Ethnographic study of a virtual learning community

Citation

Eustace, K. (1998), "Ethnographic study of a virtual learning community", Internet Research, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.1998.17208aaf.003

Ethnographic study of a virtual learning community

Ethnographic study of a virtual learning community

Principal Researcher: Mr Ken Eustace, School of Information Studies and Internet Technology Research Program Leader, Farrer Centre, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 675, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia.E-mail: keustace@csu.edu.au;WWW: http://farrer.riv.csu.edu.au/~keustace/Tel: +61 2 6933 2832;Fax: +61 2 6933 2733.

In May 1994, Paideia University's Dr Malcolm McAfee approved an ethnographic study of the Paideia Master of Arts (Liberal and Policy Studies) degree. Paideia is a university on the Internet. It offers a unique virtual community framework for higher degree study incorporating WWW servers (Internet/Intranet sites) scattered over the world with private e-mail correspondence and HTML and MOO programming to create a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) aimed at enhancing learning, teaching and research.

The Internet is defined, (Anderson, 1994), as the "agora" or meeting place in which knowledge is not only shared but created and recreated. It may, therefore, provide students with the opportunity to develop, apply and link new knowledge to their own learning context. The major purpose of the ethnographic study of Paideia was to describe or model the Paideia "agora." The study focussed on the interaction of Paideia students, the stages of evolution of the system and the impact of Paideia "agora" on the researcher's professional development (Rochester and Eustace, 1997).

The key research question is ­ How can the iterative processes of a virtual learning community like Paideia be experienced and defined? The investigation has two main parts. The first part is an ethnographic study of learning within a "virtual community". This ethnography involved the researcher as a participant in the online global Master's degree program at Paideia University. Electronic data were collected from May 1994 to July 1995 using e-mail messages, participant portfolios on the WEB and MOO conference transcripts. These data have been analyzed using NUDIST. 3D to create visualisations of the interactions between Paideia staff and students. The main ethnographic field notes collected during the MA participation are presented as 12 chapters of an online hypertext document, with the MA course assignments as another 12 chapters nested inside Chapter 9 of the field notes. These core field notes are online at: http://www.csu.edu.au/ research/sda/Reports/paideiat.html

The second part of the research examines the period of time after completion of the main ethnographic study. This is an analysis of how such experience with educational virtual community development and online education can influence change in the researcher's own teaching and research (Rochester and Eustace, 1997; Weingand, 1993).

Data analysis of the first part involves empirical code generation as an extension of the empirically grounded approach advocated by Glaser (1978). An inductive method for generating codes (categories) is derived from the research questions, hypotheses, key concepts or important themes. Codes are used as retrieval/organising devices for clustering and the quick identification of segments relating to the research questions. The coding scheme used has evolved as a general accounting scheme using a combination of the inductive codes developed by Lofland (1971) and by Bogdan and Biklen (1982). These codes suit the paradigm being developed at Paideia. The codes are:

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  EVT Events ­ brief actions by a participant (in seconds, minutes or hours);

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  ACT Activities ­ longer duration actions by a participant (in days, weeks, months);

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  SET Setting ­ the Internet infrastructure ­ e-mail, IRC, MOO or WWW;

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  AGN Agenda ­ how people define and react to the setting of topics or themes;

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  MNG Meanings ­ verbal productions of participants that define and direct action;

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  PAR Participation ­ participants' holistic involvement or adaptation to the situation under study;

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  REL Relationship ­ interrelationships among participants considered simultaneously during dialog; social patterns;

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  MTD Method ­ the theme or unit of work under study and /or research-related issues;

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  PER Perspectives ­ ways of thinking (orientation) about people and objects;

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  PRO Process ­ sequence, flow and changes over time;

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  STR Strategies ­ ways of accomplishing tasks;

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  SCA Scaffold ­ technology in the process, e.g. object-oriented programming.

This pattern coding is being used to reduce the large amounts of data from e-mail, MOO and WWW records into smaller units. It helps to build a Cognitive Map (evolving schema) of what is happening at Paideia. Pattern coding often uses interrelated summarisers. The use of NUDIST with the data analysis (Richards and Richards, 1994) is helping to produce clustered patterns that will be exported as matrix or vector numeric tables to a quantitative tool like SPSS. New methods for displaying and interacting with document clusters recommend the use of techniques for visual analysis based on multiple views of the data. In this way, the researcher can achieve new insights into the data. Special 3D techniques using gnuPLOT or tools from Intergraph, let the researcher visually observe correlations and other relevant relationships not seen using conventional display methods.

This ethnographic research method will hopefully be seen as a portable or re-usable approach for the study of virtual learning environments in general. Virtual community development (using tools such as World Wide Web and MOO technology or products such as Lotus Notes) is a growth area in information systems and post-secondary education research in Australia and overseas. This sort of research is of value to the education and business sectors, in particular. At a time when post-secondary education is being introduced to new technologies and there is a move toward resource-based flexible-learning, it is important to investigate the role that these technologies play on new pedagogical methods.

References and further reading

Anderson, T. (1994), "Using the Internet for distance education delivery and professional development," Open Praxis, Vol. 2, pp. 8-11.Bogdan, R. and Biklen, S. (1982), Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods, Allyn and Bacon Inc., Boston, MA.Eustace, K. (1996a), "Paideia: the virtual university? A case study," Proceedings of The Virtual University Symposium, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, November 21-22.Eustace, K. (1996b), "Building the virtual community at Paideia," Proceedings of the Inaugural Australian National Symposium on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, University of Queensland, Brisbane, August 30.Eustace, K. and Fellows, G. (1994), "Developing Australia's first educational multiuser virtual reality at AussieMOO," [Online], available WWW at http://silo.riv.csu.edu.au/AussieMOO.html, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, September 21.Eustace, K and McAfee, M. (1995), "Beyond the WEB and the MOO in education," Proceedings of the Australian Computers in Education Conference, ACEC'95, July 9-13, Perth, Australia. [Online]. Available WWW: http://www.csu.edu.au/research/sda/Papers/ webmoo2.html/Glaser, B. (1978), Theoretical Sensitivity: Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory, Sociology Press, San Francisco.Lofland, J. (1971), Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation, Wadsworth, Belmont. CA.Richards, T.J. and Richards, L. (1994), "Using computers in qualitative research," in Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 445-62.Rochester, M.K. and Eustace, K. (1997), "A distance independent/open learning education model for continuing professional education of librarians," Human Development: Competencies for the Twenty-first Century,Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Continuing Professional Education, The Royal School of Librarianship, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27-29, pp. 1-9.Weingand, D.E. (1993), "Teleconferencing as a continuing education delivery system," in Woolls, B. (Ed.), Continuing Professional Education and IFLA: Past, Present, and a Vision for the Future: Papers from the IFLA CPERT Second World Conference on Continuing Professional Education for the Library and Information Science Professions, K.G. Saur, Munich, pp. 48-58.