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.
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!
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
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:
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!
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
My colleague and supervisor Hamish Macleod and I first presented this paper at the 3rd Ideas in Cyberspace Education symposium at Loch Lomond in Scotland in March 2007. It draws in part on our experiences with the MSc in E-learning at Edinburgh. We’ve since revised it and it’s currently being considered for publication in an ICE3 book.
The paper takes a jester’s, trickster’s and fool’s look at teaching in online spaces. We argue that teaching in digital environments is different and requires different attitudes and strategies than its offline counterpart. We use archetypal, literary and historical characters of the fool, jester and trickster as metaphors to explore issues of authority, risk, innocence, fun, complexity, liminality and absurdity.
The paper was great fun to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well! Comments are very welcome.
Structure, authority and other noncepts: teaching in fool-ish spaces (PDF)