My ethnographic artefact, a series of data visualisations, is at:
http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/eguzman/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/02/ethnograhpy_edguzman.pdf

This week I spent most of my time lurking in the EdX MOOC, even if I had already finished copying the text I would analyse later for the ethnographic artefact. I felt this time was necessary to understand what was happening in the community. Although I spent most of the time reading as opposed to writing posts, I would not characterise this type of activity as passive. Observing a community requires a certain level of concentration and focus.

This focus is also necessary because I could learn about the community’s main activity, the coaching circle, from participants’ account of it. I was therefore quite pleased to have found that the introspectiveness I observed could be revealed quite clearly via data visualisation. The other thing I discovered is that these introspectiveness among participants seemed to be a function of time. I could find this pattern only among the posts that were created in the latter half of the review period. Interestingly, while most participants had managed to form connections, and deep ones at that, with their coaching circles, questions about how to organise and join those groups persisted. That these questions remained well into the third week of the course has implications for the community organisers.

The rest of the week I posted ethnographic accounts of two large social media sites: Reddit and Instagram. What I found interesting was how the two accounts differed in their tone. While the Reddit account was dispassionate, the Instagram was quite evocative. I think the kind of role the ethnographer takes influences the account he or she creates in the end. Lastly, I created an image as a reply to Katherine’s post about non-people, that is, non-human agents in posthuman gatherings. This theme of assemblages is something I encountered in the first week of the course and gradually better understood in the second. It provides I think rich fodder for thinking about learning in the digital age.

This week I have been thinking about how I could represent the digital artefact for the ethnography assignment for Block 2 of the course. While my artefact for Block 1 was decidedly exploratory, I plan to make the Block 2 artefact more scholarly persuasive. I am still unsure of how to achieve this though.

As described in a previous post, I plan to use an online text visualisation tool, textisbeautiful.net, to represent the dynamics of the MOOC community. My goal is less about counting words or measuring the popularity of keywords and phrases, but about using text visualization to uncover hidden patterns. How to achieve what Hine (2000) describes as “depth of description” without a “lack of reliance on a priori hypotheses” is crucial. A good text visualisation that achieves fairness without an analytical lens (the a priori hypotheses) seems to me a misnomer.

Reflexivity might hold the key though. Hine (2000) talks about three ways of how reflexivity might be applied in an ethnography: by valuing the ethnographer’s and members’ understanding equally, by focusing on the ethnographer’s perspective and history, and by explaining the contingent nature of the work.

By including myself as ethnographer in the work, I can hopefully generate a text visualisation that is fair to the MOOC community I chose to study.

Reference:
Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66

There are two key points I’d like to highlight this week. First, after reading Jeremy’s comment to a blog post, I better understood the link between post humanism and education. I created an image for what I call the superphone, a comment and a personal reminder on on how the learning process is influenced not just by humans but by non-humans, by objects, like technology for instance.

This week also, I tried to engage more deeply with the Stewart (2013) reading by creating visual notes. Creating notes this way helps me practice multimodal skills, not just its production but also its thesis — a key question for me is how to use those multimodal skills to create a work that is scholarly.

Drawing notes helps me pay attention to what I am reading. The limited space in an image forces to weigh parts of the text, so I can better illustrate (or better yet, better interpret) the text, even though the notes are still at this stage heavy with phrases copied from the text. Nevertheless, drawing helps me engage with the structure of the text, the development of its thesis. I think this is an important criteria for making a multimodal work scholarly. Other closely related criteria that resonate with me are persuasiveness and coherence. When I think of persuasiveness I think of the multimodal skills to make emotional appeals, for example, through cinematic background music, through closeups. I also think about how certain design conventions communicate an informal or formal tone, or how the use of color and typography is a conscious way of engaging with the audience.
Coherence is interesting because the non-linear nature of digital suggests that coherence might need to be reexamined. Its linked nature as well blurs the boundaries of authorship. I am thankful to Sian for raising these points in a response to a question I emailed.

To conclude this post, it is interesting also how I am able to create the sketch notes with an iPad app. This is an another example of how an object can influence the learning process. The design and features of the app and the physical characteristics of the iPad itself affect how I improve multimodal skills.