As mentioned in my comment to the previous post, online learners’ emotions are of paramount importance to their tutors, letting them have a better insight into what might engage or inhibit the student in achieving their learning goals. I have decided to take the previous and very informal attempt of visualising my emotions a bit further and analyse them in more detail, hoping I would be able to draw some conclusions and help myself overcome the interaction problems I am now experiencing. I am also trying to assess how such data would be useful to the teacher.
Description of the method
The inspiration was brought by the research paper written by Gilmore and Warren (2007) in which they were trying to research the emotions from the perspective of online tutors using the medium of an online chat for holding seminars and the potential influence these emotions exerted on the relationship with the learners. The framework they used was a combination of ethnography and grounded theory. The former means the tutors were participating in the seminar themselves, so becoming part of the researched community. The latter assumes collection and processing the data (marking, coding, grouping into similar concepts and then categories) prior to stating the research hypothesis.
This is how they justify their choice of their methodology and describe their data collection:
An ethnographic approach requires a sense of the ‘poetry of experience’ in that researchers often need to pay attention to data which are metaphorically indirect and atmospheric rather than literal and rational (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 589)
During the analysis of our own and each other’s logs there was a strong sense of ‘reexperiencing’ our emotions and as such the logs were not ‘sterile’ records of past interaction to be picked apart and recombined as codes, but more akin to ‘material memories’ that evoked recollections and emotional remembrances of our feelings (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 590)
I found this approach quite appealing and decided to replicate it in my context. While participating in the first skype chat I was trying to monitor my feelings and jot down any stronger occurrences of emotionality (a visual taster presented in my previous posting). Later I analysed the chatlog, trying to log my thoughts and feelings at the time alongside the actual chat contributions. After that, I analysed my comments and picked out any mention of emotions, either encircling them (if they were named explicitly) or extracting them from ‘in-between the lines’. I tried to restrict the set of emotions if possible so that it would be easier to count the occurrences of particular feelings. At the end, I counted all the mentions of any emotion, mentions of negative emotions, positive emotions and ambiguous emotions and mentions of particular emotions trying to establish which ones were the most frequent. See the attached PDF for more detail (this document is not public at the moment - email me for details).
Results
Any kind of emotion was noted on 34 occasions. Majority of them could be described as negative. The ones that occurred most frequently were: alienation/ annoyance, self-consciousness and embarrassment (PDF).
According to Wosnitza & Volet (2005),emotions can be analysed in regard to their direction, i.e. recipient and they have identified multiple sources emotions can be orientated towards: task, technology, performance, oneself, social environment and learning context. It’s curious that all of the emotions coded in my experiment appear to be socially oriented, mostly self-directed and occasionally other-directed (and here it seems ‘other’ stands for ‘fellow students’ rather than the tutor), so it seems the social aspect of the learning experience took over. Another odd thing is that the emotions I felt towards myself, the feelings of alienation, self-consciousness and embarrassment are closely related to the social environment. One could actually argue that for instance the prerequisite for feeling alienated is the presence of a group of which one does not feel part of. Feelings of self-consciousness and embarrassment might also have a tendency to arise in a social setting as they are linked to the issue of perception – how the person perceived themselves in relation to others, how they are perceived by others and how she/he feels about others perceiving her in a given/imagined way.
My rough conclusion in regard to my emotionality is that there seems to be a high degree of pre-occupation with that last issue, considerably higher than in face-to-face contexts.
Limitations
Of course, my ‘research’ is still very informal and its conclusions are far from being meaningful due to the following reasons:
- I have minimal experience in research
- Self-report tends to be subjective and therefore not very reliable
- The annotations were made with a few days’ delay, which might further decrease the reliability of the report
- The matter was treated in a cursory manner, without a deep analysis of how to decipher, code and group the emotions arising due to the interaction (I was just playing a researcher)
- Due to the above reasons, some important data might have got lost.
Nevertheless, the whole experiment was worthwhile and did bring some insight into my emotionality. It would be interesting to repeat this with greater care about detail and reliability as well as compare with what other chat participants felt at the time.
Now the question remains a teacher can do with such data (I am now distancing myself from it and trying to put myself in the tutor’s shoes). Could the course design be tweaked to include more social get-togethers in real time, more pairwork and groupwork to facilitate establishing closer working relationships between the students so that the comfort zone for a socially inept student is slowly extended?
Gilmore and Warren (2007) while summarising the issues related to the virtual classroom point out that online interaction is often conceptualised in dichotomy terms of being either liberating or impoverishing, either enabling highly intimate relationships or ones that are impersonal and hostile. It puzzles me to see that I am experiencing both: the Skype experience and the blog experience. So after all, even if the student runs into difficulties in one online environment, it does not have to be blown out of proportion as long as they find their niche in another environment on the course where they can flourish and fulfil their potential.
Keywords: emotions online, IDEL11
Comments
Apologies for the delayed response.
This is an intriguing exercise , and great way of transforming a personal experience into an academic insight. Kudos.
Indeed, I think something like this could also be a great idea for a final assignment. I’d be intrigued to see how another participant might annotate the transcript. Or what might happen if you stepped away from the content as much as possible to analyse the discourse (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis ). Another alternative – you could analyse the other Skype transcripts from that week – how do they compare, can you see similar emotions being discussed or alluded to?
>Any kind of emotion was noted on 34 occasions.<
Having briefly looked at the transcript, I can see how prevalent the ‘negative’ emotions were. I guess though I’d question how useful it is to count up emotional responses, since that doesn’t necessarily relate to the intensity or impact of the emotion. I think, for me, I don’t necessarily see this emotions as negative either – as has been the case with how you have leveraged them, they can lead to insight and growth.
>One could actually argue that for instance the prerequisite for feeling alienated is the presence of a group of which one does not feel part of.<
The presence of the group per se or the perceived presence of the group? I’m wondering if others might have also had the same concerns as you, even though you might have assumed they felt part of the group. (Hence my thought earlier – how would another participant code this transcript?)
The focus on socially related emotions is in direct contrast to readings we’ve tackled like Dreyfus (2009) – clearly the element of risk is present for you in this experience!
You’ve raised some good thoughts on limitations of this type of research. I think it could equally be argued that the ‘distance’ of time before annotating the transcript might also be a strength, a chance to try understand the subjective nature of your experience and how it relates to your analysis of the transcript.
For >Due to the above reasons, some important data might have got lost.< - I think this kind of research requires a different way of thinking about data – not as collected but as generated. It might have been generated differently if you had more experience, done the annotations closer to the time etc – but would it have necessarily been better? Or would it have delivered different sorts of insights?
On ethnography, if you haven’t come across is already, I highly recommend Christine Hine’s (2000) book Virtual Ethnography. Also Gatson, S and Zweerink, A (2004) Ethnography online: ‘natives’ practising and inscribing
community. Qualitative Research, 4(2), 179‐200. I could dig up some more refs, if you are interested in comparing transcripts, say, as a final assignment.
Cheers
C.
As you suggested, Clara, I have looked at the transcript again, coldly and from aside as if I hadn’t participated in the discussion. The temporal distance makes it easier to take a position of an objective observer. At the time, due to emotions, the separation of what I am (my pure self) and what I was playing at (an e-student’s/skype discussant’s self) verged on the impossible – I’m sure you can notice Sartre’s echoing here! Now, when the emotions faded away, I can see more clearly and can even perhaps decipher some of the emotions other participants might have felt at the time. As you pointed out, they might have experienced similar feelings of frustration or anger but maybe decided to use other strategies to tackle the problem. Their seemingly better assimilation to the group activity does not mean they felt part of the group. I think I was working on a false premise in that respect - since the event was called a group chat, I wrongly assumed that we had formed a group. Such a development, however, might or might not have taken place, possibly given the circumstances (e.g. relatively early on the course) the latter.
It could prove a worthwhile exercise to undertake a comparative analysis of this and the other script. My only issue is how you account for the unsaid and unmentioned, for the non-verbalised, but all the same thought and felt and therefore crucial components of the experience? How do you account for what each of the participants wanted to write but dismissed the thought or erased half way through? Perhaps, combining the analysis with the following elements
could provide an insight into each participant’s stream of consciousness at the time and consequently rich data to analyse chat discourse and related emotions and the relationship between the latter and the participation in the chat.
I agree that the quantity of emotions does not mean much as one needs to consider their intensity too. When I think of the emotions felt at the time, I can see them forming a bell curve – the initial emotions are quite mild but keep intensifying, they reach the peak somewhere in the second third of the chat; after that they become dulled, probably in proportionally to the decreasing likelihood of engagement, possibly there is a miniexplosion of emotions at the end when I realised that the opportunity had gone away.
The whole experiment proved worthwhile, in terms of getting familiar with the notion of ethnography (fair point about generating, not collecting data – thanks Clara) and especially autoethnography.
Gatson and Zweerink’s (2004) paper made me look at self-report and self-analysis from a slightly different perspective. As I mentioned in my post, I had associated such method of research with lowered reliability and validity. Gatson and Zweerink (2004) reassure that that does not have to be the case. On the contrary, being simultaneously a participant and an observer, strengthens the sceptic in you and thus lets you dissociate yourself with the observes (including yourself) and become a ‘detached, objective interpreter and translator’ (2004: 189). Of course, their autoenthongraphy focuses on the analysis of the collective the researcher is part of while in my case I was the sole subject of the experiment, against the backdrop of the ‘group’ though.
From the perspective of autoethnography, my ministudy adds a twist to the issues of identity/ies and selfhood occasioned by the discussion of the virtual world and digital identities. The material and embodied student-Ania looks into her virtual and disembodied self. In a subjective analysis, the actual feelings are ascribed to the virtual identity. But are these in fact true sensations? To perform a more objective analysis, I need to kind of step out of my body (virtualise myself? disembody myself? strangely Sartre comes to mind again) and look at my virtual self from a perspective of an onlooker/a researcher (btw I quite like the fact that Gatson and Zweerink (2004) do not question a non-academic person as a potential researcher – ‘To what extent do you have to be a professional to be an observer?’), in G&Z’s words I have to ‘extricate myself from the experience’ (2004: 180)
And here while reading G&Z, I understood a salient point that might impact the analysis – we need to figure out whether the personae presented online and the persons constructing the personae are distinct from each other or overlap. In the case of the skype chat, there seems to be a close overlap but elsewhere, in SL for instance, when thinking about this, I understood that in my musings on my digital identity, I was actually always analysing my actual self and in my mind the RL identity was equal to the virtual identity. Having read Bayne’s papers (2008 and 2010) and how we fragment ourselves by scattering out bodies in various online spaces, I have understood that this might not be the case. My virtual identity although overlapping with my RL self represents only parts of my real self but not the whole; in that case the part becomes the whole, transforming into a totally new entity! Thus, the virtual self has a degree of independence and maybe in fact lives its own life, even when I switch off the computer and go offline. For that reason, I was wondering if I could convince my real self to let the virtual self go ‘loose’ (in a sense it becomes more participatory for example) – at the moment it seems like the real self keeps the virtual self captive, trying to suppress it and limit it. It somehow echoes the way in which, according to certain educationalists, pedagogy tries to place technology in a subordinate position (something I briefly considered earlier but Bayne’s, Cousin’s and Meyer’s and Land’s papers have proved to be an eye opener here, initiating some major shift in my professional beliefs).
I still find the whole notion quite evanescent, sceptral and certainly liminal, to use the words from the papers about the uncanny and threshold concepts
and thus still difficult to capture ... but I keep thinking, hence the recent irregularity of the postings ... to be continued.