Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
are interpreted and influence the articulation of subsequent postings and actions.
On the community level, the meanings may contribute to a continually evolving
culture through structuration processes (Giddens, 1984b). The VMT Project is ori-
ented toward the processes at the group unit of analysis, which build upon, connect
and mediate the individual and community phenomena.
Elements from the individual and community levels only affect the group level
if they are referenced in the team's interaction. Therefore, we do not need to gather
data about the students or their communities other than what appears in the inter-
action record. We do not engage in surveys or interviews of the students or their
teachers. For one thing, the design of the VMT Project prohibits access to these
sources of data, because the students are only available during the chat sessions.
External sources of data would be of great interest for other research questions hav-
ing to do with individual learning or cultural changes, but for our research question,
they are unnecessary and might even form a distraction or skew our analysis because
it would cause our readings of the postings to be influenced by information that the
group had not had.
By moving to the disembodied online realm of group cognition in VMT, it is
easier for us to abandon the positivist metaphors of the mechanistic worldview. Not
only is it clear that the virtual group does not exist in the form of a physical object
with a persistent memory akin to a computer storage unit, but even the individual
participants lack physical presence. All that exists when we observe the replayed
chats are the traces of a discourse that took place years ago. Metaphors that might
come naturally to an observer of live teamwork in a workplace or classroom—
personalities, the group, learning, etc.—no longer seem fundamental. What exist
immediately are the textual, graphical and symbolic inscriptions. These are signif-
icant fragments, whose meaning derives from the multi-layered references to each
other and to the events, artifacts and agents of concern in the group discourse. This
meaning is as fresh now as when the discourse originated and can still be read off
the traces by an analyst, much as by the original participants. This shows that the
meanings shared by the groups are not dependent upon mental states of the individ-
ual students—although the students may have had interpretations of those meanings
in mind, external to the shared experience. The form of our data reinforces our focus
on the level of the shared-group-meaning making as an interactional phenomenon
rather than a psychological one.
Instrumentation and Data Formats (Objectivity)
It was noted above that when one videotapes small-group interactions a number
of practical problems arise. Data on face-to-face classroom collaboration runs into
issues of (i) recording and transcribing the verbal interaction, (ii) capturing the
visual interaction and (iii) knowing about all the influences on the interaction.
The data are in effect already partially interpreted by selective placement of the
microphone and camera. It is further interpreted by transcription of the talk and is
