Kate Orton-Johnson

‘I've stuck to the path I'm afraid’: exploring student non-use of blended learning

This paper draws on qualitative data from a study of student use of blended learning as part of a conventionally taught undergraduate Sociology course. Findings from an early evaluation questionnaire highlighted an overwhelming pattern of non-use of the materials and subsequent research with a group of 16 students evidenced limited and inconsistent engagement with the resources. In an analysis of the category ‘non-use’, the students’ rejection of the materials is seen to be closely related to a trust in traditional texts as authentic academic knowledge and an instrumental and strategic approach to study. Blended learning resources are shown to challenge existing learning patterns and practices, reconfigure existing understandings and expectations of academic scholarship and reconstruct academic boundaries in new spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Online Student: Lurking, Chatting, Flaming and Joking

This paper looks at the use of online conference interaction as a part of a web-based distance-learning course. There has been much debate surrounding the potential of educational technology, particularly online conference interaction, to support teaching and learning yet little attention has been paid to student experiences and understandings of the online learning environment. Drawing on data from auto-ethnographic fieldwork the paper identifies 5 categories of participation in asynchronous online conferences: lurker participation, member participation, expert/experienced participation, flamer participation and joker participation. Through an exploration of these forms of participation the paper attempts to understand and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of situating conference interaction alongside the demands of study. The analysis highlights the role of online conferencing as a space for ‘interaction work’ distinct and separated from existing repertoires of formal study. The paper concludes by suggesting that pedagogically successful use of conferences as part of distance learning needs to understand the challenges and demands of remediating existing practices.

Ethics in Online Research; Evaluating the ESRC Framework for Research Ethics Categorisation of Risk

1.1 The ESRC Framework for Research Ethics (FRE) categorises research involving respondents through the internet as by definition research that would normally be considered to involve more than a minimal ethical risk. The document sketches out its logic for this categorisation by suggesting that issues of privacy, informed consent and uncertain participant identity pose new and unfamiliar ethical questions. While some aspects of internet research may be particularly ethically vulnerable, the FRE fails to engage with academic debates across the social sciences and humanities that have focused on the challenges and ambiguities of navigating ethically appropriate research online. In its assumption that all forms of internet research are inherently problematic, the FRE neglects the methodological and disciplinary breadth of web-based enquiry and, in doing so, threatens to tar a number of research settings and tools with too strict an ethical brush. Research in online spaces often focuses on substantive areas that have long been a staple of social enquiry and internet research faces many of the same methodological and ethical problems as ‘offline’ research. Risk categories identified by the FRE include research involving vulnerable groups, research involving sensitive topics, research involving groups where permission of a gatekeepers may be required, research involving some measure of deception and research undertaken outside of the UK. These are all areas where internet research, in common with research in more traditional settings, may be potentially vulnerable to ethical breaches. The logic of a priori labeling all internet research as potentially problematic, however, is unclear and unjustified and fails to recognise the fluid boundaries of online research methods and the considerable body of interdisciplinary work that has debated the complex terrain of ethical research online.

Mummy Blogs and Representations of Motherhood: “Bad Mummies” and Their Readers

Digital technologies have opened up new environments in which the experiences of motherhood and mothering are narrated and negotiated. Studies of “mummy blogs” have explored the ways in which blogs, as social media networks, can provide solace, support, and social capital for mothers. However, research has not addressed how mothers, as readers of blogs, use the mamasphere as a cultural site through which the identities and role of motherhood, and the mother–child relationship, are socially and digitally (re)constructed. This article focuses on confessional blogging of the “bad” or “slummy” mummy: blogs that share stories of boredom, frustration, and maternal deficiency while relishing the subversive status of the “bad” mummy. Drawing on understandings of social media as a space of social surveillance and networked publics, the article argues that in framing narratives of motherhood in terms of parental failure and a desperation for gin, “bad mummy” blogs collapse social contexts in important and interesting ways. Using an example of a conflict between two mummy bloggers, the article will reflect on the ways in which the digital terrain of motherhood can both liberate and constrain: a space for mothers to express and share frustrations and seek solidarity, a space of public condemnation and judgment, and a space that poses ethical issues in the digital curation of family life.

Afterword: Mediating the Digital

This pair of essays combines effectively to constitute an invitation and a corrective, but they also pose a set of provoking questions. They invite the reader to ponder if and how technological innovations congeal around contemporary mediated practices in ways which recast our understandings of social and cultural relations. Here, both war reporting and social networks require a distinct sociological treatment, but one which treads delicately between the Scylla of modishness (the uncritical waving of the web 2.0 banner, for instance) and the Charybdis of absolute stasis, where little has changed. In this sense, they show why it is important to resist imprecise characterisations of digital mediations which replace fine-grained examinations of situated material practices with flabby sloganeering. That they do so whilst insisting on the importance of framing concepts reinforces the necessity of a theoretically attuned sociology of the digital that never loses sight of local relations. To bring together networks, mediations and communications is, after all, to associate three complex and multi-layered terms that have abstract qualities as well as evoking palpable, concrete, material worlds.