non Research research

May 15, 2011

Stop film animation project literacy research

Had a meeting with a fellow Educator, named john Q, cohort of many years.  Reason was to have a informal conversation about research and how it applies to my current course.  His conversation facilitated the many aspects of research that I am not understanding from the course materials or teachers.  Follwing the ideological beliefs of the program I am expected to learn successfully through online collaboration that our course format follows, and expects however, that does not assist me in growing or understanding in any way what I am supposed to be doing.

I have found great difficulty engaging the other members of my group into deep discussion based on the literature that I have read up to this point.  I am struggling with the participatory nature of the course, on numerous occasions I have attempted to begin a discussion about the deeper aspects of this research course to go past the creation of our stop animation artifact with little success, the comments are usually, discouraging and indicates to me an unwillingness to even discuss aspects of Literacies and social learning beliefs that I/we have (I am assuming)read.

Furthermore I feel that I was ill prepared for this course right from the beginning as there was no communication to any of the students in my cohort until the Friday before Tuesday that our class started, this gave us only 3 days to read the assigned readings for our first FTF meeting.

Ofcourse many did not read any of the assigned reading for many different reasons.  I admit that I was unable to fully read all of the necessary chapters in the 2 books.  In my opinion, I would have been better prepared for this firts night had I been able to read the required materials in advance-providing me with the then needed background knowledge.-this would have been the just in time learning that is strongly encouraged in the avant garde approaches to 21st Century learning.  As a matter of fact, I am jsut now finishing up the assigned reading for the first class.-Not good!

Published in my instructors book (New Literacies 2011) it clearly states that they expect the reading to be done before the first night of our class:  

Preliminary information and resources are provided to give a broad sense of the media and research tasks. Participants receive in advance texts on media options—including ‘how to’ tutorials, on data collection and analysis, and on sociocultural approaches to understanding and researching language and literacy. The syllabus is provided a month or more ahead of time, and includes suggestions about what to bring to help with data collection(Lankshear and Knobel New Lits3 Text 2011 page 156)

The syllabus was not provided in enough time to provide the kind of reading and reserching needed to be ready for our first face to face meeting.

Moving on I continue to struggle with the relevancy of the project as far as providing any efffective research, I find the act of doing and searching out information to do a silly stop animation absolutely disconnected with the course objectives.  Data?, the data has not spoken to me yet.

Perhaps after I have a chance to do further research and create a position argument of agreement as far as if I have found any literacy in what I did?  At what point did the literacyness of the act of the learning? How to does learning and collection data on making a stop motion movie make me more litterate or  fluently literate in the doing of my project?-at what point did this happen?  am I and insider of this practice? not by any means!  Can I share and talk about tips for stop film animation? yes.  Have I had to read and reread and watch and collaborate and create yes, experiment test, and improve? yes so it is an act of literacy in the sense of learning how to by going out and finding online books, articles, youtube movies, fanfiction websites and chat rooms to find and share information about my movie artifact.

Where do I go from here, well I feel that I must now go back into research by the means of finding our sources of information on participatory culture and begin collecting my thoughts to put down on paper and 'paper' inorder to begin to create a report.

Questions that we are basing our non-research research paper on!