6.3 what the book will be about(writing so far)?

An open-for-discussion post about what I'm thinking the ethnographic chapters will do.

1. Set up a focus relevant to the particular culture of your community & that uses connective ethnographic methods that:

• account for interconnections between online/offline culture + experience; 
• construct complex, not necessarily coherent representations of community life through the use of multiple critical lenses; 
• examine the Internet as culture and cultural artifact (Hine);
• watch for links between technology + performance (Wakeford); 
• are careful not to prematurely bracket literacy practices based on the "space" where they take place (Holloway & Valentine); 
• compare practices across participants and contexts (Lam);
• etc.

2. Characterize "generic" purpose(s),  assumptions, values, beliefs, literacy practices, identities of participants, texts (and other features of Discourse communities as we set up our definition) for a your Discourse community (Fanfiction, blogging, fantasy sport league, gaming writing group, NaNoWriMo, IF-ingLoveScience). 

This characterization will be drawn from:

• what the research literature says about the community (and generically related communities);
• cultural Conversations surrounding the community => how the popular press, people in general talk about this community =cultural stories re the practices, participants, sites, uses etc.  For example, there are many assumptions associated with ownership, writing, and stories in this recent article about Kindle Worlds move to "pay" fanfic writers.  Analysis of some of the Conversations (see Gee) surrounding your community (as in Hine's approach described in Leander)

3. Develop a data-driven characterization of your particular community based in observations & analyses of significant elements typically present in your community's social life and being.   Elements might include: phenomena, "texts", conditions/contexts,  actors, actions, interactions, and outcomes within your community's social life

4. Develop the characterization  from 3 in terms of the focus for your chapter  (e.g.  Robyn may look at gender, power relations and silence, Mark may look at indentity issues, practices, & ideologies as they bear upon feedback systems, etc)

5.  Include analyses of flow & circulation among identities, ideologies + literacy practices in your characterizations for 3 &4.  This would include reflection on positionings that facilitate changing perspectives or integration of new practices, as well as any characterizations relevant to your focus.

6. Write a conclusion which:

• sums up your observations with respect to your focus
• points out how your study supplements/reflects approaches under point 1
• poses local theory to extend and supplement  larger theory grounded in cultural Conversations from point 2
• notes features of points of movement discussed in point 5.

6.2 Meetings and readings

I think maybe we didn't leave ourselves enough breathing room between when the semester ended and we started meeting?  I know I was feeling a little out of breath keeping up.  I'd like to have group meetings, at least at the beginning when we will be talking through the focus for our projects, reviewing methods used by other researchers with similar research agendas, and working out the format for the chapters.  After that - it might make more sense to meet individually.  Let me know?

I will post some of my thoughts + observations on Leander + Burn before I go to Computers & Writing, along with some discussion of how I am imagining the book. 

Be in touch if you have questions about what to work on - let me know if you need some time before you dig in to this. 

Yeah, I know, this is my third post for today.  I guess I finally finished some other things and am pretty eager to get started on this.

6.2 Thinking about purpose & form

This is a sort of freewrite meant to let you know what I am thinking about as I work on the proposal.

At this point I am thinking I might analyze one of my writing courses as a Discourse community as a way to characterize practices + ideology.  I'm not sure where that would go - maybe a 3rd chapter in the first section ?  A kind of sample for what the other ethnographies do?  This ethnographic description would be alongside the pieces you are writing and would serve as a ground for the final chapter where we look at how ideologies/practices in writing communities differ - and how writers might draw more constructively from mediated experiences as they move from one community to another.  I am realizing there are problems with this approach - and am at a "we'll see where this goes" stage of thinking about it

1. What is our book about?  We are asked to " Briefly describe the ebook or scholarly project—no more than two single-spaced pages."

In terms of aboutness, so far I have got:

• ethnographic study of online communities as a way to characterize t personal experiences of ideologies (that is, not the representation of the ideologies associated with particular community genres - like fanfiction communities - but rather to characterizes the ideology(-ies?) that individual participants, or local groups of participants, enact within a specific community
• exploration of the flows & circulation within belief systems and practices, and across contexts and Discourse communities, etc
• some curious theorization of points of entry/flexibility with respect to moving across ideologies/belief systems (or at least being able to "hear" across belief systems)
• (as part of the last point) speculation about what our study might show about the "

      

2. Connections to Conversations in other research.  The proposal guidelines ask us to place our work "within the context of an academic field and key conversations in that field."   What follows is some drafty writing to give you and idea of what I am thinking.  This is not the last word - but rather an effort to put a focus out there so we can look at the different writing communities with a shared focus/goal.


Identifiers for our field are:  new literacies, online communities, ethnography, discourse analysis (which includes narrative analysis), pedagogy

Relevant Conversations.

Online communities are Discourse communities where meanings, identities and practices are mediated primarily through writing. 

This conversation might include Gee (who coined he term Discourse), Swales essay to define discourse communities, and earlier discussions from social constructionism (Rorty, Bruffee, Gergen, etc).  As pointed out in these discussions, features of Discourse communities are often either partially or completely unarticulated so that participants generally can act in terms of the communities' assumptions, values, and beliefs, but may not be able to articulate those features.  This suggests, as pointed out by Lankshear & Knobel, that when participants in online communities participate in "related" communities (like school), they (at least initially) bring belief systems and practices associated with communities where they spend the most time/feel the most at home in/are most strongly identified with.  When those beliefs and practices are not a good match, their can be confusion and frustration. 

Literate identities and literacy practices are continuous with, not separate from, experiences in both mediated and unmediated contexts.  This engages the points made by Leander and the researchers he summarizes.  It suggests methods from "connective ethnography" will be necessary to accurately characterize the "literate lives" of mediated communities.

Ethnographies in Section II  will explore participants, practices, belief systems, and contexts surrounding online communities as shaping and shaped by experiences from social interactions in the material world. Because of this, data  will necessarily include information on both:

• participant identities, literacy practices, and relevant experiences (stories) and relationships within their material world lives
• participant reflections on connections between their participation in the online community that is the focus of the study and their lives in general.

Identities are created and experienced through social constructions flowing through particular individuals.   I am not sure which theorists to invoke here = but this is going to be the justification for focusing on the experience of community through the eyes of one or several (as opposed to many) individuals, and for choosing a point of convergence for our research group (students/faculty at Kean) rather than putting forth repersentations from a broader perspective.

Learning communities in general, and writing classrooms in particular benefit from increased awareness of ideologies and practices from diverse Discourse communities, and how flow and circulation among those ideologies can affect successful membership in multiple communities.

Still working on this.

What our study can contribute
Our study contributes characterization of the literacy practices and ideologies inhabited by participants within 7 different Discourse communities associated with mediated identities.   Ethnographic descriptions in individual chapters provide detailed descriptions of a range of online communities.  These descriptions offer context specific, connective characterizations of  assumptions, values and beliefs that embody literacy practices within (and across the material world lives) of participants. Our analysis examines correlations between structural features of contexts and participants' choice of and style for using particular literacy practices;  this analysis pays particular attention to structural similarities (and differences) in contexts (mediated and physically enacted) where similar practices are used.

Within this analysis we look at the flow and circulation of positionings within literacy practices and ideologies as they play out within personal, local, and larger cultural contexts.  This analysis notices that while these individual performance present enactments of practices and ideologies engaged for particular audiences, they also constitute an interactive continuum where each performance in each setting integrates experiences from all contexts. 

Our analysis focuses on context, social relationships (including mediated relationships), features of literacy practices, and contextual-ideologies.  Focus on these features should allow observation of patterns in how, where, and when participants choose negotiate/resist/obviate or innovate ideologies associated with the many discourses they participate in while taking part in the Discourse community that is the focus of the study.  This observation may provide clues to what kinds of contexts allow for moves across ideology and discourse => the kinds of moves necessary to move into new Discourses, including academic Discourses.


Any comments would be appreciated. 

6.2 Overall shape of the book

My posts are going to alternate between summing up/setting up meetings and work for the proposal.  So this is a start for putting together the proposal.  I am not sure whether I should be posting the focus/purpose  before or after I consider the organization - but the truth is writing a TOC seems easier that figuring out what we are doing = so here goes.

Introduction

Section I:  Some title to identify this section as setting up our focus and our assumptions about how to study that focus

Chapter 1: Ideologies, Identities, and Discourse

Chapter 2:  Methods (yes, I am hoping to come up with a better name for this)

Section II: Some title to indicate that this is the section with the ethnographic studies

Chapter 3: Trash Talking, Alter Egos and Disposable Writing in the Quasi-community of Fantasy Sports
Robin Orr-Gioffre

Chapter 4:  The Author is Dead, Long Live the Authors: Writer-ship, Writing Groups, and Composing Electronic Literature
Willmaria Miranda

Chapter 5:  "We F*cking Love Arguing": Unmoderated, Binary Discourse and the Conversation of Mankind
Joe Palinsky
Chapter 6:  GPOY: Validation through Likes, Comments, and Re-blogs
Luis Diaz III

Chapter 7: NaNoWriMo: Product-Centered Writing for a Deadline
Nicole Dreste

Chapter 8:  Welcome to the Fandom Wing: Consideration of Homogeneous Writing Communities
Heather Connors

Chapter 9:   Not sure of the title
Mark Sutton

Section III  Ideologies and Discourses in Context
Chapter 10  Something that pulls things together

5.27 New media features for ebook + next meeting (5.31)

I decided to write a second post = rather than continuing the last one, which was getting very long.

NEW MEDIA FEATURES FOR eBOOK
We reviewed the ways Transnational Literate Lives used new media - which included primarily pictures + videos (photos, excerpts from interviews with links to transcripts, student made videos that functions as exposition, excerpts from interviews + exposition => that are then analyzed in print like "quotes").

In our discussion, you added the following new media elements to this list:

google doc videos/chat "videos" (representations of evolving drafts or interactions that take place on screen)
screenshots (or animations of evolving representations as they unfold on the screen)
Skype videos
minidocumentaries
animations
static pictures with embedded audio (eg text or picture with voice-over analysis)

I think that pretty much sets it up the features we have in mind (so far).  The way I see it, the next thing to do is to talk through a kind of "template" = with the set of headings (+ styles to go with the headings) and the format for embedding new media "illustrations" when we choose to do so.  With that kind of a general picture for how our text will look - I think I can probably get what there is to get from the workshop - and certainly I can make appropriate contacts.

WHAT WE WILL DO MAY 31
We will read Leander's essay on "connective ethnographies of online/offline literacy networks & Burn's on researching multimodal texts.  You should receive more definite information concerning the readings in an email tomorrow.  I am also going to suggest that you look through John Swales' discussion of The Concept of a Discourse Community  This link is to a pdf from a WAW course that uses Downs + Wardle's text = and will work for us.  The whole essay is available at Eric.

Heather and some of the rest of you suggested that one thing that would be useful would be some collaborative walk-through in terms of analyzing texts.  As weird as this may sound, I am going to suggest that we apply the approaches framed by Burn as a way to analyze an academic space that is both online/offline, and that functions (in many ways) as a discourse community => ENG 3029.

I figured this would be useful since: 1) it would give us some practice (allow us to do some norming?) in terms of the kinds of questions we are going to ask of our data to characterize the various online communities we are studying, and 2) it will give us a chance to see some of the academic assumptions, values, and beliefs => in action and revealed through discourse analysis within an academic community (a class I taught last semester).

SHARED REFERENCES
I have also begun a google drive bibliography which I will invite you to share, some time on or before Friday.  These are the works I will be reading through, thinking about, as I set up the frame for our book.  I will invite each of you as authors - and am hoping you will add to the list as you do your own readings. 

I think that is about all I have been doing so far.

HOW TO USE THE BLOGS
I am hoping we can all use our blogs as places to store drafty writing.  In some ways blogs aren't very good for that - since they accumulate backwards and previous post lists can be annoying - but I am thinking maybe that is OK, and that just having written the posts - and having them to come back to = and possibly commenting on each others' posts as we read them?  I don't know what do you think? 

5.24 Framing ethnographic studies for new literacies

At the end of our meeting I erased all the notes I took, so this is a reconstruction.

Our agenda was to:

• answer any questions about IRB applications + projects
• make sure the blogs are linked up
• discuss how we want to use Computers and Writing and if anyone wants to go besides me
• talk through Lankshear + Knobel's piece on new literacies research
• discuss what how we would like to use the new media features of our ebook

IRB questions

For those of you who received provisional approval, my understanding is that you can begin collecting data, but that you must submit the requested changes by the data mentioned in the approval.

Use the provisional approval form to make your changes. Email a hard copy to the IRB addres (+ whatever additional materials were requested) and turn in a hard copy to the IRB office (I think I have to sign it). 

• Under section B in the form : Copy and paste each provision from your notification letter then address each issue as numbered in your notification letter.
• Then =>  In your application identify the changes by italicizing and underlining to show where the changes from the original submission address the issues/concerns of the IRB. (also mark them so that the reader can correlate the changes with the list posted under B on the provisional approval form).

 Be in touch  if you want to talk through interview protocols (highly recommended) or other data collection tools.  We can set up a time to talk through them.

BLOGS
We are getting there.  We will keep working on the privacy issues.  My blog is set as not searchable = but open to anyone who has a link.  If  you want to make SURE no one reads your blog, you will want to set it to invitation only.  We can finalize links/invitations at the next meeting.

COMPUTERS & WRITING
I will go to the e-publishing workshop, the GRN + selected talks.  If you look through the program and see anything you'd like notes on- let me know.  It should be exciting.  I am assuming I am the only one going - but if anyone changes his/her mind, I can turn in paperwork to travel this week.

L&K: FRAMING NEW LITERACIES RESEARCH
Defining terms. We used the Lankshear and Knobel piece as a starting place for defining terms: new literacies, literacy practices, discourse, Discourse, discursive, "ethos" (identity) stuff associated with literacy practices and discourses surrounding new literacy practices.  Hopefully you have some notes on these terms - since I seem to have deleted all mine.

Changing technologies = changing culture. 
We also had a discussion that extended the chart for differences between Web 1.0 & 2.0 to include the ways new media use has changed since this essay was written.  The progress from  Ofoto=>Flickr=>Instagram embodies a lot of the kinds of changes emerging technologies and practices have brought about.  As L&K point out in the changes from 1=>2, there is continuing movement from text-like organizations (static configurations, authorized by centralized expertise=artifacts produced for consumption) to configurations that are participatory, collaborative, and distributed.  That is, they are created and accessed through de-centralized authority structures, that content is vetted through user participation, with increasing networks of connection.  We also noted the increasing accessiblility made possible through cheaper technology, more powerful + specialized and easy to use applications, and ubiquitous use (if you don't know how to use it - you can ask almost anyone).  In some sense, new media practices are being "assimilated" and so that they are becoming "commonplace" as opposed to "new".  In some cases and in some social circles (particularly in adolescence) new media connetions have been socially integrated into "everyday" expectaions for living in the 21st century.  This information is "out there" = everyone knows this.

Elements of new literacies studies from a socio-cultural perspective =>RESEARCH QUESTIONS
In the section beginning on 292, L&K identify constructs (features and consequences of the features) of new literacies that will be of interest in studies that look at new literacies as social, culturally significant phenomena.  They suggest that studies that connect new literacies to social contexts, underlying power dynamics, dominant (and nondominant) discourses, and so on, will look at:
1. recognized ways of being, doing, and saying (discourses) = what are the meanings associated with "correct" ways of being, doing, and saying (where meanings include the assumptions, values, & beliefs that generate those meanings) characteristic of my community?
2. meaningful content = what constitutes meaningful content in my community? what distinguishes what is significant from what is not?
3. encodifcation = what are the practices for "encoding" meaningful content within my community? In what ways is encodification context dependent?  How does encoder identity (ethos stuff) affect encodification?
4. discourse membership = what constitutes discourse membership?  How is status negotiated within my discourse community?  What is the interaction between ethos stuff & technical stuff for discourse community membership? And so on.

I have listed their four poits -along with some of the questions that might arise when you look at your community in light of those constructs.

As a writing exercise, each of your wrote some questions you might ask about your community.  These are not the questions you will ask when you interview your participants => rather they are questions you will ask of your data.  You will look at your data with these questions in mind.  Neither should they (necessarily) be questions that will generate direct answers to what you (think you) are studying.  THEY ARE QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU CHARACTERIZE YOUR DISCOURSE COMMUNITY.  For a rich answer to any question you might ask about your community, you have to have a broad, complex understanding of how your community works.

Spend some time with these questions.  It is a good idea not to rush to answering questions associated with your focus until you have spent LOTS of time with these questions.


Finding a (relevant) focus.
L&K suggested 4"purposes" that can serve as frames for new literacy studies.  Seeing what is there, trying out (or suggesting new) theory, applying findings to educational agendas, participating in a larger research agenda. 

I suggested that we all start out in the "seeing what is there" perspective.  A fundamental feature of ethnographic study is seeing the data "new" => in so far as possible, the idea is to "step out" of our predispositions (carried forward from the culture we belong to) and describe what we see. 

Because many of the mediated communities we are looking a have been studied before (one way or another) = part of our claim to importance will be an intentional exploration of the social practices, discourse, etc that does not (prematurely) lapse into theoretical "summing up" or an educational agenda.  As stated in our proposal for C's, one central purpose of our work is to identify underlying ideologies that characterize these communities = so that educators might see them more from the perspective of participants in those communities (see L&K's discussion on 296 about teachers stepping into minefields). 

So let's start there = with deep descriptions of discourse, contexts, participants' assumptions, values & beliefs, social practices through characterizing the data.  Then we can see what we have to say.

So for Mark's project = characterizations of the documents, moves he decribes is exactly what we are looking for - and he will certainly end up with material to answer the questions he is interested in (and that may be the focus of his piece).  At the same time, for the focus for the book => which is contrasting ideologies within particular mediated communities with educational ideologies, there needs to be sufficiently rich material for a complex representation of the ideology of each community.

Trust me, we will be talking about this some more.

DIGITAL FEATURES OF THE eBOOK
I ran out of time and am now off to Helen's farm.  I will post the rest of this later today = maybe as a new post.  This is LONG.


 

5.22 What are we doing?

I finally finished grading and am reading to begin our project for real.  As you may have noticed from the random emails - I have been looking around in terms of how to write this up as an eBook, and have some ideas we can talk about at our first meeting.  Meanwhile, read through the chapter from Lankshear + Knobel - and Selfe & Hawisher's Transnational Literate Lives (linked at the right).  We will talk about L&K in terms of approaches to new media research, and we can use TLL as a pattern for mapping out how we might want to use the same (or different) mediated elements they have included in their text. 

These are some of the things I have been doing (thinking about) in terms of how to be a good mentor for you in your work on these projects.  I am hoping you will let me know in some detail what you need - how I can work with you.  What I've written below is my first guess at what background I might be able to provide.

1. Support for collecting data (what should we be looking for?)
Provide "how to" texts on doing ethnography - with some attention to doing ethnographic work on online communities.
Discussion of methods: "teach" methods in these texts, I can recommend texts and you can read them yourselves, or we can do a kind of interactive thing where we do a little bit of both.  E.g. we can talk about specific sections of texts which I might recommend in response to your questions about how to "do" certain kinds of things.
Engage in collaborative review of methods texts
Provide/discuss selected examples of ethnographic work

2. Support for analyzing data (what do we do with the notes/video-audio recordings/transcripts/artifacts)
The list for this will look similar to the above list only with a different focus - and with some practice sessions for using the different methods on data.  I am hoping we can practice some of the methods on Heather + Robyn's data

3. Support for writing (how do we write this up)?
I guess the most important thing here is to remember that you will begin writing it up in the act of collecting your data. 

We can work drafting the "texty" parts using a writing group/workshop approach, and we will schedule sessions for that. 

 

What I am most concerned under this point is working together to create a (more or less) agreed-upon template for chapter formatting, and styles for integrating new media elements.  To make some progress toward deciding on a form, I have done/will do the following.

- attend the workshop on writing new media publications at Computers + Writing
- contacted Professional development at Kean re support for developing our template
- initial contact re possibility of working with computer science students

So - after putting all of that out there - this is what I hope to do on Friday.

Friday, 5.24:

• discuss/present where we all are in terms of our individual projects (what we have done, what we plan to do - maybe this could be the first blog post?)
• talk through the L&K in terms of  what you will be studying (and how it fits in to new literacies studies)
• talk through Transnational Literate Lives, primarily in terms of its use of new media and how we want to use interactive/mediated elements in our text
• develop a list of mediated elements we want to use
• choose methods + sample readings + set agenda for next meeting