Academic+Supervisor+Comments+and+Suggestions

07 May 2010 10:06 To: James Simpson Subject: N. Eydelman: critical study question

Hello James--

How are you? I've a couple of things to ask about my critical study. I'm now in week 4 of the students' drafting/editing their essays which was planned to be the week by the end of which the students had to submit their final essay draft. And the current situation is the following:

1) Student 1 (MS Word) submitted her final draft, which is based on the comments of only one of the other girls (the other one hasn't done it).

2) Student 2 has posted her draft 2 in the wiki but hasn't yet had comments from either of the other two students.

3) The third one has not yet posted a revised 2 draft of her essay.

I don't see a major problem yet with extending the period during which the students comment on each others' essay drafts and revise theirs by let's say a week but probably not longer than that because I can feel that the students are getting tired.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the student working in Word submitting her draft based on one set of comments, i.e. I don't think I can ask her to do another "final draft" if she receives the comments from the 3rd participant. So, I think I'll discuss this issue in the limitations of the study, but I wonder how this can impact the interpretation of the results of the study.

And one more thing I wanted to ask you is to have a look at the list of possible questions I've come up with for the interview. They are repetitive at the momemnt but I've kept them in the file I've attached to this message for my future reference.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Have a good weekend.

Best,

Natalya

Quoting James Simpson :

Hello Natalya My apologies for the delay in replying. I too see no problem with extending the period of involvement, but as you say, not indefinitely. In answer to your question about the paucity of data possibly affecting the interpretations you make - well, you;ll work with what you have, and deal with any perceived shortcomings in the limitations section, as you say.

And as for your questions: I would keep the general ones and leave out the very specific ones. You could also y. group them thematicall Remind me how you are going to carry out the interview. This will determine the level of detail you can go into when you are probing for responses. Best wishes James

-Original Message- From: Natalia Eydelman [mailto:ed09ne@leeds.ac.uk] Sent: 10 May 2010 17:04 To: James Simpson Subject: RE: N. Eydelman: critical study question

Hello James

Thank you for your reply and suggestions about grouping the questions for the interview. I'm going to conduct them in skype. Depending on the quality of connection they will be either with or without video with 2 participants. As for the third one, she does not have the facilities for video in skype at all, so with her I'm restricted to skype messenger, which worked fine with the first interview.

I also wanted to ask you about the extent to which I should be ready with my rating of the students' essays by the time I interview them. On the one hand, the focus of the study is on the affordances of the tools used in it for peer-feedback which is the focus of the interview. On the other, I am going to evaluate the changes in the quality of writing as a result of drafting and peer-editing. I guess my question is (or better was) whether I should ask them about their perceived understanding of whether the quality of their writing has improved as a result of going through cycles of editing and revision but having written this and knowing my students I think they would answer it's for me to judge. What do you think?

Natalya 13.05.10 Hi Natalya A couple of things: When you are discussing methods, you can sketch out the affordances of different CMC tools (and modes) for generating interview data - this will make an interesting paragraph. As for your question about asking students about their perceptions of the quality of their writing - and whether it has improved etc - well, I think you have to persuade the students to accept you as a researcher rather than a teacher, and to ask them gently but firmly for their opinion and perceptions. This points to the problem inherent in all participant research, that of separating out the identities of researcher as teacher and researcher as researcher. It seems that this is not just a problem for you (as teacher/researcher) but for the student research participants as well. How are they positioned by you (as researcher) in the research? As students? As co-researchers? As 'research subjects'? Again, this suggests an interesting reflective paragraph or two when discussing research design - i .e. the fluid, dynamic and non-fixed roles and role relations of you and the participatns. All best wishes James