Comments on: When Worlds Don’t Collide

By: When Worlds Don’t Collide | In Practice

When Worlds Don’t Collide | In Practice — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:50:16 +0000

[...] April 6, 2008 by Doug Noon Crossposted on Borderland: [...]

By: Sarah Puglisi

Sarah Puglisi — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:22:36 +0000

Man, I enjoy reading your blog.
The greatest way to create the understanding necessary might be in some role reversal. Perhaps our greatest dis-service to our understandings in not getting into each other shoes a bit more.

By: Doug Noon

Doug Noon — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:08:31 +0000

Charles, I’m grateful for the time and thought you put into your comment. My experience with classroom research and university oversight has been that internal review board policies are not always compatible with the goals and methods of teachers. Yes, of course, student identities need to be protected the same as any research informant. The ethics of publishing our observations of classroom activity is a real problem for teachers. I agree with you that practitioner accounts are generally undisciplined and atheoretical. But formal research into classrooms has to acknowledge its limitations, as well. The rift between social and academic language is, for me, a central difficulty I have with using blogs in the classroom.

This topic may be worth a few more posts.

By: Charles

Charles — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:14:44 +0000

A few comments. You are not likely to find links back to the students’ blogs because research usually requires that the identities of participants, especially minors, be kept anonymous. It’s also possible that the author by providing her online identity, she might also be providing leads to the students’ identities, which would be prohibited. From another perspective, does a doctor need to have the patient’s disease to be able to diagnose it?

Yes, more case studies of students from various backgrounds and especially failure stories are important to get a better understanding of how identities are established.

As for “what can the academy tell us about blogging that we don’t already know, or won’t find out on our own?”, there are some differences. For those in the academy, research is their job. They’re trained to conduct systematic research and interpret their results theoretically. The difference is sort of like the trained psychologist and the every day person. Much of what the psychologist does is common sense and known by most, because we constantly interact with others and interpret those interactions. Yet, we expect the psychologist to have a better understanding of that “common sense” and to have better ideas of how to interpret it. Of course, there are exceptions at both ends, and I would expect the layperson to take all research with a grain of salt and consider how it applies or doesn’t to their particular situation–just as you commented on the demographics of this case study and how it might not apply to less advantaged students. The best of both worlds is to learn from each other: the layperson from systematic research and theory, and the all-too-frequently closeted academic from reality.

On the academy admitting students’ social languages, think about business, law, medicine or most careers. Business and other reports are not likely to accept such social language. Students know their social language, but not so well formal language. For students to be more successful in their careers, then, it is much more important that the university help them acquire formal language.