Educational Research

This paper explores the roots and presents some forms of phenomenology starting with the origin of Husserl’s phenomenology and his notion of going back to things as they are in order to seek their essences. The paper then looks at the different perspectives, starting with the empirical phenomenology: its disciplinary linkage to psychology, its focus on the phenomenon itself, and the analysis of the structural in order to discern how structures speak. Existential phenomenology, on the other hand, sees human experiences of the world as being worth studying, where we are not only epistemological spectators in the world but are also ontologically embedded in it. Finally, Hermeneutic phenomenology acknowledges that humans have prejudices and their preconceptions from their experiences are nearly impossible to ignore. Understanding is achieved through dialogue. The hermeneutic circle refers to the interplays between our self-understanding and our understanding of the world, and entails an existential task with which each of us is confronted. The paper then focuses on the authors’ experiences during our PhD research. The paper highlights some differences in research approaches, aligned to different subtle perspectives, which offers the researcher flexibility. The aim for this paper has been to engage the networked learning community in discussing the suitability of choosing phenomenology as a research methodology. A snapshot in the exploration of the researchers decisions to use phenomenology for Technology Enhanced/Networked Learning research is presented and their reflections on their progress to discern the differences between the choices we made in developing our respective research designs. Some of the reasons behind our decisions, with the purpose of entering into dialogue with the Technology Enhanced/Networked Learning community, are presented.

This paper explores the roots and presents some forms of phenomenology starting with the origin of Husserl's phenomenology and his notion of going back to things as they are in order to seek their essences. The paper then looks at the different perspectives, ...

Online learning using communities of practice as a model for learning is fast becoming a new landscape for educational institutions. In constructing online communities of practice (CoP), the most obvious approach has been for academics to set up the CoP on a university system integrated with a formal teaching programme, located in the same place. We take the view that Place is a social construct, derived from the people that contribute to it and imbue it with meaning. Our position is that the places in which formal and informal learning occur need to be distinct and should have different feelings of ownership, governance, purpose and meaning. Providing for informal learning experiences in a place clearly owned and managed in an academic presence is counter-productive to learning that is intended to be owned by practitioners and located in their work space. We suggest that educators do not belong in communities of practice, do not belong in informal learning communities and that form...

This paper examines Oxford University students’ conceptions of the role of the tutorial in their learning. An analysis of interviews with 28 students constituted four qualitatively different conceptions of the ‘Oxford Tutorial’. These ranged from the tutorial involving the tutor explaining to the student what the student did not know, to the tutorial involving the tutor and the student in exchanging different points of view and both coming to a new understanding of the topic under discussion. These different conceptions also appeared to be related to variations in students’ views of the role of the work done in preparation for the tutorial, their view of the student’s and tutor’s roles in the tutorial, and the conception of knowledge that students adopted in relation to the tutorial. The implications of this study are discussed in terms of the relations between students’ conceptions of tutorials and their anticipated learning outcomes and its implications for contexts outside of Oxford in terms of students’ conceptions of academic tasks.