Greg McVerry

#methods #autoethnography

Doing ethnographic research on the internet “transfers the ethnographic tradition of the researcher as an embodied research instrument to the social spaces of Internet” (Hine, 2008, p. 257, as cited in Airoldi, 2018)

The thick description of an autoethnography often aims to make connections with broader themes and connect the micro personal experience with the macro (Holman Jones, 2019; Wall, 2016).

however, some things also disappear. For ex-ample, if an online space closes down completely and does not get archived, that information is lost forever (Herrmann, 2016).

More of the reason to do an autoethonography from your own site. It is how you ensure artifacts do not disappear. Almost all of my early web teaching artifacts are gone. Walkmyworld relied on Storify and Mozilla webmaker apps. Both are gone, everything 4042.

Another tip: send any artifact to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Furthermore, many online interactions may be inaccessible to researchers because they occur in private, publicly without a hashtag, and on other plat-forms such as Facebook groups.

I think this might change whether you are presently conducting data collection or looking back on your web interactions (as I am) for an autoethnography. I can describe my data sources well. I am also better protected from link rot because I hang and learn in spaces with a commitment to data ownership.

Maha opens with a description of autoethnography. I wonder if the methods still need the justification. This is a common feature in qualitative research, trying to prove your methods matter. Maybe I might just state it matter of factly. Not sure.

The next section then goes into a description of the space and person Maha is and built

Need to read: Baym, N. K., & Markham, A. (2009) Internet inquiry: Dialogue among scholars (pp. vii–xix). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

When I got into Collectivist Massive Open Online Courses (cMOOCs) and started developing my own Personal Learning Network (PLN), online learning became central to my life not just my lifelong learning. I built relationships online and took them deep into collaborations and friendships

Maha does a nice job storytelling her subjectivity statement. I think what I will do is date range my autoethnography but then state

I believed an autoethnography offered the benefits of allowing us to dig deeper into our own self-reflections as participants, bringing out the invisible thinking behind our public interactions.

There are two other reasons why I prefer autoethnography over other research approaches. One is that there are certain experiences, such as the experience of participating in a cMOOC, that are di%cult to understand from an abstract perspective

Maha then went and used narrative frames and a reflection after each one. Based on work in Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira. I should check this out.

These community guidelines were adapted from Ito (2014). CC 2.0. Community Guidelines for Research Activity. http://forum.connectedcourses.org/t/community-guidelines-for-research-activity which were in turned taken from a study of the open course, Rhizo 14.

This was taken from somewhere else. Folks have done good thinking around syllabi and statements of open. Don't reinvent the wheel

This may leave you with a few questions: What about privacy? What does "public" and "in the open" mean? What will you do with my data?

Open is not private, private is not open. You can engage in #openpedagogy and still be private

This includes Public posts, comments, and artifacts shared on sites, apps and platforms such as Twitter, G+, blogs, Facebook, and Zeega:

Wow Google+ gone. Zeega...gone....Twitter selling third party data and ads...See why privacy and open shoudl begin with students owning theirt data. This is why #IndieWeb makes sense

Online communication, such as tweets, blog posts, and comments are generally out in the open and technically “public” and available for researchers to analyze and quote. Internet researchers have, however, documented how a particular communication may be technically public but viewed by the individual who posted it as meant for a more limited or private context.

Doing what is legal and what is right is not the same thing. Yes I could use this data to my heart content or can I? Is requiring students to use a social network silo truly open pedagogy? Making them allow someone to sell their data?

Participants in #WalkMyWorld may also be contacted and recruited to participate in surveys and interviews for specific research studies. In these cases, it will be incumbent upon the researcher to offer a clear explanation of the consent and privacy procedures, how the data will be used, and what benefit the research will provide to the individual and the #WalkMyWorld community. The researcher should also consider offering interviewees the opportunity to review transcripts and quotes.

IRB still matters when doing OER research

#openpedagogy Think and prepare students for #contextcollapse