Case Study 1: Cultural Studies

Two versions of this case study are available to download in pdf format (the Adobe Acrobat Reader to allow viewing of pdf files is available for download here). The first version is the basic case study as presented on this page, the second version includes all the 'voices of experience' - comments taken from learners and teachers to build up the case study - that are accessible from each section below, interwoven into the case study as a whole.

>> Case Study: CMC Use in Cultural Studies - summary version

>> Case Study: CMC Use in Cultural Studies - including interwoven 'Voices of Experience'

To view the 'Voices of Experience' relating to each section click on the 'plus' icon under each header where they appear

Introduction

A first year Cultural Studies module in a Scottish urban university, this course was taken by some 150 students from a wide range of degree disciplines (notably print journalism and graphic design degrees). The student constituency was mixed, and included a number of mature students; many lived at home rather than in halls. No background in computer use was assumed for entry.

Characteristics of the Communication Technology

Students had individual email accounts. However the computer-mediated conferencing was accessed through FirstClass software. Many students accessed this through university campus computers with at least one lab being open 24 hours a day. A good number of students had computers at home and made use of the service through a modem link. Some used the FirstClass client software and some relied on a web interface. A basic technical introduction was provided in the course handbook: there was a small groups hands-on workshop in the first week of the course. Students could submit postings to the conference associated with their own virtual tutorial group, submit postings to the whole class via a kind of virtual lobby, engage in chat sessions with anyone they nominate who is currently logged on, as well as browse anywhere and everywhere. The course handbook provided some introductory guidance on use and sessions were provided early in the course for those students who felt they needed to become more comfortable with the technology.

Stated Purpose of the Conferencing

This was the third year that text-based conferencing had been available to students on this course. It was conceived as a way of maintaining the discussion possibilities and learning development potential of face-to-face tutorials, which were limited by staff-student ratios and time constraints.

Two tutors managed the course. There were weekly lectures; associated with these were particular readings and, perhaps, an invitation to explore relevant web links. The website for the course was busy and clearly a focal management point. In addition to being assigned to a virtual tutorial group, conventional tutorials were run in a conventional manner. Thus, up to 15 people might meet face-to-face on a bi-weekly basis.

Stated Principles of Use

Assessment was exam (60%) and coursework (40%). Coursework related to tutorial activities and tasks. There were two group assignments and one individual one. The group assignments had to be co-ordinated and posted by the virtual tutorial groups. These groups were not necessarily the same memberships as the face-to-face ones. There was a demand, therefore, to co-ordinate discussion and planning around the topic set - perhaps with people one had never met and (for it is possible) never would meet. Tutors read the postings and made contributions to the discussions but they did not play a formal moderation role.

Use of the system was logged - in the sense that a counting-down clock informs each user (at log-off) the total amount of time they have spent using the system.

Character of the Communication

Here we are concerned with what governed participation in the exchanges: what dictated someone's decision to take part and what factors were involved in regulating the flow of contributions.

Degrees of engagement: There was some uncertainty about the extent of use. Some informants talked as if it is almost universally used and with vigour. Some suggested it was not used very much at all. Where it was used there could be a perception that certain individuals tended to dominate what went on. Moreover, those active users may have been significant in triggering contribution by others (rather than participation being rather flat across a small constituency).

In a class involving participation from individuals on a range of degree courses, it may be that subject discipline groups (perhaps those on the course more concerned with the power of print, eg. journalists) could become the particularly active ones. Certainly CMC is a forum for students to make distinctions between the disciplinary affiliations of their peers.

Some reticence might have arisen from an uneasiness in airing opinions in an environment where the readers were, largely, not personally known to the author. Participation clearly was not universal. There was widespread agreement that there were some who were opportunistic in their use and, in particular, only appeared online near the time when an assignment was due. In a sense, this may seem harmless - but it may become a source of resentment especially in a situation where assignments relate to group activity and discussion topics. In particular, there may have been an uneasiness about "taking" from the discussion without going to the effort of "giving".

Patterns of use were seen as falling off during the course of the semester. Sometimes this was because not all talk is on-task and this may become grounds for neglect as the pace of deadlines etc. mounts. It also raises the potential role of the tutor in maintaining a critical level of useful and relevant activity.

Self-moderating contribution: what is the model that contributors have of this activity? What guides their thinking about whether to make a contribution? There was an awareness of the limitations of this kind of discourse. For instance, there was a sense that all this was not really a discussion at all. This was true particularly in the chat area (where discussion might be more properly felt to be occurring. There was an awareness that not all that goes on has much to do with work.

The text medium creates a clear tension between the formal and the informal. The lack of contextual cues could make contributions frustratingly ambiguous or incomplete - and this might matter where part of what must go on is organisation and co-ordination. Or the informality can become frustrating to those who have cultivated more precise patterns of using the written word.

Two other concerns were visible in relation to the moderation of contributions. One was that the informality could drift into the irritating or the offensive. The other was the state of feedback experienced. On the informality, it is well known that the medium can encourage a degree of disinhibition. That seems to have been experienced in this present setting. Some students' reactions to feedback centre on a concern as to whether other people were reading what they had written (or are not). Sometimes this was dealt with by explicitly naming peers to pressure a response from someone.

Self-Perceptions

A recurrent issue in text conferencing case study reports is the extent to which individuals feel self-conscious about the permanence and visibility of their contributions. This does not seem to have been a strong theme in the present informants' conversations. Perhaps this may be because so many of the other contributors (even those in one's own group) were not actually known personally. Thus, at the time of writing a contribution students may be more engrossed in the content than in the actual person they were trying to reach or reply to. Yet the practice of having parallel face to face tutorials does revive fears of being intimidated.

Yet sometimes the public nature of other people's ideas is not actually intimidating but can be inspiring. As in cases here where sceptics report discovering that their peers were actually 'smarter' than they supposed. This sort of academic input is a straightforward way in which one might hope that the medium worked to learners' advantage - a kind of vicarious learning though noting other people's insights. However, there are more subtle ways in which the demands of CMC use might be valuable. For example, simply the need to come to campus to take part (where access was not available at home) might serve just enough of an extra motivation to keep some living-off-campus students engaged - and thereby using other campus facilities (the library in particular) to the full.

Learning and Teaching Relationships

What role did CMC play in organising relationships that are usefully sustained at other points in the learners' study routines? Or what forms of existing relationships were reorganised in what way by participation in the conference? There is relatively little to say about this from the case study, again because the rather thinly spread nature of the constituency, their new arrival as students, and the limited degree of extra-curricular contact for some of them. Some students actually complained that the conferencing seems actively to decouple work from a social or recreational agenda.

In particular, those online colleagues that might be encouraged are not easily enough transformed by this contact into forms of relationship that have much life outside of the CMC environment.

Getting Things Done

One issue dominated the discussion of the actual goals that the CMC exchange was conceived to support. That issue was the difficulty of co-ordinating group work. The organisers had reasoned that a group assignment (assessed) would be a necessary catalyst for the discussion that it was hoped CMC would provoke. The difficulties and resentments that surrounded the management of this enterprise are probably no greater than those surrounding any group work demand in university. However, there was a natural temptation to see CMC as being crucially involved in its cumbersome organisational demand. The situation rather soured the atmosphere and brought into view a sense of differential student contributions to corporate work (in a situation where assessment credit might well be equally spread).

Some of this could have been solved (informants claimed) if there had been a matching of groups between the face-to-face people and the virtual group work people - as it stood, the latter were just too often too difficult to contact when it came to the point of needing a face-to-face co-ordination (which interestingly it always did seem to need).

Continuity with Curricula

A number of issues could potentially arise here. One is the obstruction caused by technical problems and problems of access. In fact, most people mentioned one or another sort of difficulty of this kind. In particular, at the time of the interviews there had been major problems at the computer centre that had caused some postings to be lost. There was a sense of computers often 'not working' and some feeling of needing more of them. Yet this was not a dominant concern and certainly not foremost in the informants' own spontaneous remarks. They seemed to tolerate a degree of practical difficulty.

Rather little was said about more academic context issues. The conferencing experience was not talked about as being particularly relevant to the disciplinary concerns of cultural studies itself - although surely it is? The question of links between the virtual and the real tutorial contact was raised: there were not strong feelings about this. Comments were mainly in terms of the direction of advantage for supporting discussion - which could work either way. Often the two were compared in terms of the ease with which people made contributions with some sense that the physical presence of a tutor could be more inhibiting for novice students.

Finally, there was some awareness that the activity served as a sort of glue that gave a sense of greater continuity than normally expected - say, between lectures and other teaching contexts for the course.

Evaluation

Most comments were in terms of comparing the case for face-to-face versus textual modes of exchange. By comparison CMC is often seen to be empowering to the individual tutorial contributor. It is seen to extend the reach of the discussion through the large potential audience and as liberating from the perceived tyranny of tutor-led discussions.

It promotes more reflective and considered contributions of a tutorial nature. Moreover, it is there to hand at moments when you feel inspired to contribute.

While it is not the same as face-to-face discussion, for some it may seem a tantalisingly close approximation. Finally, the experience is seen by some as being 'modern' and in step with possible aspirations for new information societies.

Yet there are reservations. In particular, in relation to the content of the discussion itself - which is judged by some to have a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover the format of face-to-face tutorials is seen by some as involving something precious - whatever the shortcomings of these live conversations.

The role of the tutors in moderating this discussion was often remarked upon. It was clear that there was no way they could easily do the right thing. For some, the key issue was to have them in the background allowing the students to do their own work unhindered. For others, there was felt need for more reassurance and feedback from this authority. Or, because there was such commentary, that it should be more generously spread.

Several features of this class strike one as relevant to the quality of the experience as it was articulated by the users. These features might not be present in other classes and so we are reminded of the idiosyncratic nature of the medium and its effects.

In particular the class was large, first year, a mixture of disciplinary registrations and a good proportion of mature students living at home. There is much in this mixture of ingredients that recommends text conferencing. The more campus-isolated students did value the contact. The size of the class minimised possible embarrassment through inevitable anonymity.

The existence of parallel face to face tutorials was also very relevant to students' reactions. For on these occasions the momentum of the text conferencing could be sustained by explicit reference and, perhaps, the sense of common class purpose could be reinforced. Many students implied they would have felt cheated if this contact was not preserved at some level and they often recognised that it furnished a different form of experience - that was important to them.

Participation was ensured through taking it into account via assessment and through requiring that a group project was catalysed by the medium. The logging of use may have led to some cynicism - as some peers were seen to rapidly make up time close to crucial deadlines. The group work idea was distinctly problematic. It seems that co-ordinating joint writing in this medium is very difficult and students' awareness of the easier route they could have followed if all were in a face-to-face tutorial was a source of some irritation.

Finally, the academic content of the course may also have been very relevant to the high degree of engagement in CMC. Introductory work in cultural studies inevitably invites students to talk about cultural material very familiar to them in their recreational lives (particularly television and film). On looking at the preserved email discussions there is a sense of rather undisciplined contributions. Perhaps an acid test of how far the discussion is going beyond informal talk about mass media is the frequency with which contributors make explicit reference to academic sources or course-related themes/topics. In fact, this happened rather rarely.

The intervention did seem successful in creating the conditions for a more animated atmosphere among the students taking the course. In many respects we may say that there was a good match to the medium here: the constituency of the students, the forms of assessment, and the nature of the academic topic may have been optimised to ensure participation. This favourable mix must be kept in mind when extrapolating to other teaching contexts.

Text of this section by Charles Crook, editor Erica McAteer

Computer-Mediated Conferencing: Grounded Guidelines