Interests and agendas
I think this resource will be a useful tool for exploring ideas and planning for work to be completed at NRC 2005 in Miami. Thank you to Laurie for setting this up for us!
I'd like to suggest that we exercise our blogging skills by writing about the kind of research we are most interested in pursuing with respect to technology and literacy. Part of what I think we want to do is identify colleagues with whom we might collabaorate and I suspect an important part of that process will be learning more about the kinds of research folks are doing and what we'd like to be doing over the next few years.
I am interested in how readers move around inside electronic reading environments (by selecting links). Since starting this line of work in the later 90s, I have focused primarily on quantitative approaches, defining specific measures and assesing the influence of various factors on these measures. I am, however, also quite interested in the interpretation of visual displays of reader navigation, an approach that seems to me to be more qualitative than quantitative (although I have linked numerical measures to these visual displays as well.) I ground my work with hypertext in transactional theory.
I expect to continue working on quantitative questions related to the structure of hypertext and reader navigation within it, but I also hope to begin to define more "up close" qualitative approaches that focus on individual readers as they read online text. I am also very interested in reading theory generally and the more specific issue of how existing theory does or does not address the new possibilities for literacy practice online.
I look forward to learning more about the interests and agendas of others in this group!
I'd like to suggest that we exercise our blogging skills by writing about the kind of research we are most interested in pursuing with respect to technology and literacy. Part of what I think we want to do is identify colleagues with whom we might collabaorate and I suspect an important part of that process will be learning more about the kinds of research folks are doing and what we'd like to be doing over the next few years.
I am interested in how readers move around inside electronic reading environments (by selecting links). Since starting this line of work in the later 90s, I have focused primarily on quantitative approaches, defining specific measures and assesing the influence of various factors on these measures. I am, however, also quite interested in the interpretation of visual displays of reader navigation, an approach that seems to me to be more qualitative than quantitative (although I have linked numerical measures to these visual displays as well.) I ground my work with hypertext in transactional theory.
I expect to continue working on quantitative questions related to the structure of hypertext and reader navigation within it, but I also hope to begin to define more "up close" qualitative approaches that focus on individual readers as they read online text. I am also very interested in reading theory generally and the more specific issue of how existing theory does or does not address the new possibilities for literacy practice online.
I look forward to learning more about the interests and agendas of others in this group!
posted by John Mc | 1:42 PM
2 Comments:
Here are some of my interests & agendas:
For the past several years I have been conducting qualitative research on young adolescent struggling learners' web-based searching behaviors while engaged in authentic classroom inquiry. I have some descriptive stats based on data tracking software and piles of other assessments & protocols that have yet to be fully analyzed! With an n of 131 permissioned kids (48 with LD), my colleague Kathleen Guinee and I still have a ton of data to process.
With the overall goal of building tools and pedagogical approaches to inquiry-based Internet curricula, and helping teachers and students develop effective & efficient searching strategies, I am interested in several things:
-How novice vs. experienced searchers approach online texts and tasks
-How typically-achieving vs. struggling learners approach online texts and tasks
-How the nature of the task influences users' behaviors and strategies
-How reader stance influences behaviors & strategies
-How user characteristics influence behaviors & strategies
-Fundamental similarities and differences between expository print texts and web texts (and therefore, appropriate strategies for approaching them)
-Deconstructing the features & cueing systems of "typical" web texts
-Building new theories of reading comprehension on the Web
-And so much more!!!
John,
Your interest in looking at how readers move around in electronic reading environments is something we are starting to see in the work we are doing with 7th graders. We were out in the field this week trying to identify skills that students lack when searching for information. The one thing that was common between most of the students is the fact that they don't seem to READ in online environments. We had several students just scan until they found a link that was "clickable" without reading the context surrounding it. This happened in both website and email environments. Pretty interesting to watch. I think that this component of our work will be key in developing instruction to address the new reading needs of electronic environments.
Laurie
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