Over the last few months Wendy and I have been doing some thinking about the calendars we’ve collaborated over in CLMooc for 2021 and 2022. We’ve written a short report which is published as part of the ASCILITE conference proceedings, and Wendy presented at the conference last weekend. You can see the slides below, and the abstract of the report.
Abstract
Can collaborative creativity help to connect digital practitioners with each other and enhance their well-being? In order to answer this we undertook a piece of qualitative research. Using bricolage as our methodology, we surveyed participants of a collaborative creative project and used grounded theory in order to categorise the responses. In order to illustrate our findings and better explain the nature of the creative project, we share some of the artwork and music that was created by participants as part of this project. We conclude that as well as enhancing well-being, this creative endeavour also added to the personal learning of these participants.
I recently attended a webinar [Meet & Eat] Autoethnography in Online Doctoral Education which I very much enjoyed. One of the presenters asked a question of the audience that got me thinking, and I am really thinking out loud as I write this post:
How do we challenge an autoethnography? How do we challenge personal experience?
I answered briefly in the chat to say that I would not challenge any one else’s interpretation, but rather I would offer my own interpretation and ask for them to comment about it. I also mentioned that this was the approach that used in my own PhD thesis, and I referred, as I often do, to the parable of the blind men and the elephant:
I don’t know the questioner’s opinion of AE, he didn’t give it, so I don’t want to assume that he was misunderstanding what AE is and is not. But this type of question is often asked by those who do misunderstand the nature of qualitative research – often because they hold to some ideal of universal, objective truth, and they consider qualitative research to be inferior because it does not meet this standard. And the answer to the question from this perspective is to point out that you don’t challenge an AE by simply saying that it is not necessarily true, and that there are other possible interpretations. An AE does not pretend to be objective, and it is open about the fact that it is based on a personal story, although it is not just a story. As Ellis, Adams and Bochner say:
Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.
Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams & Arthur P. Bochner (2011)
So rather than asking if an AE is true, we can ask if it is plausible to use the story to understand the relevant experience, whether it is a useful interpretation, whether it helps us to better understand the issues at hand. And, of course, we can ask whether there are other AEs that can help to give us a fuller understanding of it all.
“Lurker” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
In my last post I shared a quote from Joanne McNeil introducing the idea of researcher as lurker. Since then I have been thinking at some reasons for researchers to show or hide themselves from their participants, and the related issues of visibility of data and ethical considerations. Here is my starter for ten about levels of researcher visibility and possible research reasons.
Researcher Visibility
Research Reason
Status as researcher disclosed to participants from the outset
Participatory research Ethnography
Status as researcher initially hidden (not disclosed to participants), disclosed at/after data analysis stage
Concerns about researcher influencing behaviour (e.g. Hawthorne effect). Later disclosed so participants can authenticate interpretation
Status as researcher never disclosed to participants during data collection or analysis stage
Participant point of view not relevant Researcher as ‘god-like’/expert Data is being collected after the event Participants are anonymous
Data Visibility
How?
Public throughout
Open research/open data
Public at publication of project
Shared to institutional database
Shared with participants
Various ways
Shared on request
Various ways
Never shared
My next stage is to think through types of ethical (approval) to match these.
[I think more and more, by the way, that the insistence on the need for ethical approval by institutional gatekeepers is problematic (and not at all ethical). I say something about this in my PhD thesis (see ~ p 82).]
An interesting paragraph in a book I am reading at the moment (Lurking, by Joanne McNeil). We are used to talking about learners as lurkers, but here’s another perspective. What images do we invoke when we think about the researcher as lurker?
The picture of researcher as outsider – as a profiteer swooping in to steal content and to cherry pick meaning to fit their own agenda – was one that gave me pause during my own PhD (I am sure some of you remember the story of the ‘researchers’ who came across a Google Doc that some of us were using to start writing a journal article and used it in a conference presentation without asking or attributing – the affront we felt at that unethical behaviour has stayed with me). I chose participatory research as my methodology, and ultimately ended up writing an autoethnography because I wanted to try to allow my community to have a voice in what I was doing, and to make it clear that what I was saying was my own interpretation.
Of course Twitter is public, and the ToS make it clear that researchers are permitted to use tweets without attribution, but imo that is not the full story – there are also ethical considerations (I say some things about this in my PhD thesis if anyone is interested).
I’m not sure where I am going with this yet – as always I am writing to find out what I am thinking.
