Comments on: Week 5 Lifestream Summary http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/gracee/2011/10/26/week-5-lifestream-summar/ part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:20:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 By: Jeremy Keith Knox http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/gracee/2011/10/26/week-5-lifestream-summar/#comment-32 Jeremy Keith Knox Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:25:48 +0000 http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/gracee/?p=301#comment-32 Getting a ‘snapshot’ of a community is a useful analogy Grace, and I think it’s a great way to start thinking about research methods. I think small studies are a great way to ‘scope out’ a community (I’m doing on at the moment!), and also to think about the ways in which established social science methods might relate to the ‘virtuality’ of the online. I think answering the question ‘is this group a community?’ is really interesting, and it gets to the core of what I think ‘virtuality’ brings to social science research. Rather than starting with the idea that you can actually come to understand what is going on in a given social group, I think digital communication forces us to challenge the assumptions of what a ‘community’ is…and that’s surely a good thing! Also, as Jen mentioned in a comment earlier, the Twitter ‘fail whale’ page spawned its own ‘community’, discussed in an ethnography last year: http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/alisonj/2010/11/04/fail-whale-community-ethnography/ Getting a ‘snapshot’ of a community is a useful analogy Grace, and I think it’s a great way to start thinking about research methods. I think small studies are a great way to ‘scope out’ a community (I’m doing on at the moment!), and also to think about the ways in which established social science methods might relate to the ‘virtuality’ of the online.

I think answering the question ‘is this group a community?’ is really interesting, and it gets to the core of what I think ‘virtuality’ brings to social science research. Rather than starting with the idea that you can actually come to understand what is going on in a given social group, I think digital communication forces us to challenge the assumptions of what a ‘community’ is…and that’s surely a good thing!

Also, as Jen mentioned in a comment earlier, the Twitter ‘fail whale’ page spawned its own ‘community’, discussed in an ethnography last year: http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/alisonj/2010/11/04/fail-whale-community-ethnography/

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