Читать книгу Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces - Hannah R. Gerber - Страница 19

Ethnography focuses on understanding cultures and communities. It emerged out of the field of anthropology in the early twentieth century and means “writing about people” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p. 44). Ethnography aims to better understand the perspectives, attitudes, shared values, norms, practices, and interactions of a given group of people through rich, thick description (Geertz, 1973). As such, ethnography requires researchers to become participant observers, immersing themselves in a specific community context in order to collect data such as artifacts, interviews, and extensive field notes. In online spaces, researchers have conducted investigations in situ (e.g., Black, 2008; Ito et al., 2010; Lee, 2014), adapting ethnographic methods to engage in online and connective ethnography.

Online ethnography, also referred to as virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000) and netnography (Kozinets, 2009), is concerned with the data collection methods used to understand interactions within online spaces. Online data collection methods build on traditional ethnographic principles, which include a bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1962) of methods and tools that are continually refashioned and reworked to address the needs of the researcher.

Participant observation in online environments, whether through interactions with participants in massively multiplayer gaming worlds (Nardi, 2010; Steinkuehler, 2007), or interactions with participants in fanfiction communities (Magnifico, Curwood, & Lammers, 2015; Martin, et al. 2013), has become a central component within online ethnographic research. However, this kind of research also creates the need for researchers to better understand how to define the boundaries of a learning space. As explained further in Chapter Two, a field site for an online study can be both moving and porous, and researchers need to remain aware of these changes and be flexible in their approaches. The field site is dictated by the interactions among the individuals, the resources and tools that they use, and the social context of the learning situations.

Because of the importance of both online and offline spaces in people’s learning, many researchers have recognized that the online and offline worlds inform one another. Thus, researchers need to pay close attention to the intersections between worlds (Fields & Kafai, 2009; Leander, 2008; Leander & McKim, 2003). One way is through connective ethnography, which acknowledges the connection between online and offline practices and environments.

Kevin M. Leander (2008) explained that, stemming from Hine’s (2000) concept of virtual ethnography, connective ethnography is “a stance or orientation to Internet-related research that considers connections and relations as normative social practices and Intent social spaces as complexly connected to other social spaces” (p. 37). Examples include, but are not limited to, the study of instant messaging practices among adolescents (Jacobs, 2004) or the ways in which immigrant youth develop their literacy skills through their computer-mediated communication (Lam, 2000).