An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies

Bakelite and other Shibboleths: eBay listings and the 'policing' of 'amateur' collecting knowledges within the space of an online old radio forum

eBay, the online auction site, is composed of thousands of item descriptions constructed by sellers themselves. Sellers may be collectors or antiques experts, but often they are amateurs selling off unwanted items. As such, eBay becomes an unprecedented public space for the performance of amateur collecting and consumption knowledges where experts are being disintermediated by non-expert knowledges. These knowledges have become a major source of discussion on an online old radio discussion forum and the case study presented here contends that amateur knowledges are strongly contested, often in separate online spaces, and as part of identity performance. While a ‘cult of the amateur’ may be occurring online, it is not happening without a fight over knowledge and its performance. eBay is shown as a relational space to the forum, allowing radio experts to perform their own group identity and related practices - distinguished from those seen on eBay. This paper examines these distinctions in detail - the identifying traits or 'Shibboleths' of eBay amateurs - such as the incorrect spelling of 'Bakelite'.

Network-Based Classrooms

Computer-mediated communication is an increasingly familiar part of the educational experiences of students from elementary school through graduate school. This is not surprising, because electronic mail, bulletin boards, gopher servers, and other forms of telecommunication offer conveniences and exciting new possibilities for learning. The rapid expansion of the Internet, the availability of low-cost modems and high-speed data lines, and a growing awareness of the educational possibilities are leading to major changes in classrooms. The many ways in which network-based classrooms are used highlights questions about the goals and means of education that are too often pushed aside. By affording new ways of communicating, these classrooms ask us to rethink questions such as: What role should the teacher have in the classroom? How can students support each other???s learning? What kinds of writing should students learn to do? How should we accommodate, or balance, student interests with other curricular concerns? What is needed to make a classroom become a true learning community? In addition to raising these questions, they provide us with new possibilities for answering them.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Impacts of directed tutorial activities in computer conferencing: a case study

This paper describes a qualitative study of asynchronous electronic conferencing by three tutorial groups on the same postgraduate course (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Worldwide), forming part of an MA in Applied Linguistics (via Distance Education) at the Open University, UK. The groups varied in the degree to which the tutor participated in the discussion and in whether the tutor's input took the form of responding to student posts or the setting of tasks to scaffold the learners' development of academic skills. It is argued that the least interventionist strategy in terms of tutor response and task-setting resulted in the least productive conference discussion in terms of both communicative interaction and academic development, while a more interventionist role by the tutor depended for its success on characteristics of the tutor input and the task set

Chapter 3: Building an Online Learning Community

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

The Online Student: Lurking, Chatting, Flaming and Joking

This paper looks at the use of online conference interaction as a part of a web-based distance-learning course. There has been much debate surrounding the potential of educational technology, particularly online conference interaction, to support teaching and learning yet little attention has been paid to student experiences and understandings of the online learning environment. Drawing on data from auto-ethnographic fieldwork the paper identifies 5 categories of participation in asynchronous online conferences: lurker participation, member participation, expert/experienced participation, flamer participation and joker participation. Through an exploration of these forms of participation the paper attempts to understand and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of situating conference interaction alongside the demands of study. The analysis highlights the role of online conferencing as a space for \'interaction work\' distinct and separated from existing repertoires of formal study. The paper concludes by suggesting that pedagogically successful use of conferences as part of distance learning needs to understand the challenges and demands of remediating existing practices of interaction and study.Distance Learning, Auto-Ethnography, Online Conferencing

Cyberbullying and the Educator’s Responsibility

This paper takes the results of a previous study and considers them in the light of societal concerns about cyberbullying. The topic of cyberbullying attracts a great deal of attention in the more popular media, with many of those involved expressing frustration or uncertain of their responsibilities. The previous study found a relatively high level of cyberbullying among university students and this paper raises issues around what might be institutional, professorial and societal responsibilities. It is hoped that the publication of this paper will generate both an awareness of the problem and discussion on what might be the appropriate action by professors, the university and the students

New literacies and future educational culture

The paper draws attention to three developments that are crucial to online education. First, the new literacy required by group discussion in writing, i.e. by computer‐mediated communication ('e‐talk') is discussed Educators are urged to delimit and structure their courses so that online conversations in writing are successfully framed for effective discourse. Second, new literacy arising from the merging of multimedia with text is considered It is maintained that this will enhance communication, not debase it. Third, the way that increasing ease of information retrieval is eroding boundaries between traditional disciplines is discussed It is argued that this may create new difficulties in education. The paper recommends various ways of overcoming the problems that arise from the three developments