Christian Greiffenhagen

Making rounds: The routine work of the teacher during collaborative learning with computers

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the work of the teacher during collaborative-learning activities. Whilst the importance of the teacher for the success of collaborative learning has frequently been recognized in the CSCL literature, there is nevertheless a curious absence of detailed studies that describe how the teacher intervenes in pupils’ collaborative-learning activities, which may be a reflection of the ambivalent status of teachers within a field that has tried to transfer authority from teachers to pupils. Through a close analysis of different types of teacher interventions into pupils working in pairs with a storyboarding tool, this paper argues, firstly, that concerns of classroom management and pedagogy are typically intertwined and, secondly, that although there may be tensions between the perspectives of teachers and pupils these do not take the form of antagonistic struggles. The paper concludes that it may be time to renew our interest in the work of teachers in the analysis of collaborative-learning activities.

From methodology to methodography: a study of qualitative and quantitative reasoning in practice

Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scrutinised almost every aspect of natural science methodology. Ethnographic and historical case studies have moved from an analysis of the products of science to investigations of the processes of scientific work in the laboratory. Social scientists appear to have been rather reluctant to explore this aspect of their own work in any great depth. In this paper, we report on a ‘methodography’, an empirical study of research methods in practice. This took the form of a small-scale investigation of the working practices of two groups of social scientists, one with a predominantly qualitative approach, the other involved in statistical modelling. The main part of the paper involves a comparison between two brief episodes taken from the work of each, one focussing on how two researchers analyse and draw conclusions from an interview transcript, the other on how collaborators work out an agreed final version of a statistical model for combining temporal and spatial data. Based on our analysis of these examples, we raise some questions about the way in which social scientists reason through their problems, and the role that characterisations of research, as research of a particular kind (e.g., qualitative or quantitative), play in actual research practice.

Unpacking Tasks: The Fusion of New Technology with Instructional Work

This paper discusses how a new technology (designed to help pupils with learning about Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is introduced and integrated into existing classroom practices. It reports on the ways through which teachers and pupils figure out how to use the software as part of their classroom work. Since teaching and learning in classrooms are achieved in and through educational tasks (what teachers instruct pupils to do) the analysis explicates some notable features of a particular task (storyboarding one scene from the play). It is shown that both ‘setting the task’ and ‘following the task’ have to be locally and practically accomplished and that tasks can operate as a sense-making device for pupils’ activities. Furthermore, what the task ‘is’, is not entirely established through the teacher’s initial formulation, but progressively clarified through pupils’ subsequent work, and in turn ratified by the teacher.

Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back?

In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between ‘doing’ and ‘writing’ science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh’s formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgical frontstage–backstage analogy and his claim that various myths about mathematics only fit with how mathematics is presented in the ‘front’, but not with how it is practised in the ‘back’. By investigating examples of both the ‘front’ (graduate lectures in mathematical logic) and the ‘back’ (meetings between supervisor and doctoral students) we examine, first, whether the ‘front’ of mathematics presents a misleading picture of mathematics, and, second, whether the ‘front’ and ‘back’ of mathematics are so discrepant that mathematics really does look certain in the ‘front’, but fallible in the ‘back’.

Statistical Practice: Putting Society on Display

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.

The mundane experience of everyday calorie trackers: Beyond the metaphor of Quantified Self

In this article, we build on the work of Ruckenstein and Pantzar, who have demonstrated how our understanding of self-tracking has been influenced by the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS). To complicate this very selective picture of self-tracking, we shift the focus in understanding self-tracking from members of the QS community to the experiences of ‘ordinary man and woman’. Therefore, we interviewed ‘everyday calorie trackers’, people who had themselves started using MyFitnessPal calorie counting app but were not part of any tracking community. Our analysis identifies three main themes – goals, use and effect – which highlight the mundane side of self-tracking, where people pursuing everyday, limited goals engage in basic self-tracking and achieve temporary changes. These experiences contrast with the account of self-tracking in terms of long-term, experimental analysis of data on the self or ‘biohacking’, which dominates the QS metaphor in the academic literature.

The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions

This study takes pool skating, where only one skater rides at a time, as an example of a turn-taking system, albeit one that is organized not through speech but through bodily actions. This allows us to revisit Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s (1974) famous “turn taking” paper—in particular, their initial broad conception of turn-taking systems as including activities other than the speech-exchange systems studied by conversation analysis. Despite the original declaration, non-speech turn-taking systems have evaded close scrutiny for the past four decades. By turning our attention to such a system here, this study makes two contributions: firstly, to the sociology of turn-organized activities (through a comparison of the central features of turn-taking for conversation with pool skating) and, secondly, to the study of how bodily actions can accomplish pre-beginnings (since in pool skate sessions, this is the place to settle the matter of turn allocation in order to avoid overlaps in riding).

Visual grammar in practice: Negotiating the arrangement of speech bubbles in storyboards

Abstract It is generally acknowledged that we live in an increasingly visual culture, populated with a variety of visual objects. Researchers have recently started to investigate the underlying regularities, the “visual grammar,” according to which these objects are assembled. While most existing studies base their analysis on products (such as advertisements, movies or pages from newspapers), this paper studies the processes through which such products are assembled, thereby investigating visual grammar in practice. The particular objects analyzed are storyboards that were produced by secondary school pupils using a new computerized storyboarding tool as part of their engagement with Shakespeares Macbeth. The paper focuses on situations in which pupils explicitly discuss and negotiate the placement of speech bubbles, thereby revealing aspects of the “meaning-effects” of such placements.

Two concepts of attachment to rules

In this paper, we discuss some implications of John Rawls’ paper ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955) for social science. We argue that Rawls’ notion of ‘practice’ is not a straightforward contribution to sociological theory, but rather re-orients the idea of what understanding social actions might be. We explicate how Rawls’ distinction between ‘summary’ and ‘practice’ views of rules might play out in approaching mathematical practice and mathematical expressions. We argue that social constructivists like Bloor hold on to a ‘summary’ conception of rules while Wittgenstein adopts the more radical ‘practice’ conception.

Wild interdisciplinarity: ethnography and computer science

Abstract Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service was a project funded by an ‘in-the-wild’ research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar forms of research, in which social scientists are involved in the deployment of experimental technologies within real world settings, are becoming increasingly prevalent. The fieldwork for the project was highly problematic, with the result that few users of the system were successfully enrolled. We analyse why this was the case, identifying three sets of issues which emerge in the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary collaboration and wild setting. We conclude with a set of recommendations for projects involving technologists and social scientists.