Literature Review
Research Questions
My initial research questions will be
• “How can I as a resource provider use the 'read-write' web to improve communication between users?”
• "How can my use of these tools encourage users to form collaborative relationships around specific resources?"
Other questions will emerge during the course of the enquiry.
(From my Research Proposal)
The attitudes of teachers to the internet and the uses to which they might put learning resources that are provided there are crucial for my practice as an internet resource provider. As one of my resources is a collection of digital images of classroom displays I suspected that it might appeal to teachers with a more visual learning style. I looked at Bates' (1999) small scale study which investigated the impact of learning style and previous computer experience on teachers attitudes to the internet and hypermedia. The 13 teachers were given 3 days intensive training to author HTML. web pages and their attitudes to the internet were compared before and after. Bates found that learning style and previous internet experience had little impact. Only previous experience of hypermedia authoring had any positive effect. Teachers' attitudes were more positive after the training than before and she concludes that training more teachers in authoring hypermedia is one way of encouraging them to use digital multi-media in their teaching. Bates used standardised tests to judge teachers' attitudes before and after rather than interview. The learning styles were classified according to Kolb's 4 categories rather than as auditory, visual or kinaesthetic. I felt the study was less helpful to me than it might have been because of this.
Also there was no discussion of the informal learning or the collaborative effect of the 13 teachers working together and how this might have impacted on the results.
My instinctive idea about the Classroom Displays archive was that if a community of interest were to build around the artifact then this positive experience would enhance the attitude of these teachers, or teaching assistants, more generally towards internet technology and usage. Koszalka (2002) used a similar starting point in her study. She set up listserve groups as a follow up to training about the use of internet resources in the classroom. These facilitated groups provided mutual support and became a place to share successes and failures. She concludes that teachers felt more positive towards integrating internet resources in their classroom because of this support but also because of their increased familiarity with the internet as a learning medium. Once more this study used standardised testing as the data collection method and I would have liked to have had access to more qualitative data about teachers' experience of the process.
An action research study by Boling (2005) provided more direct examples of the experience of changing attitudes to the integration of technology in the classroom. She asked student teachers to keep both private and shared on-line reflective learning journals during a course of lectures/meetings about the use of technology to enhance literacy. During the course she looked at the use of blogs in literacy and encouraged participants to set up a community of bloggers.
She also conducted surveys before and after the course. Using grounded theory and NVivo qualitative data analysis software she analysed the data produced. She noticed a contrast between her own perceptions of the participants' expressed attitudes in the class and those that they expressed in their journals. In class she felt they had been very positive about blogs and the whole blogging experience but in their journals some had said they felt that blogs had no place in education. She picked up on a 'feeling' that participants believed that this 'new literacy' would take up time better spent on traditional literacy skills. This made her return to her data and re-examine it.
Over the time of the course most participants did become more positive about the potential of the 'read write web' to enhance their teaching. She pinpoints giving teachers access to worthwhile collaborative resources as one way of supporting them to accept and integrate the use of technology in their classrooms. This study supports some of my assumptions about collaborative relationships in the on-line environment.
Not all educators see the integration of internet technology into the practice of primary school teachers as positive. Monke(2005) argues that computers have no place in the early years of school and that children should spend this time 'strengthening their inner resources' and that time spent on computers prevent children from having more 'authentic experiences'. Whilst this argument has some attractions for me, and certainly for some of the teachers I work with, it is not totally relevant to this study or this aspect of my practice. My work in this context is aimed at supporting teachers in their preparation of lessons not in providing on-line resources to be used by children. It may be that the research will take me in that direction but it has not done so as yet.
The introduction of aspects of the 'read write web' form part of my initial research proposal. It still remains the case that much of what has been written about this is opinion or untested theory. In 2003 Godwin-Jones wrote about the emerging technologies and the potential of blogs and wikis for collaborative work in a language teaching context. He mentions the work of Will Richardson, who was then just starting to use blogs to teach journalism courses and whose work I continue to follow.
Stephen Downes writes extensively on his blog about the ways in which these emerging technologies could change education at all levels. New ideas and theories are forming and being discussed and debated. As a member of the 'Edubloggers' community I am currently taking part, in a small way, an international discussion on James Farmers blog Incorporated Subversion about how to counter the blocking of blogs by local education authorities. These blogs and their discussions cut across geographic and educational boundaries. Comments on them come from people from many countries whose status ranges from high school pupil to university professor. As ideas gel and papers and journal articles emerge they too will be brought into my emergent research. My research too I hope will add to the small but growing body of research in this field and, I hope, be all the more useful for its emphasis on action research and rich qualitative data.
By using RSS and a feed reader I am able to watch and learn from people as their ideas are formulating and in some cases to engage in discussion with them. I can watch as people read and are inspired by the work of the Edubloggers and become in turn advocates of this new literacy.
This is not to say that the audience is uncritical or that these tools are always successful and it can be just as interesting and enlightening to read accounts of the failures
http://kairosnews.org/node/3794?PHPSESSID=b6e2c075351f78beb5bc4bf90c0833bf
[Forward to Methodology Justification]
[Back to index ]
Research Questions
My initial research questions will be
• “How can I as a resource provider use the 'read-write' web to improve communication between users?”
• "How can my use of these tools encourage users to form collaborative relationships around specific resources?"
Other questions will emerge during the course of the enquiry.
(From my Research Proposal)
The attitudes of teachers to the internet and the uses to which they might put learning resources that are provided there are crucial for my practice as an internet resource provider. As one of my resources is a collection of digital images of classroom displays I suspected that it might appeal to teachers with a more visual learning style. I looked at Bates' (1999) small scale study which investigated the impact of learning style and previous computer experience on teachers attitudes to the internet and hypermedia. The 13 teachers were given 3 days intensive training to author HTML. web pages and their attitudes to the internet were compared before and after. Bates found that learning style and previous internet experience had little impact. Only previous experience of hypermedia authoring had any positive effect. Teachers' attitudes were more positive after the training than before and she concludes that training more teachers in authoring hypermedia is one way of encouraging them to use digital multi-media in their teaching. Bates used standardised tests to judge teachers' attitudes before and after rather than interview. The learning styles were classified according to Kolb's 4 categories rather than as auditory, visual or kinaesthetic. I felt the study was less helpful to me than it might have been because of this.
Also there was no discussion of the informal learning or the collaborative effect of the 13 teachers working together and how this might have impacted on the results.
My instinctive idea about the Classroom Displays archive was that if a community of interest were to build around the artifact then this positive experience would enhance the attitude of these teachers, or teaching assistants, more generally towards internet technology and usage. Koszalka (2002) used a similar starting point in her study. She set up listserve groups as a follow up to training about the use of internet resources in the classroom. These facilitated groups provided mutual support and became a place to share successes and failures. She concludes that teachers felt more positive towards integrating internet resources in their classroom because of this support but also because of their increased familiarity with the internet as a learning medium. Once more this study used standardised testing as the data collection method and I would have liked to have had access to more qualitative data about teachers' experience of the process.
An action research study by Boling (2005) provided more direct examples of the experience of changing attitudes to the integration of technology in the classroom. She asked student teachers to keep both private and shared on-line reflective learning journals during a course of lectures/meetings about the use of technology to enhance literacy. During the course she looked at the use of blogs in literacy and encouraged participants to set up a community of bloggers.
She also conducted surveys before and after the course. Using grounded theory and NVivo qualitative data analysis software she analysed the data produced. She noticed a contrast between her own perceptions of the participants' expressed attitudes in the class and those that they expressed in their journals. In class she felt they had been very positive about blogs and the whole blogging experience but in their journals some had said they felt that blogs had no place in education. She picked up on a 'feeling' that participants believed that this 'new literacy' would take up time better spent on traditional literacy skills. This made her return to her data and re-examine it.
Over the time of the course most participants did become more positive about the potential of the 'read write web' to enhance their teaching. She pinpoints giving teachers access to worthwhile collaborative resources as one way of supporting them to accept and integrate the use of technology in their classrooms. This study supports some of my assumptions about collaborative relationships in the on-line environment.
Not all educators see the integration of internet technology into the practice of primary school teachers as positive. Monke(2005) argues that computers have no place in the early years of school and that children should spend this time 'strengthening their inner resources' and that time spent on computers prevent children from having more 'authentic experiences'. Whilst this argument has some attractions for me, and certainly for some of the teachers I work with, it is not totally relevant to this study or this aspect of my practice. My work in this context is aimed at supporting teachers in their preparation of lessons not in providing on-line resources to be used by children. It may be that the research will take me in that direction but it has not done so as yet.
The introduction of aspects of the 'read write web' form part of my initial research proposal. It still remains the case that much of what has been written about this is opinion or untested theory. In 2003 Godwin-Jones wrote about the emerging technologies and the potential of blogs and wikis for collaborative work in a language teaching context. He mentions the work of Will Richardson, who was then just starting to use blogs to teach journalism courses and whose work I continue to follow.
Stephen Downes writes extensively on his blog about the ways in which these emerging technologies could change education at all levels. New ideas and theories are forming and being discussed and debated. As a member of the 'Edubloggers' community I am currently taking part, in a small way, an international discussion on James Farmers blog Incorporated Subversion about how to counter the blocking of blogs by local education authorities. These blogs and their discussions cut across geographic and educational boundaries. Comments on them come from people from many countries whose status ranges from high school pupil to university professor. As ideas gel and papers and journal articles emerge they too will be brought into my emergent research. My research too I hope will add to the small but growing body of research in this field and, I hope, be all the more useful for its emphasis on action research and rich qualitative data.
By using RSS and a feed reader I am able to watch and learn from people as their ideas are formulating and in some cases to engage in discussion with them. I can watch as people read and are inspired by the work of the Edubloggers and become in turn advocates of this new literacy.
This is not to say that the audience is uncritical or that these tools are always successful and it can be just as interesting and enlightening to read accounts of the failures
http://kairosnews.org/node/3794?PHPSESSID=b6e2c075351f78beb5bc4bf90c0833bf
[Forward to Methodology Justification]
[Back to index ]