditional approach of disembodied academic research
  • came out of Chang et al is that there are three broad types of autoethnography
  • the type that emphasizes the auto (closer to autobiography, more narrative)
  • OR a type that focuses on the ethnography part (more analytical, relating one’s own experiences to the wider culture)
  • but any AE contains elements of both
  • I *think* in #rhizo14 we’re attempting something closer to the latter, but what we have at the moment is closer to the former.
  • the practice needs to move beyond mere storytelling in order to be research
  • Autoethnography needs to “use personal stories as windows to the world, through which we interpret how their selves are connected to their sociocultural contexts and how the contexts give meanings to their experiences and perspectives” (Chang et al, p. 18-19).
  • Geist-Martin et al’s & Chang et al’s critiques of their own process – here are some parts I wanted to highlight:
  • They looked for themes across their stories
  • They helped each other clarify certain aspects of each other’s stories
  • They critiqued and recognized ways in which their stories reproduced cultural stereotypes
  • They struggled with how to “cut” parts of their stories in order to make this paper
  • They mention how social activities they participated in, in each other’s lives, influenced how they wrote together
  • They talk about community-building that occurs because of the collaboration on the autoethnography itself
  • They raise ethical issues about how personal narratives actually refer to people outside the narrative itself and the ethics of such story-telling that will get published and scrutinized
  • Clearly, doing autoethnography collaboratively is meant to diversify the viewpoints on a topic, making the interpretation richer and more complex than just one person’s autoethnography. It also, of course, makes it more complicated to do. Easier to start than to finish
  • Chang et al mention 4 key dimensions of CAE:
  • Self-focused
  • Context-conscious
  • Researcher-visible
  • Critically dialogic
  • the more “critically dialogic”  work is, the more it tends towards an analytic/ethnographic rather than evocative/biographical type of research
  • it makes sense to  do evocative research on emotionally sensitive topics, where over-analyzing it might actually lose the essence of what is being researched
  • for tales of abuse, illness, etc., but not for #rhizo14 which is less of an emotionally taxing thing to talk about
  • Some more stuff about CAE:
  • Alternation between solo and group work
  • This part in Chang et al made me laugh because of its vagueness:
  • Chang et al call it an “iterative process”), there’s data collection at the beginning (which can keep happening as gaps are found via group negotiation); there’s data analysis and interpretation (where we seem to be at – and I think that might raise areas of gaps to go find data about or to re-write our narratives about – will explain later); and of course writing.
  • what matters is that I can basically do whatever I want, call it CAE, and set my own criteria for rigor I’m only half-kidding.
  • CAE as an emerging research practice should not be limited to a particular approach or style of representation
  • The authors suggest the following benefits of CAE  (p. 25):
  • collective exploration of researcher subjectivity
  • power-sharing among researcher-participants
  • efficiency an enrichment in the research process
  • deeper learning about self and other
  • community-building
  • this quote (p. 26):
  • “CAE offers us a scholarly space to hold up mirrors to each other in communal self-interrogation and to explore our subjectivity in the company of one another”
  • this quote (p. 28):
  • “This kind of collaborative meaning-making requires that each team members be willing to be vulnerable and open with co-researchers in order to enable the deeper analysis and interrogation that enriches the final product”
  • the challenges of CAE:
  • Risk of incomplete trust to lead to premature consensus-building that compromises the data
  • Apparently quite difficult to do at a distance because of degree of closeness needed
  • Interdependency of research efforts
  • Mutlivocality can make each researcher influenced by the voices of others
  • Team effort
  • Ethics & confidentiality (this prob deserves a post on its own, but I’ll just give it a section here for now)
  • Ethics
  • Authors ask if CAE needs to go through IRB? Ours went through IRB. Not sure if they really understood the extent of what we were doing, but they approved it.
  • The biggest ethical issue I see is that when only indirectly reference others, we may be broaching on their confidentiality
  • We also need to be clear on who gets  access to the data after we write our “report”, and how they can use it
  • We as individual autoethnographers also need to recognize the need to protect ourselves – how much are we revealing about ourselves and is it OK that all of that becomes open to public scrutiny as we publish it?
  • The incident over the use of our data during #et4online by Jen Ross and Amy Collier was a case in point – it is not that simple.
  • Ch 5 of that book about the data analysis side of things
  • emerging coding approach
  • I’ll just come back to one MAIN point that’s running through my mind (well, points, plural, but they are all related):
  • Can we get multiple autoethnogs out of this
  • How do we incorporate  the views of people who wrote narratives in the autoethnog but who are not part of the team currently analyzing the data?
  • CAE implies that only the authors’ stories are told. Now the authors could react to stuff that happened by and with other people, but there are ethical issues in getting to deep with that
  • Can we use some of the other data in the narratives DIFFERENTLY? So not as autoethnog, but as narratives
  • The inherent “connectdness” of it all makes it almost paralyzing to imagine how we can tell our own stories (6-7 of us) without either implicating others, or needing to reference others
  • I usually do ethnography by using any and all data I can; this would mean referencing public blogs, etc.
  • I keep circling back to the same thing, right? There power questions, there are questions of who can tell whose story? There are multiple “others” in the “we” of autoethnography, and what do we do by telling our story and leaving out theirs?
  • What about the people who didn’t even blog visibly or at all, and so have no easy “trace” to find even if we wanted to incorporate their views?
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