894 Looking at outlines

After looking at Kim's outline...

Kim defends the reason that she wants to examine these theories.  She also includes a sense of how she is going to unpack the theory in terms of her own object of study.  This is a particular weakness in my outline at the moment, and in fact, an area that I could have improved in my first case study.  Another thing that I can learn from this treatment is to unpack the theory within my analysis.  For some reason, I decided to explain the theory in one section and then apply the theory in another.  Although that approach is reasonable, I think I can make my write-up more efficient and at least as effective by synthesizing these elements.  I don’t think I was confused by anything; Kim’s outline includes enough detail to be clear and her organization, as I’ve already said, looks pretty effective.  Likewise, I honestly don’t think there is an area that needs to be expanded.  The limitations section isn’t fleshed out, but she admits that.  

After looking at Alex's outline...

There were a number of things that I liked about Alex’s outline. The idea of tracing Blackboard over time was interesting, and I can see how Prior’s version of CHAT could lead to such historical tracing.  I was intrigued by looking at the idea of questioning the “pedagogical and epistemological ethos” of the platform.  I would be interested in seeing the insights.  The theory in the hypertext readings wasn’t obvious enough to me to consider applying the concepts as theory, so I was impressed by the fact that Alex was looking at community and connectivity in this way.  It seems like a valid application to me, though it hadn’t occurred to me when I read the readings.  There weren’t too many things that I was confused about in terms of Alex’s intentions, though a few terms were less obvious to me.  For example, I wasn’t sure what “challenge-based exigency” meant. I think the “questions of absence, absenteeism, inaccessibility, dehumanization, isolation, and alienation” sound interesting, though just from the outline I’m not sure how these would tie back into Johnson-Eilola’s ideas or how they would play out in the analysis.  Of course part of my problem here is that I found only some of the ideas in the hypertext readings sensible.  I’m particularly impressed with the attempt to apply Joyce’s “poetic” ideas.  That is exactly the way I found his ideas in more generous moments! That being said, I think metaphors can be productive for analysis, so again, this will be interesting to see.  Overall, looks like this will be an inventive analysis.