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Virtual ethnography – the Communication and Culture network

November 2, 2010 by Noreen Dunnett

Click on the image above to go to my virtual ethnography. Please could you comment on it on this blog. Thanks

Posted in Virtual ethnography | 19 Comments

19 Responses to “Virtual ethnography – the Communication and Culture network”

on 02 Nov 2010 at 10:10 pm1 martin

Noreen,

A superbly insightful ethnography…it must have been quite exciting to take a side step away from your work and analyse it from a different perspective. Great to see the positive comments, and the integration of social and informative seems to work very well with very positive results.

‘A problem shared…’ clearly is something which is true here ‘respondents feel secure…benefit from expertise of experienced teachers’

Really enjoyed reading your work
on 03 Nov 2010 at 2:16 pm2 Jeremy Knox

Really impressive piece Noreen, and a very slick presentation. This ethnography felt quite objective, and I wonder how you worked with the fact that you were an ‘insider’ in this community?

Interesting suggestion here on community formation (the Ridings and Gefen quote): that the primarily motivation is the participant desire for information. I wonder how you see the social dimension in relation to this? For me, it is also the way that information is delivered in communities that is attractive to potential participants, in that it comes from other people, rather than static texts, or ‘soulless’ media.

Intriguing results from your survey, related to this. Sharing, support and security were valued, yet feeling ‘part of a community’ was not! Is there a misconception, or lack of faith in the term ‘community? Would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
on 03 Nov 2010 at 7:36 pm3 Dennis Dollens

Noreen,
Impressive survey design and implementation for research capturing original information from well planned workflow and organization. I was especially impressed with the dual goals for obtaining class and C&C data: that the project gave useful information back to the organization under study. The presentation maintains a smart flow between your activity, response and support from the likes of Kozinet and friends. Great work.
on 03 Nov 2010 at 7:52 pm4 Noreen Dunnett

Thanks for the comments Jeremy. Yes, I’m an insider but a privileged one, in the sense that I am the creator of the network and also the moderator and administrator. As the other members know that and I have set the agenda with my welcome messages it may be that this gives me too much power. I try to stay out of most of the forum discussions unless I have something unique to offer, for this reason, because I want members to feel ‘ownership’ of the network. However, I am still having to ‘lead’ a bit, putting up content, sending out regular messages to prompt members to come back and check out the latest discussions etc.

Your point about information being delivered to people in static texts was the very reason I moved on from the straight subject website to the social network idea. I have just instigated a simple, more visible text/file sharing facility on the network which I am hoping will increase participation and maybe encourage people in the social side of things. A lot of the respondents to the survey said they weren’t interested in socialising which is why I came to the conclusion that Comms and Culture may be a ‘community of practice’ rather than a social network.

However, I also share your view that there may be a misconception or lack of faith in the term ‘community’. I think people think that will involve more commitment and self-disclosure than they are willing to contribute! That is somewhat at odds with their comments that they valued colleagues advice and expertise, however.
on 03 Nov 2010 at 7:57 pm5 Noreen Dunnett

Hi Martin – thanks for the positive and complimentary comments. I enjoyed creating the ethnography, even if I don’t quite have your gifts in the presentation area – yours was very cool!

Yes, it was interesting to use this network and it focused my attention back onto some of the practical problems we have been facing – a simple, visible way of collaborating and sharing resources. I’ve adopted an app called Box.net for a trial on the main page of the network and it is proving very popular with a selected sub-set of users so I may pay for a subscription and extend the facility to the rest of the teacher members.

The question of ‘expertise’ is a real matter of concern to the examiners who are members of the site because they were hoping more people would engage in a general debate about contemporary issues in cultural studies but people seem reluctant to do this and it may be a lack of confidence about subject knowledge since most Comms and Culture teachers are not specialists.
on 03 Nov 2010 at 11:08 pm6 Marie Leadbetter

Really great ethnography Noreen – I want to go back and revisit it in more detail as it has real professional relevancy for me too, at the moment!
on 04 Nov 2010 at 12:06 pm7 Michael Sean Gallagher

Let me join in here in the chorus of applause, Noreen. Well done and ethnographically speaking, I believe it gets to the heart of the community, as in as an outsider unfamiliar with this community, I feel as though I know it somehow. It really bridges the gap between insider/outsider and participants/observer. Well done.

I am curious as to the graphs of your statistics (Slide #6, specifically). Does the blue represent no of new students per month? Or active users/participants? I only ask as a person who does a lot of analytics work for JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/), this pattern ascribes almost perfectly to ours, ie the academic cycle of the year.

Blips in September (although interesting trend for September from 2008 to 2009 to 2010; why the spike in 2009?). Heady use in the autumn, dips in December (finals/papers/holidays) and then ramps up again to March (midterms, etc.). I could literally take this graph and map it over our use and it would be exactly the same. We schedule bug fixes, interface changes, other backend work around these use patterns as we know exactly when people are using it. Usage patterns are a big part of digital cultures, I think; they are the tools of the digital sociologist/anthropologist.

Fantastic work, Noreen.
on 04 Nov 2010 at 12:18 pm8 Noreen Dunnett

@dennis Thanks for the kind comments. It’s nice that I have managed to make some of my research on this course relevant to actual practice. Since I left teaching in 2008, much of the work I have done on the Msc has been rather abstract, albeit highly enjoyable. Doing the ethnography has rejuvenated my interest in the Comms and Culture network and I have implemented a range of new features for members.

@michael – Yes the graphs show exactly what you said – overall membership growth against new members per month. The dips and rises do coincide with academic terms. I think the big spike in membership in 2009 was due to a concerted effort on the part of AQA (the examination board) promoting the network in their face-to-face teacher information sessions. I had a discussion with one of the principal examiners on the phone last night about linking face-to-face work with teachers with activity on the network in a more sustained way, as well as a number of other ideas such as monthly invitation blogs from different schools and colleges, a Twitter feed from the Chief Examiner etc. Be nice if they took up some of these ideas but it has to come from the community – I can only suggest!
on 04 Nov 2010 at 2:34 pm9 Sharon Boyd

Noreen this is fabulous – and I do think you’ve got a cool presentation!

It was wonderful to be taken through such a well-established community, and your strength as insider helped greatly with that. You were able to “take us” where we needed to go, and as with Michael’s comments, I feel that I know it better as a result. I’m glad it also helped you, as you said, step back and get an opportunity to look at some of the problems that you had been facing.

Exceptional! Thank you so much
on 04 Nov 2010 at 4:20 pm10 Jen Ross

I’m really impressed also that you were able to make time to survey within your community, and with your willingness to take an ethnographic look at a space that you are responsible for. Nice work, Noreen.

Because the community has both students and teachers in it, I wondered about the range of power dynamics and levels of participation, and how this might play out – do students contribute to forum discussions? Are there ’student areas’ and ‘teacher areas’? If so, are these formally built into the community, or have they emerged? It seems like quite an unusual space – a non-classroom place for both teachers and students – that wouldn’t exist in the offline world. Is this something you’ve noticed at all?

Both you and James (in his beekeeping ethnography) have noticed what Shirky calls the power law distribution of participation (also known as the long tail and the 80/20 rule) – that the vast majority of content in social systems online will be produced by a small minority of participants. It’s pretty interesting that this appears again and again in all sorts of settings. I guess that’s why they call it a ‘rule’!

Shirky, C. (2008). Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production, in Here Comes Everybody: the power of organising without organisations. London: Allan Lane. p109-142.
on 04 Nov 2010 at 4:52 pm11 Noreen Dunnett

@jen I’ve always had real misgivings about teachers and students being members of the same ‘virtual community’ and tried to deal with this unease in a variety of ways – by giving teachers their own ‘group’ within the network, membership of which was controlled by me and trying to get teachers to organise online activities within their particular institution group rather than on the main page forum.

I suppose I thought the students (who are 16-18) might start to see the virtual community as something other than social networking a la Facebook and start to see other uses for it and themselves as part of a community of practice. I think a few students have seen themselves this way and related very well to staff in this environment but it is the exception rather than the rule.

The other point of unease and ambiguity for members is the presence of exam board representatives – examiners, officials etc and the feeling of being ‘watched’. On the other hand, these people’s memberships allow other members informal access to information and advice about the specification and exam procedures and some debriefing.

The idea of a non-classroom space for teachers and students has always appealed to me but I have a non-hierarchical view of the teacher/student relationship as you may remember from discussions in SL in IDEL last year. I see teachers as facilitators, both off and online.
on 04 Nov 2010 at 9:00 pm12 Hugh O'Donnell

Noreen,
(Thanks for your feedback on my LATE submission!)

Well presented – clean, slick interface that I think my pupils would like…

I was particularly interested in the ‘key’ positive feedback features: sharing, security and expertise. To me this idea of security – which comes from openness and having someone there to help you – is KEY in the classroom, especially amongst less confident learners; something your study has highlighted is key to online engagement.

H
on 05 Nov 2010 at 4:09 pm13 James Lamb

Hello Noreen,

Great idea to get explicitly professional benefit from the ethnography!

On a different note, I’m interested to know know whether, having selected a community of which you’re a part, you now perceive the community in a different way compared to before?

Not so much in terms of the statistical knowledge about the community, but whether having carried out the study you feel your place in the community has changed or whether you now look at it in a different way to before? Do you think you will now approach the community in a different way, or do you think people will interact with you differently?

I wonder whether your experience would be different to someone who focused on a non-professional (i.e. purely social) community of which they were a part?

As ever, interested to hear your thoughts on this!

James
on 06 Nov 2010 at 12:38 am14 Alison Johnson

Hi Noreen, yes great presentation. Really like the interspersed quotes, analysis and screen shots. This worked very well. Great points about core group and rapid growth in network demonstrating need. The fact some would donate money to maintain network also shows value. Also interesting points about level of personalisation of profiles reflecting level of embodiment or engagement with community. Did your analysis work out whether the core group all had richly detailed profiles or not?

Survey worked very well and great way of anonymising participants. – what did you use to produce it?
on 07 Nov 2010 at 1:23 pm15 Sindhu Radhakrishnan

Noreen

A well refined work…

I got that nice feel from you as a ‘MAKER ‘and ‘INSIDER’ of this community. A community arise from shared interests and shaped to particular needs. Since this is a community for both teachers and students I may say it delivers that “Status Equilisation Effect” as well. From the survey results “Feeling supported and secure”, “Feeling less isolated”, I also receive a bonding touch. This has the potential to grow as a building community?
on 07 Nov 2010 at 3:04 pm16 Noreen Dunnett

@hugh I think I tend to approach most of my communication and interaction from my habitual teaching stance – as you point out, openness and trust, designed to make students or members of my network feel secure and supported. I’m really pleased it comes across that way to you too – must have got something right!

@james No, I don’t think the study has changed my perception of the community greatly or the community’s perception of me – I have always tried to portray myself as detached but interested outsider – I have been part of the community – I was a Comms and Culture teacher and student – but no longer in that role. I am still interested in the issues and the community but don’t have the same emotional and instrumental stake in it. I think (or hope!) people value that objectivity but believe that I care about them and the community. Yes, I also think since this is a ‘community of practice’ it would be a very different experience from a purely social network – concerns are much more practical and based on the need for information.

@Alison – No strangely, the core group did not have richly detailed profiles – that is what drew my attention to this area. I expected the total opposite. I came to the conclusion that participants view this as a ‘community of practice’ rather than a social network and based their interaction on the practical need to exchange resources and information. I used Picasa with a free application called Autoviewer to produce the presentation.

@Sindhu – Yes, I saw this as a ‘building community’ too.
on 07 Nov 2010 at 10:27 pm17 Linda Matthews

The ethnography project conveyed a real sense of a learning community, with an ebb and flow of participation, underpinned by a solid central core. I really liked the way in which your own leanring and this project became a focus within the community itself and was then reflected back within this presentation. It was like a mirror to our own learning community, in a way we were ‘present’ through this work. Thank you.
on 11 Nov 2010 at 7:04 pm18 Charmaine McKenzie

Noreen, I really enjoyed this. As Linda said, there is a real sense of a learning community and the “ebb and flow” in participation she noted is something I saw in the community I looked at.

Like Alison, I like the way you interspersed the quotes, analysis and screenshots. The tool you used was also well used as it lent itself well to linking in a very meaningful way, the previous and following slides.

First class as usual, Noreen.
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