So for 2021, now that I am starting to find myself more comfortable at UTS, I think that it’s time to really start applying myself with some dedication to my research agenda. This is going to be complicated by the increased amount of teaching that I am required to do, but I think that I should be able to manage both that and my research commitments if I am organised and focused. I’m going to do a couple of posts about my different areas of interest here, mostly because I think it will help to spread out my two main interests, even though I do acknowledge that there is some overlap between the two. In this post, I am going to focusing on my research
NOTE: I am becoming increasingly troubled by the use of ‘citizenship’. While I have never used it in the strict politico-legal sense, as in someone belong to a nation, I am conscious that this is still a dominant understanding, and therefore, citizen can be seen to be exclusionary. This is picked up in the Mparntwe (Alice Springs) Declaration, which has changed citizens to members of the community. I’m also conscious that citizenship education carries with it the same limitations. For the moment, I am going to continue using citizenship education, but only until I find a more inclusive term.
Goals
Broadly speaking, my research in this field is related to the way that civics and citizenship learning takes place in online spaces, and especially with, through and by social media. What I am trying to do is explore the way that social media can be used (either intentionally or not) to educate and encourage activism in social movements and other causes. I’m interested in the way that people use the affordances of social media to engage with others, educate themselves and each other, and to encourage themselves and others to take action, in both the virtual real and the physical real spaces. And of course, I’m interested in who is being educated, and who is not in these spaces.
I think there are the following areas that might be worthy of closer examination:
- Fridays4theFuture, both in Australian and overseas.
- Responses to crises through social media: e.g. Covid-19, Bushfires, Floods (especially in Australia)
- Professional Learning opportunities (esp. in Australia’s teaching communities) – e.g. #edureading.
Conceptual Framework
This is a work in process. Clearly, we will be drawing on a number of different theoretical positions. In the first instance, I think that Goodyear and Carvalho’s work on productive learning networks might be of value. I also think that the work on new social movements, and the way they use social media, will be valuable (see Castells, too). Also learning online and through networks, as proposed by David Gauntlett. There is also the civic online persona (Wells) and the affordances of social media (Tufekci). Nathan Jurgenson has also written about the power of hashtags and social media.
This is a high level overview; there is more information that needs to be considered before I state with any clarity my position on these.
Plans
I think there needs to be a two part process. In the first instance, I would like to undertake some data scraping from various social media sites, and then some analysis of this data to identify potential networks. I think that edureading might be a good starting point with this, and then moving on Fridays4theFuture. From this point, I will be able to undertake some visualisation, and it is the insights generated from this visualisation and analysis that will lead to part two.
In part two, I think we could potentially undertake some more qualitative data analysis. This would mean examining the nature of different posts on social media, within the ocntenxft of the network and beyond simply their textual properties. It might also involve interviews and focus groups with various indviduals.
The outcome of this approach might be a new conception of how learning takes place across social media.
Tools
I’m going to be using a variety of different tools to gather, process and analyse the data. They will include:
Gathering: InstacrawlR, Instagram-Scraper, Twint
Analysis: R
Visualisation: Gephi
Publishing: RPubs