Finding the Individual in Collaborative Online Learning Environments

Collaborative learning is well suited to online learning environments built around threaded discussion. Research frameworks have developed around these practices providing methodological guidance for examining learning as a collective endeavor within the boundaries of a course. These frameworks may not adequately represent the individual as an active agent within these socially-constructed environments. The aim of this paper is to explore how narrative analysis provides a method for examining expressions of individual identity construction within an online environment. Analysis of a personal story written by a student in her weblog within an online graduate course suggests that individual identity is expressed as the integration of course concepts within practice settings and that the personal discursive space afforded by the weblog supports this integration. Background This study is concerned with how social software tools (i.e., weblogs and RSS) are used by graduate students in education to establish and develop their academic identities within the context of their program. Of particular interest is how these tools might support those students who either study at a distance or work full-time or, both. Studies of place-based graduate student success identify a strong relationship between participation in collaborative research projects with faculty and other graduate students and timely completion resulting from academic preparation for independent research (Anderson, 1996; de Valero, 2001; Lovitts, 2001). Students whose contact with the academic community is limited to coursework and supervisory relations are challenged to find opportunities to participate in the disciplinary practice of education research. Even where graduate study is conceptualized as professional development, participation within a community of others with different experiences is key to improving and broadening practice (Lieberman, 1995; Scribner, 1999). By limiting graduate experience to coursework, opportunities for participation are contextually constrained by the boundaries of the individual course and students are left with little to provide them with a cohesive sense of their own progress (Lemke, 2000). A principle design goal of this project was to explore how a technologicallymediated environment might bridge student participation within the academy across their course experiences, throughout their program of study. Weblog technology was adopted Finding the Individual 2 2 because it afforded an individualized writing environment that could be used by students for the duration of the program in which to write about and keep track of their experiences and interests. At the same time, as a publicly viewable space, students could connect with and perhaps learn from each other’s experiences by reading each others’ entries. With an emphasis on experience in context, the weblogs were thought to hold potential as site in which the written trail of personal growth and development might become a community resource. As such the weblogs offered the potential for both supporting the development of academic identity by offering a single, public location for reflection over time and providing models of growth for other students to observe. Technically, weblogs are websites with reverse chronological presentation of entries. While weblogs are frequently conceptualized as online journals implying a private, reflective and personal form of writing (Blood, 2004; Herring, Scheidt, Wright, & Bonus, 2005; Mortensen & Walker, 2002; Oravec, 2003; Stiler & Philleo, 2003) they are publicly available and are used as shared resources. This personal yet public nature of weblogs is recognized as creating the opportunity for writers to work through ideas with input from others. Mortensen and Walker (2002) suggest that “in some manner, the writer is putting his or her daily experiences into a larger context, discussing micro events in relation to the wider universe of events. The weblog connects the public arena with that of individuals” (p. 258). Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a separate technology that makes it possible for users to subscribe to and monitor updates from a large number of weblogs on one webpage. The individual nature of the weblog coupled with the community-building potential of RSS provides the basic platform upon which this research project was based. Conceptual Framework Much of the research concerning the design of online learning environments investigates how technological and pedagogical elements support learning within course boundaries (McCombs & Vakili, 2005). Within the bounded online course setting, design elements that foster collaboration and community are found to be key in promoting learning and the development of a socially supportive environment (Wilson, LudwigHardman, Thornam, & Dunlap, 2004). The role of community is to support and facilitate collaboration directed at socially-constructed knowledge construction (Job-Sluder & Finding the Individual 3 3 Barab, 2004; Palloff & Pratt, 2005; Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001; Wilson et al., 2004). As Garrison (2006) notes, an increased sense of community supports “collaborative learning and discourse associated with higher levels of learning” (1 page) and reduces potential disconnectedness felt by students in asynchronous learning environments. However, this type of community, described as bounded by (Wilson et al., 2004) is transitory and short-term, designed to meet specific pedagogical and didactic outcomes. The individual participates in the service of the community and their interests and goals are constructed collectively. Each course is a discrete event, but individual development is ongoing. Whether conceptualizing graduate study as professional development or apprenticeship, ongoing participation within a community of practice figures centrally as a requirement for student learning. Graduate study is more than the acquisition of skills and knowledge. It is about becoming a critically informed practitioner and, particularly for doctoral students, a participant in a scholarly community (Conrad, Duren, & Haworth, 1998). Lave and Wenger (1991) suggest that “activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are reproduced and developed within social communities” (p. 53). By focusing on collaborative online learning as it occurs within courses, the range of experiences that inform an individual’s understanding may become decontextualized and limited to the discrete and bounded course environment. The weblog environment under investigation in this study was considered to be an individual online space in which the students could make sense of and connect their academic and practice experiences. In our attempt to understand the potential of the weblog as an online space in which the individual can find expression, analytic frameworks that privilege the collective provided little guidance. Sfard and Prusak (2005) suggest that conceptually, identity “figures prominently whenever one addresses the question of how collective discourses shape personal worlds and how individual voices combine into a voice of a community” (p. 15). They argue that identifying (italics in original) is an activity “in which one uses common resources to create a unique, individually tailored combination” (p. 15). The act of becoming is therefore neither wholly individual nor is it the Finding the Individual 4 4 reproduced outcome of collective action. As Bruner (2001) suggests, an anomaly of Western ideology concerning identity is that “while Self is regarded as the most ‘private’ aspect of our being, it turns out on close inspection to be highly negotiable” (p. 34). It is in fact, intersubjective. Recent conceptualizations of identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998; Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Wenger, 1998) call attention to its contextual and constructed nature—an individual’s identity is constituted in their participative experiences (actions, communities, interpretations). Sfard and Prusak (2005) suggest that it is in the telling of these experiences that identity is constructed. Experiences, re-told are the telling of identity. The weblog entries of the participants in this study contain many instances of these stories or narrativizations. The narratives are situated in the lives of the students and reveal much about their individual interpretations of their own experiences. Because weblogs are publicly shared, these trajectories represent the selective presentation of the individual for an audience. This paper explores how individual identity can be expressed within the weblogs as stories that provide students with an opportunity to connect their disparate experiences of practice. The study is exploratory and uses narrative analysis (Cortazzi, 1993; Reissman, 1993) to examine a student-generated story as an expression of agency and action. In doing so, this paper contributes to our understanding of how weblogs can be used by graduate students during a program of study to understand their own unique trajectories within an academically-oriented online environment that has the potential to span course boundaries. In the following section the study and research methods are described. Method and Data Sources This exploratory study employs a design-based research methodology to understand what potential weblogs hold as a technology to support program wide engagement for graduate students in Education who cannot participate in full-time oncampus studies. Design-based research emerged as a response to traditional experimental or laboratory research in which a discrete variable was manipulated in carefully controlled experimental conditions (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004) and is useful for the progressive examination of learning environment design within a naturalistic setting. Finding the Individual 5 5 Design research methods involve the systematic identification and manipulation of elements of the learning environment considered to affect the design under investigation. (Collins et al., 2004) refer to these successive manipulations as progressive refinements or phases of a design, the goal of which is to develop an understanding of what works, what does not work, and why. This study examines a weblog environment used during two iterations of an online graduate course called Constructive Learning and the Design of Online Environments (CTL1608). In both iterations of CTL1608, students used an online threaded discussion environment as their primary method of communication. The course was structured around a series of weekly readings and discussions. Application of educational technology was a primary focus of the course and therefore students were encouraged to use a range of technologies. In the first phase of the study, students used the weblogs, a web-based video-conferencing system, and a chat tool. In the second phase, students used all of the above technologies as well as a wiki (a collaborative internet-based writing space). The weblog environment was built using a weblog application called Movable Type (http://movabletype.org) and the students, the instructor, and the TAs each received their own individual weblog. The primary aspect of the environment that was manipulated between phases of the study was the way in which the weblogs were displayed to the students. In the first phase, delivered in the winter semester of 2005 (CTL1608W05), the weblogs were displayed in a single webpage as a series of links which required that the students click on each weblog link to read each others weblog entries. In the second phase, delivered in the fall semester of 2005 (CTL1608F05) an RSS aggregator was available that displayed excerpts of all the weblogs in a single webpage. This design modification was implemented so that the weblogs which were written individually were displayed in a communal environment. The weblogs were an integrated part of the course and a self-assessed mark, worth 25 percent of the final grade was given for their completion. Students were provided with regular prompts to guide their writing and they were encouraged to experiment with the technology. To give the weblog environment a broader context, members of a research group outside the course environment were encouraged to maintain weblogs. Finding the Individual 6 6 Upon completion of each course, students were asked for permission to use their weblogs as data for this study. In phase one, 19 out of 20 students agreed to participate in the study. Of those students who agreed to participate, only one student was registered full-time (a PhD student), one was an EdD student, and the rest were registered as parttime masters of Education students. In phase two, 12 of 15 students agreed to participate. Of those students agreeing to participate in phase two, there were two full-time students (both PhD) and the remaining students were registered as part-time MEd students. The weblogs were copied from the server and entered verbatim into NVivo, a computer-based qualitative analysis tool. All names were changed to pseudonyms to protect participant anonymity. Initially, weblog entries were separated according whether they were written in response to a researcher provided prompt. Open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was used to identify categories within the unprompted weblog entries and through this process; the fully-formed narratives under consideration in this paper were uncovered. As Riessman (1993) suggests, these narratives were noteworthy because they could not be broken up in a way that allowed their component pieces to make sense. Twelve narratives were identified (three in phase one and nine in phase two). In this paper, one narrative is selected for analysis. Lianne is a doctoral student who was a secondary school teacher in her home country. She was in her first year of study when enrolled in CTL1608F05. Lianne wrote eight weblog entries in total during the course (M=9.18 for CTL1608F05). This narrative was selected because it is representative of the stories within the weblogs of both courses. As background for the analysis of Lianne’s story, narrative analysis methodology will be considered with a focus on how it contributes to a better understanding of weblog use as an individual