of educational research and challenge researchers to attend to how learners move across and through multiple spaces.
Networked field sites allow researchers to trace how individuals move through multiple online spaces (e.g., from a Facebook site, to a fanfiction site, to a blog space) in order to make meaning. Researchers may call on multiple approaches to understand meanings made across spaces, just as Fields and Kafai (2009) did when examining participatory practices in Whyville. In this way, we can see how an emphasis on agency and creativity can move the field forward because researchers can be encouraged to view the boundaries of methodological traditions as porous; that is, researchers can see how methodologies can be combined to customize a research approach that is appropriate for a particular context of inquiry.
Inspired by remix, researchers may bring together a number of methodological approaches in order to investigate and understand meaning making within and across online spaces. Customizing a research approach, however, needs to be done with care. It would be irresponsible to simply draw from different traditions without an appropriate lens and purpose. As such, researchers should reflect on the affordances and limitations of the multiple methods, and ask questions such as these:
In what ways will the various methods work in concert to capture and discover meaning making that spans online and offline environments?
How will the remixed approach support the investigation of diverse field sites?
How will the approach enhance critical reflection of researcher positioning and bias?
Using the lens of remix, this book features examples of agentive and creative research approaches from design to data collection to data analysis. More specifically, we highlight how drawing on multimethod approaches and traditions can enable researchers
to move across various online sites, following participants, events, or networking residues (see Chapter Two and Chapter Four);
to traverse and analyze online and offline data (see Chapter Four);
to collect and gather participants’ cultural productions and systematically (whether chronologically, spatially, or another category) trace the evolution of those productions (see Chapters Five and Six);
to gather available back-end data (keystrokes, log-in data, and other algorithm data) and combine those data with traditional qualitative data, such as interviews (see Chapter Six);
to understand and implement ethical approaches to entry into networked field sites (see Chapter Seven); and
to engage in cocreation and coproduction in designing research studies with participants, even across disparate studies (see Chapter Eight).
As researchers embrace multiple approaches to study meaning making in a variety of online spaces, it is important to examine the creative and agentic techniques promoted by the concept of remix that one might take in designing his or her study. As more scholars enter their various fields of study (e.g., nursing, education, cultural anthropology, social work) recognizing that online spaces are important, scholars may be concerned with, and interested in, the diverse ways people engage in learning in online spaces. This might influence how researchers design studies to better understand these practices and meaning-making experiences. Judiciously selecting multiple appropriate methods to get to the heart of a research question is one of the biggest promises in looking at online research through the lens of remix.
Conclusion
The study of learning in online spaces can be vastly enriched when researchers consider the plethora of ways that learning unfolds dynamically in and across networked field sites. Because contemporary frames for meaning making within online environments cannot be relegated to a one-size-fits-all model, methodological approaches also must be reconsidered. As indicated, researchers should examine the framing of mental models and logics of inquiry that help to further shape their analytic frames. From there, researchers can adopt a research paradigm that aligns with their study’s design.
Connecting to Your Work
Referring back to the various studies provided in this chapter, several different methodological approaches were introduced. The following questions can help you think through a future study, while drawing on the concepts that were introduced in this chapter.
In what ways do you think that your potential research questions might be adapted to draw on a remixing of multiple approaches? How would this allow you to see different elements of your research?
What benefits might be gained by introducing remixing multiple approaches to a study’s design?
How do the theories behind mental models and logic of inquiry lend themselves to developing your study in an online environment?
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