Other useful concepts to explore
More gems extracted from Rosanna’s feedback
*other useful concepts to explore:
1. Communicating and learning styles
2. Linguistics of email
3. “media richness” and personality styles
There are studies I know of in these fields, if you like to dig more, just ask me.
If these studies are available online then I’d like to link to them from the DAR wiki.
*practical ideas on how to do DAR:
A. starting with testing the several definitions:
Majerstin discovered about 44 definitions of CoPs. Plus there are similar concepts that are worthy a reflection upon IMHO.
B. gathering case-studies and seeing how many of them match a definition of CoP and in case which one:
MANY “studies” call a bunch of people a CoP WITHOUT specifying the properties that makes it a CoP (or not). I could tell you which authors to stay away with, in case ***grin***
OK, I’ll need to look into this at some point.
I’m aware that the term CoP can get thrown around near online groups which don’t meet the criteria – I have used Etienne Wenger’s definition of a CoP requiring an identified
- domain
- community
- practice
I wrote about this at the outset of my research with the craft cidermakers community.
C. using qualitative and quantitative measures
D. using linguistic analysis of collaborative exchanges and artifacts as qualitative measures of the “degree of CoP” present in a group of professionals.
Linguistic analysis could be could be very interesting if I knew how to do it, and I’d have to have some idea of how it might bring some benefits or improvements to the community or the practice. I’ve identified that both qualitative and quantitative data analysis can be appropriate to action research methodology. Some people think it has to be all qualitative, but I think that arises from bending the stick too far the other way in contrast to positivist methodologies.
Kock (1997) depicts four popular myths about action research methodology:
- (1) That action research is necessarily opposed to positivism;
- (2) That, in order to allow for “true emergence” of research findings, action research should begin without a clear research framework;
- (3) That action research is necessarily a qualitative research approach;
- 4) That action research, due to usually not relying on heavy statistical analysis, allows for fast and easy data collection and analysis.
I had a bit of trouble finding that paper again online, it seems to have been taken down by the university site but here it is via the wayback machine
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