| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

001 2-1-1 Researcher Notes

Page history last edited by Wilma Clark 13 years, 8 months ago

SELF-MANAGED LEARNING IN OUT-OF-SCHOOL CONTEXTS


[Study Home]  [Study Phase One]  [Study Phase Two]  [Study Phase Three]


[2.1] [2.2] [2.3] [2.4]


 

2.1 Influences Relationships - Researcher Notes

 

Framing the focus of attention relative to Phase 1: In attempting to identify influence relationships between the available resources in the learner's ZAA at the start of Phase 2, I found myself instinctively reverting to the wider focus of attention derived at Phase 1, Step 2 rather than the restricted model derived at Step 3. I wondered why and whether I was doing the right thing, whether for example, I should be sticking to the finer iteration at Step 3 which, I assumed would be reflected in the refined model of the EoR which would be produced in this Phase. My misgivings came from the notion that Astronomy (as knowledge) was too broad and would benefit from having its component parts identified – at least some of these were identified as resources in the EoR model at Step 3 (but not as knowledge per se). In any event, thinking about this and what the issue might be... I still felt that the wider focus of attention rather than the more narrowly framed one was appropriate somehow. I think it has something to do with (1) available knowledge and (2) desired knowledge – so that in mapping available resources... somehow you need to be able to distinguish between what ‘is known’ and what the learner ‘wants to know about’. So, it’s more about the notion of Astronomy incorporating elements such as knowledge about the universe, galaxies, etc. and the Milky Way as a question being a filter of that knowledge (even though it’s also knowledge).

 

How, where and when do learner resources come into play in considering influences relationships? One thing I struggled with was the issue of the learner’s resources and when to bring these in – obviously ‘motivation’ is an internal resource the learner brings to the activity, so technically, it would be identified later... or at least separated out – it’s not so much a temporal issue as a separating out resource types issue). So, maybe its a case of identifying the learner's learning goal and motivation.

 

Links between Phase 1 and Phase 2: There seems to be quite an interesting interaction (back and forth model) occurring between Steps 2/3 in Phase 1 and the two stages of Phase 2 (two stages as in generation of a general description of resources in table form and refinement of that as a more in-depth representation of the EoR model – incorporating filters).

  

Optimising the learner's experience: In the development of the EoR model and the identification of influences relationships an exempoptimising the learner’s context... optimising , potential interactions... because it is the interactions that will generate learning. In this study example, you don’t necessarily know what technologies are going to/might be available... so in that sense there’s also a potential for optimising contexts by anticipating potential ‘technology gaps’ and ways in which these might be filled, whether through forward planning, anterior decision-making, etc. or through in situ spontaneous selection/appropriation. So, some of the analytical work lies in identifyinthings which are tangible and made available by the learner (deliberately taken along and/or used for a particular purpose) and those which may or may not be taken along/appropriated by a learner across multiple contexts. So there are a whole range of questions that matter in the latter situation that are not present in the former. Questions like: do I have the technology, can I get it, will it be suitable, do I have the skills to use it, who can help me, as well as other variables such as functionality, quality, relevance, motivation, etc. It’s not so much an optimisation of context in the latter case, then, as an optimisation of the learner’s context and potential interactions with that context (understanding at the same time that the learner’s context comprises multiple real-world contexts simultaneously).

 

Negotiating relationship types (influences, components, typology and social): I realised as I worked through the stages of Phase 2 that in the generation of the influences table I had initially generated the ‘influences’ and ‘components’ without really thinking about them deeply – at least not necessarily concretely/specifically... oh this is a component that influences that... it was more of a natural identification. Looking back at the table now, though, and thinking about these relationships, the ‘influences’ panels are standing out more and, in standing out, are making me understand the relationship between the resource category elements and the resource filter elements more clearly. When using an exemplar model (like this one) to guide you, it's easy to slip into a pattern where you adopt the table structure without really thinking about the relationships between the contents (I didn’t really think them through relative to each other when I first drafted the table – more I was just thinking about the component parts, etc. relative to themselves, i.e. within category/filter elements). It's a good idea, then, to focus on what you are doing in terms of how you are using the relationship types to help you to identify the elements along with the relationships between and within the element categories – this is, indeed, what has just now occurred in terms of my own understanding – but I did miss it at the table creation stage, and only noticed it at the translation of table to diagram stage.

 

Getting to grips with Relationship Categories: I realised that I had an underlying assumption that there was a layered categorisation but in fact this doesn’t appear to be the case, after all... component part and type of are not layered levels but different kinds of things. One thing I did wonder was what the ‘social’ relationships are - is there a need to clarify that ‘social’ in this instance refers to people? Because it seems to me that tools, spaces, etc. are also social – so this is a difficult one. It seemed to me that this means people and behaviours/practices/norms. Realising this, I revised my descriptors in the People/Tools filter category... to show sociality. It didn’t seem necessary to claim sociality in the category element column – more in the filter element. There seems to be an underlying rationale for this in the notion that the ‘social’ invariably requires interaction in order to be ‘social’. In trying to apply this to this study example, it did start to get rather complicated when I tried to apply the notion of ‘social’ to rules, norms, interactions as filters... so there is a need here to decide how far the relationship ‘social’ goes. For this study example, I therefore assumed that ‘social’ referred only to people.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.