As I read through Berg's insights on using diaries and blogs in particular as a means of unobtrusive research I was reminded of a TED talk we watched last year in my class. The presenter was a young man named Jonathan Harris and he had created a program that archives emotions posted on the internet. We Feel Fine is one of the coolest things I've ever seen and I think it's a fantastic example of the kinds of things that are possible using only unobtrusive research methods.
This reading also made me think about the blogging projects we've done in Service Corps. The first year we tried blogging as a class we created a livejournal account for the whole class and everyone used tags to differentiate their posts and comments. Looking back over that journal now it's interesting to see how performative most of the posts are. The students are clearly writing to an audience and although I think they accurately reflect some of the students with other students they are clearly a persona which I think nicely illustrates the Berg's warning about being careful to analyze data collected from the web and the need for triangulation of research to verify it. The second year we decided to blog a little differently. Instead of using the class account and tagging the posts, each student created their own livejournal account and they would post to a common community journal for their required posts but they were also free to post in their own journals whenever they wanted. It was very interesting to see the difference in posts that students posted to the community and the posts in their own journals. There was a very clear level of performance in their community posts that was not present in their personal journals. In fact there were several times when students seemed surprised I had read something they'd written in a personal journal entry, despite the fact that it was posted on the internet and at least somewhat created for a class assignment. Again, I think this nicely illustrates why blogs can be a very interesting means of unobtrusive research.
ETA: Ha! I told you all that I never look at everyone else posts before posting my own because I'm worried I'll inadvertently copy someone and now I see that Jason has also mentioned We Feel Fine . I guess I'll take that as a second witness of the awesomeness and applicability of the site to this week's discussion.
1 comment:
Well, tipping my hand a little further, I am planning on looking at We Feel Fine as part of my presentation today also. Not only because of the creation of archiving that we use when we create blogs but the archives that we have to research. I am primarily interested in it as a pedagogical resource for study about archival research and about understanding more with regard to our online culture as well as our geographic cultures and the kinds of legacies we are creating. I think this would be helpful for both an English class as well as a Social Studies class - and says something about social media that is of worth to others in our class too. Hopefully it is a worthwhile exercise in class. We shall see!
Post a Comment