For the third year running, some of us have collaborated on a calendar to brighten our days and walls in 2023. I have loved every one of these collaborations, and I think that this is the best of all so far. It’s available on the CLMooc blog as pdf and Google slides. We hope you enjoy it. The image in this blog post is my submission.
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.
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.
