Although I have a personal, curious interest in how and why seniors interact online, for the purposes of this class project I’ve made the difficult decision to stick with my original idea to ‘study us.' I have a professional interest in distance learning and educational technology, so I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to look critically at the epicenter of an online class: the live, personal interaction between students and instructor.
Some initial questions I want to focus on are:
1. How do we, as a group, reflect the key concepts put forth by Shirky and Jenkins: cognitive surplus, media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence?
2. What drives us? How can our motives be characterized, beyond fulfilling degree requirements? I believe Shirky’s ideas on autonomy and competence will frame this answer.
3. What are we each trying to accomplish specifically through our discourse in the MOO? What techniques do we employ? How does the setting (MOO) affect the discourse (in contrast to a real world setting)?
4. I am particularly interested in examining our use of the ‘emote’ function, and what we gain by articulating thoughts in third person.
Having set my target and some research questions, my next step is to review several resources on discourse analysis and establish a plan for quantitative and qualitative data gathering. I will be looking for one primary source that clearly outlines basic approaches and methodologies to instruct my work. While I will examine every MOO transcript, my thought (at this point) is to identify one sampling on which to focus the quantitative research.
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