in class work for 2/6 + 2/8

The task for today is, first of all, to work either by yourself, or in a team (in a team, if you don't have a laptop; make a friend). You will work to see what else is "out there" for your topic in terms of methodology, that is, besides your most important method, which will be reflected in your hierarchy of evidence and eventually in your literature review. On your chosen topic, you will need to locate five different studies, each employing a different method. For each one (i.e., for each of the five), you will need to answer all of the following questions:

1. How do you reference this journal in an APA work cited?
2. What method is being used?
3. How do the authors use the method? What do they use it for? What specifically does the method enable them to do? Why did they choose this method rather than another? What was it about this research agenda/topic that led them to choose this particular method? Answer a handful of these. They all get at similar thing. But I want blocks of texts. 
4. What is the conclusion of the study? And how did the method enable them to reach that particular conclusion?
5. What was one interesting thing you discovered by leafing through this article? 

You ought to have twenty five bullet-pointed items at the end, then. You can either answer them directly on your blog, or answer them on paper. If you answer them on paper, be sure to take a picture with your phone of each page of writing, and each page should have each team member's name on it. You will then need to upload the pictures to each of your blogs. Each answer will be worth a point. If you look to the syllabus, you will see that it allows for in class work to be factored into your final grade. Regardless, it is your responsibility to make it painfully obvious on your blog that you did this, and that you did this in accordance with the instructions. Also label this "in class exercise 2/6 + 2/8" in your labels section. (Be sure you're labeling every entry to your blog.) Whatever you don't finish this week is homework. It took me about fifteen minutes to do the example below. The most important bits are in bold, which you should bold too.

Example of what working with one method in one article would look like:

1. Westberrya, N. & Franken, M. (2015). Pedagogical distance: explaining misalignment in student-driven online learning activities using Activity Theory. Teaching in Higher Education 20(3), 300–312. Print. 
2. Activity Theory
3. The authors used to method to measure the student's change in knowledge through time (302). They show students usually begin online discussions with energy, but only engage for as long as they have to: "It seemed that the students’ main goal was to show their own understanding by completing their discussion posting as expediently as possible in order to gain marks for themselves" (305). To continue: "The data suggest that students placed little value on the task and their commitment to other students. They limited their exposure to others’ texts by reading as few as possible and quickly completed the feedback task; they expressed little interest in enhancing their peers’ understandings or having their own understandings advanced by their peers; and they felt a two-way lack of commitment" (306). Or to go back: "they avoided deeper and prolonged interaction such as an exchange of postings with other students and rarely returned to the forum after they had posted" (305). The method enables them to study not how learning takes place theoretically or ideally but in practice, that is, as enabled by social relations. Likewise, the same social relations that enable a student to be encouraged by others online also enable that discussion to turn into a "repressive monologue" (303).
4. The conclude that, in online discussions, students are can't "effectively learn in the absence of the teacher" (311). That is, because "[o]ne overriding implication arising from this research is a need for teachers of online courses using repeating interactive activities to retain a pedagogical presence and as part of this role, to guide students’ interpretation and construction of learning objects so that alignment occurs between student and teacher understandings and between the planned and enacted curriculum" (310). It appears that these methods enabled the researchers to reach this particular conclusion because activity theory is attuned to showing how people can have different perspectives on the same thing, and how these differing perspectives can generate contradictions that make peoples' interaction with one another less satisfying or inefficient: "The lecturer’s description of the activity remained fairly constant. She believed that peer feedback could help students improve their writing. However, one student and the two tutors did not appear to share her perspective from the outset, instead, questioning the efficacy of the activity at the beginning. It seemed that these three participants occupied a parallel existence, either engaging with the activity in a half-hearted manner or actually subverting and changing the activity" (309).
5. One interesting thing I encountered was the idea that different perspectives on the same thing can create a distance only activity theory can measure.