Microblogging about teaching: Nurturing participatory cultures through collaborative online reflection with pre-service teachers
Section snippets
Theoretical perspective
The 2009 report by Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, and Robison contended that the proliferation of content creation and digital sharing by young people (Lenhart & Madden, 2005) has resulted in the emergence of participatory cultures. These cultures arise because technologies allow those with similar interests (e.g., gaming, popular culture, lifestyle choices) to communicate, collaborate, share, and learn from each other in ways that would have previously been difficult, if not impossible.
Review of literature
While reflective practice maintains a central role in most pre-service teacher programs (McCabe, Walsh, Wideman, & Winter, 2009), it is not easily defined (Sparks-Langer, 1992) or nurtured. Reflection is a complex process that balances meta-cognitive contemplation with an eye toward refining future actions. We agreed with Dewey’s (1933) description of reflection as “turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious and consecutive consideration, thereby enabling us to act in a deliberate
Methods
Our study relied on both qualitative and quantitative methods, but it was undergirded by an interpretivist perspective that recognizes the diverse nature of learning environments and the tentative nature of educational research. As we considered reflective practice both within this study and our classes, we sought to maintain congruency among our epistemological assumptions, aims, and context. While our study population was a decent size, we did not seek to produce generalizable results because
Findings
In order to address our three primary research questions, we organized findings according to three main categories: implementation, nature and types of online interactions, and student and instructor perceptions. While these categories overlapped with each other, they also helped us maintain a narrative format that is in harmony with the flow of our classes and our research ventures over the semester (e.g., the usability data from the end-of-study survey is presented alongside corresponding
Analysis and implications
While there is of course a difference between the digital space on Edmodo that we provided and those which people seek out informally, we undertook this study with the hope that some of the affordances of online affinity spaces and participatory cultures might translate to collaborative reflection among our pre-service teachers. In general, we found that many of these chief characteristics did translate to our medium and situation, thus fostering a promising learning environment for our
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