All posts by Jen

events, phd

Forthcoming talks at SRHE conference & University of Glasgow

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I’ll be giving at talk at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference on Wednesday 9 December called Reflective practices as masks: a new way to think about reflection in higher education

Summary: This paper discusses ongoing research into how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education. I define high-stakes reflection as reflection which is summatively assessed or has a gatekeeping function into a profession, and use a metaphor of the mask to draw out different aspects of high-stakes reflection online: performance, disguise, protection, transformation, discipline and trace. Conceiving of online reflective practices in these mutiple and overlapping ways has implications for how educators understand and support reflection, and the expectations we place on our students in terms of what high-stakes reflective writing can and should accomplish. These practices should support development of academic or professional identity and voice through explicit engagement with matters of authenticity, power, narrative, subjectivity and agency – not through a discourse which frames the recording and improvement of the “true self” as the ultimate goal of reflective practice.

I’ll be giving a longer talk on similar themes at the University of Glasgow’s Learning and Teaching Centre’s seminar series, on Wednesday 13 January 2010. I will have time at this second event to share more of the data that’s emerging from my PhD research.

I’ve been thinking about the masks for a while, and I’m now starting to draw some conclusions about what I think that thinking about reflective practices in this way might imply for teaching and learning. Both of these talks will represent the cutting edge of my ongoing doctoral research looking at online reflective practices in Higher Education!

elearning

Student writing online project website now up

The web site for the Student writing: innovative online strategies for assessment and feedback project (which we call SWOP for short) is now online at http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/swop/

The first stage of data generation is now under way with the appointment of our first four postgraduate research associates, who are keeping ethnographic accounts of their courses and facilitating a wiki for assessment and feedback stories.

events, phd

Literacy in the Digital University seminar, 16 October 09

I’m looking forward to giving a short talk at the first seminar in the ESRC funded Literacy in the Digital University series – http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminar-1-programme.html . The title of my talk is “Personal, professional and academic voices in online reflection: new literacies for new media practices”. I’ll post up slides or something as soon as they’re available!

elearning, papers

Paper about digital natives

Here’s a paper that Siân Bayne and I wrote for the 2007 Society for Research in Higher Education conference – we are working on revising it in light of all the new literature about digital natives/immigrants/net generation since then, but I think the core arguments are still current, so thought I’d post it up here.

The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: a dangerous opposition

elearning

new project about feedback and student writing online

A small group of colleagues and I have been successful in getting funding for a two year project looking at innovative online strategies for assessment of and feedback on student writing. We’ll be looking in depth at digital writing practices on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in E-learning programme, including:

  • tutor-student communication and formative feedback through reflective weblogs
  • assessing collaborative writing in wikis
  • assessing multimodal and hypertextual work
  • student-nominated assessment criteria
  • co-creating courses through discussion

The project officially started yesterday, and I’ll be heading it up. I’m really excited about it, especially because one of the things we’ll be doing is inviting students on the programme to work with us as co-researchers, conducting a series of ethnographies of particular courses and helping to develop an “assessment and feedback stories” wiki. We’ll also draw on archived data from the programme since it launched in 2006.

I’d really like to hear about other projects people have done which have used similar methodologies or explored similar themes. Please get in touch if you know of any!

papers, phd

Paper about qualitative research transcription as translation

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I wrote this paper to coincide with a seminar I gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in February 2009. It looks at the process of transcription of qualitative research interviews as an act of translation.

“Like any translation, transcription is an act of negotiation. Errors, interpretations and decisions made in transcribing form part of the data to be analysed. The paper explores some current issues in translation studies, and applies them to qualitative research transcribing, touching on concerns relevant to both social scientists and translators: power, situatedness, and the non-transparency of language. I argue that in drawing on important theoretical work being done in translation studies, social scientists can make more conscious decisions about how they interpret and represent their data, and ultimately can conduct better research.”

I would welcome your comments on this draft.

Was that infinity or affinity?: qualitative research transcription as translation , Jen Ross, January 2009