across various literacies in multiple online and offline settings. She has conducted research in such diverse environments as homes, libraries, and schools, and within inner-city, rural, and international contexts in North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. She has given lectures and keynote addresses on her research at conferences and universities around the world. Gerber’s recent publications can be found in English Journal, Educational Media International, and The ALAN Review. She is coeditor of Bridging Literacies with Videogames.Sandra Schamroth Abramsis an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at St. John’s University in New York. Her research of digital literacies and videogaming focuses on agentive learning, layered meaning making, and pedagogical discovery located at the intersection of online and offline experiences. Her recent work appears in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, the Journal of Literacy Research, and Educational Media International. She is the author of Integrating Virtual and Traditional Learning in 6–12 Classrooms: A Layered Literacies Approach to Multimodal Meaning Making and the coeditor of Bridging Literacies with Videogames.Jen Scott Curwoodis a senior lecturer in English education and media studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her research focuses on literacy, technology, and teacher professional development. She has recently investigated young adults’ writing practices in online spaces and teachers’ integration of digital tools in content area classrooms. Curwood’s scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Teaching Education, and Learning, Media, and Technology.Alecia Marie Magnificois an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches courses on English teaching, digital literacies, and research methods. Magnifico’s research interests focus on understanding, supporting, and encouraging adolescents’ writing for different audiences. Much of her writing in this area describes and theorizes composition across formal and informal contexts. She also works with teachers to design curricula and assessments that engage digital tools and multiple literacies. She enjoys the challenge of developing research methods to represent what happens in these complex social learning spaces. Magnifico’s recent work can be found in Literacy, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and E-Learning and Digital Media.
Chapter One How Can Learning in Online Spaces Be Informed by Qualitative Research?
Guiding Questions for Chapter 1
Historically, how have qualitative approaches been used to study learning in online spaces?
How does the concept of remixing multiple approaches lend itself to the study of learning within online spaces?
What are some ways in which researchers can remix multiple qualitative approaches in order to study learning in online spaces?
Introduction
Conducting research in online spaces can be challenging, but rewarding. Online environments often seem like brave new worlds filled with unknown and exciting areas for discovery. By exploring existing qualitative approaches to studying learning in formal and informal online spaces, researchers will be able to better understand the development of multimethod approaches.
Readers can expect to see how examples of online learning, from initial design to data collection to data analysis, are addressed in light of the porous boundaries that loosely separate online and offline worlds (Burnett, 2011; Burnett & Merchant, 2014). This chapter provides an overview of seminal constructs that impact qualitative inquiry—namely mental models, research traditions, and inquiry paradigms—and offers insight into methodological shifts as well as researcher agency and creativity.
Mediated Spaces and Online Learning
For qualitative researchers wanting to understand the everyday, the Internet has therefore become almost unavoidable, but is also often troubling in the extent to which it seems to challenge our starting premises about who we study, where they are, and what they do there. (Hine, 2013, p. 2)
Advances in technology have led to new and shifting landscapes, often presenting researchers with multiple challenges in investigating evolving online spaces and practices. Consequently, researchers may grapple with questions about designing their study to best understand online meaning making (Black, 2008; Gee, 2007; Hine, 2000; Nardi, Ly, & Harris, 2007). This book highlights how scholars have examined learning in digital spaces, and it provides seminal examples and prompts to inform and inspire future research. This book pushes researchers to think through existing approaches and methodologies, and to consider alternative and multiple ways to approach the study of learning in online spaces.
The Internet and online learning are not new. In fact, online social spaces like Usenet and multiuser domains, also known as MUDs, were present in the 1970s. These eventually led to other variations, such as MOOs (a MUD that is object oriented) and MUVEs (multiuser virtual environments) that supported flexible environments and user creativity (Slator et al., 2007). Though research has attempted to define characteristics of online learners (Dabbagh, 2007), examining the features of online spaces will allow researchers to explore more deeply examples of meaning making.
In so doing, this book calls attention to the complicated nature of investigating learning in online spaces. Given that online environments continually and often dramatically change, this book avoids claims about what online learning spaces are. Instead, this book provides understandings of how researchers have collected, generated, and analyzed data, as well as (re)considered the affordances and limitations of their chosen approaches.
Making Pragmatic Choices About Methods
Questions of learning and education often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and demand complex data collection and analyses. As such, it is possible and frequently useful for researchers in these areas to adopt, develop, and mix methodologies that draw from a variety of traditions. This tradition began with mixed methods scholars who initially sought to escape the “paradigm wars” of earlier generations. (An excellent history can be found in Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998.)
Initially, it was most common to combine qualitative and quantitative measures. One definition of mixed methods describes it as “research in which the investigator collects and analyzes data, integrates the findings, and draws inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study or program of inquiry” (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007, p. 4). In current research, however, multiple combinations of methods, known as multimethod research, are possible and support the emergence of new descriptions and insights.
When beginning an investigation, researchers must hone their ideas for the study’s focus. For example, rather than collecting all possible data in an online setting for learning, are particular kinds of interactions more interesting? Do online interactions suggest another relevant avenue to pursue? A number of different analyses or data sources might be investigated as ways to examine particular areas of the online spaces, or they could be used to tease out certain kinds of learning processes that become more evident as the researcher enters the space.
As educational research has evolved, the field has become more willing to accept mixed, open-ended, and naturalistic frameworks. In past years, many studies of learning environments were planned as deliberate experiments, and as such, frameworks for data collection and analysis were often seen as immutable contracts in which the researcher promised to study definite research questions in established, specific ways. This particular image of the analytical framework does not work as well in qualitative studies where interpretation and mapping are central activities to a study’s development. For example, many ethnographers first
