I see two courses of action:
Drop the digital bit - (ouch :(

Or establish why the digital bit is so important to me.....

...my first response would be...for as long as I've really been engaged in technology my fascination with it has been in the way it's able to reveal the invisible and visualise it in unusual and surprising and revealing ways...and once again I see it in this project as a way to expose our bodily behaviours during learning, in order to become aware, reflect upon and understand them better........

"This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the
uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosopy, it considers how being
online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic
practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on higher education as troublesome,
anxiety‐inducing and ‘strange’, viewing online learning and teaching practices through the lens of an
uncanny which is productively disruptive in its challenging of the ‘certainties’ of place, body and text.
Uncanny pedagogies are seen as a generative way of working with the new ontologies of the digital."
Bayne, S. (2010) Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education, Vol 8, No.1. pp. 5-13. (pdf draft) accessed 3rd March 2010 http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/pdfs/academetron.pdf

I am interested in how raising awareness of the body in relation to learning might affect one's ability to take advantage of the body for learning (positively or negatively). Raising awareness using digital tools tools and then perhaps, perhaps, not sure about this...also just discusson/using video/other analogue techniques support online? This might be too much. But would be interesting to make the comparison.

Might greater awareness of the body (in a learning context), help raise awareness of learning styles and perhaps alternative ones (not the audio or visual which is the current focus) offering new approaches. (Does awareness of learning styles and approaches improve learning? Something to look out for)...(Does a raised awareness of the ears/or the eyes/audiovisual during learning raise awareness of learning styles or audio learning styles - put like this, I'm not sure the first question makes all that much sense.. ) Question revision....Does a greater awareness of the body (whether discussed or visualised), during learning help encourage exploration of kinesthetic learning, raise awareness of learning styles and extend study approaches...something more like this....still not quite right....very awkward...I don't feel that raising awareness of ears and sound during learning would necessarily raise awareness of my aural learning styles or offer alternative approaches to learning unless I was an amazing leaner so it has to be more than that...and maybe there's already research that states it better and has explored this a bit...I think it has to be more...it has to be.....about relating the body, and what it is doing to the learning - so what is your body doing? what kind of learning is taking place....I wonder what I mean by learning? AHA is learning for me...everything else is steps on the way to the aha....so writing, being frustrated/angry, having some spaced out time.....feeling reflective, feeling perplexed...and how would that work during all those times that I'm not actually aware that I'm learning - it's all happening under the surface. I feel as if perhaps I need to use digital tools to track these things - that's why they're important - to track without being too obtrusive....and without requiring the students to be writing or noting things down.....(I did have a crazy idea about pressing buttons to register the feelings they're experiencing in relation to their writing....blah blah..)

It would also be interesting to also find out how raised awareness of body effects "kinesthetic" learners (if there is such a thing...or rather those who are already partly aware of the importance of bodies, or those who at least end up with high kinesthetic scores using Gardners questionnaires (did HE design those questionnaires?)) and how it might influence those who are not. (as usual I'm thinking about my sister in law, and perhaps R?). And would these interventions improve their sense of mind body integration in online learning (which at the moment is frequently cited as not being there - so would their attitudes change to the online environment)?

My group are..I think...Learners who don't have the time or money to attend face to face HE and are attending on a part-time basis. Who spend a lot of their time in a job that is NOT related to the learning (because I think bodily integration is already much greater if you're using online learning within a related working context). The age thing is difficult. I haven't yet found a lot of information about REALLY what people think about online v offline, body v mind relationships in distance learning. But I don't want to do this research myself. Sian Baynes' is the only research i've found. I hope there's more.....perhaps I'll have to in order to measure difference in attitude anyway..come to think of it.

Why am I doing this piece of research?

Why do I want to do this piece of research?

What are my research aspirations?

What do I understand to be my research context?

What do I see as the consequences of my answers to the preceding questions for my future approach to my research project?

I think it's two things...

an awareness of how we use our body to communicate with others....our gestures, our smell, our expressions, our posture, our movements....

but also an awareness of how we use our body to communicate with ourselves.....how our fingers explore and touch, our physical habits and how we interact with places and things, how our bodies feel, our physical rhythmns (I'd call it biorhythmns if it wasn't for the fact that that term hadn't already been taken by pseudoscientists/or protoscientists..I don't know much about the 'science' except I find the idea of a algorithm being capable of defining how I feel slightly outlandish to find it a convincing science...at the present moment at least..perhaps not in the future.).

Back to the point then...I am interested in both these things, and I think the two are very closely related...but can i really explore both? Do I have the capacity?

I think what I must mean is primarily text-based rather than visual/audio/video-based communities. Rather than beyond-text....thoroughly rooted IN text :)

Yes, it's true that online learners learn online...but only sometimes...they also do a lot of learning offline.

OK, and that would be fine except when I'm talking about helping learners understand the role of their body in learning...if I start saying I want to look at the role of the body in learning for online learners, I'm not only talking about the online interactions, I'm also wanting to help them understand what happens during all that time that they are offline. Except of course they are never entirely offline...even if their computer is offline, their mind and body may still be partly online....it's not like there's a wall between their online and offline learning experiences...I am sure both kinds of experiences live on in their minds and bodies...whether they're at Sainsbury's or sleeping, or on the bus or reading a book or playing mindfield on their computer....

And I also started to realise that learners who learn in classrooms, do not only learn in classrooms, they spend a large proportion of their time learning outside of the classroom (whether they're aware of it or not). And when they are out of their classrooms (and increasingly when they are IN if they have a mobile phone), they too may also be learning partly online....even if it's not officially part of the learning activity - they'll be learning online, thinking online, possibly interacting with their classmates (if not their teachers), online.....(regardless of whether there's a VLE)...

And then I realised that we are probably never entirely offline or online anymore.....that if I am looking at the role of the body in learning, regardless of whether the learner is a distance learner or a face-to-face classroom learners, they are always partially on and partially offline..

so how to I distinguish between these two kinds of learners. And why should I care about the distinction. Should I even make the distinction? Perhaps I should just talk about learners or blended learners (all mixed up and messy)...how do I focus in? How can I be clear about the boundaries of my research.....?

Classroom

How great would it be if you could speak a short 15 second message into your phone and then have it instantly appear as a twitter posting? no more fiddly texts...this is truly on the move blogging...

Anne and I have 16 beautiful N91s thanks to RLO CETL to use with students.

I am still working with Spinvox to find out why it does not work with Ping.

Jott is only for US users (but seems to work well).

Twitterfone looks like it would be perfect but it's by invitation only and at the moment I don't have an invite....

I have a week to work this out before I have to lump for Voice>text>blog :(

And I want this to it out so badly that I have gone into obsessive mode where I find it impossible to htink about much else. This is the point where I start to think about taking a train to Ireland just to procure an invite!

2. Are there other definitions I have encountered (not necc just academic)?

3. What are the different purposes which research may serve? Why does it happen? (e.g. might just be to keep yourself in a job, to generate new knowlege..). Why am I doing research?

Keep it concise - 4-5 bullets. After...

Have a think about whether I changed my mind during the process? How did it make me feel to have to do it? what did I get out of it? What do I think Paul wanted me to get out of it?

I attended a twitter conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. (well, you could say it's still going somewhat). This was an enormously enlightening experience. I'm blogging it so that as i get up to speed with Twitter I don't forget my first impressions...

I have a twitter account. I was not sure if it was easy to set up (it was a long time ago), but A was also on it without any problems. Setting up the phone so it was possible to twitter by SMS - a bit of a to and fro but not too difficult.

Getting to grips with the idea of a twitter conference - much less of a comfortable experience. Where WAS it? If there had been a single place that it took place - I would have felt more comfortable but it seemed to be in several places - in Dim Dim to begin with, in Moodle (for the bulk of the pre-existing content and resources), AND in twitter. I was nervous before we started. Getting into Moodle not entirely straightforward.....Getting to Dim Dim was very easy...but if you were late and didn't attend that...it would have been very hard to get up to speed - because that's where things like hash tags were explained. No hashtag, no conference, pretty much.

The discussion - again we came in late and unlike a physical conference, where you sort of know where you are - slip in at the back.....look at people's faces (maybe look at the hand-out on your seat), prehaps look at the notes people are making - how many people are checking their email? OK, you're orientated.....or actually, the twitter conference does not have presentations - the focus is on the questions at the end. So potentially much more interactive which is fantastic.....but hard to just slip into halfway.....

So we enter twitter and what do we find? a huge list of tweets - short snippets - without context it's sometimes hard to decode them - it's not quite like the English I'm used to....and no real thread....answers all over the place.....hard to follow them, they coming thick and fast, by the time you've decoded the first 4 there are another 7 above them. Refresh (takes blimmin ages), and then there are even more that have yet to appear - another refresh. It's quite draining.

A great thing - I booked a couple of days before - i knew Tues and Wed were busy but i thought I could squeeze it in.....so I could still attend - that wouldn't have happened if i had to be "away" for 2 days. At the same time, I was NOT able to do 2 things at the same time as I had expected. I did not find it possible to attend a twitter conference imbetween my work. I was either engaged with the conference or I was working. the first morning I was "at the conference" the afternoon I got around to going through all my emails and discovered lots of urgent work. The next day I just worked. I didn't get a chance to visit the twitter conference once. I was only aware of it going on in the background because I kept receiving notifications in my email....I could not close off work. These are all acknowledged issues with any training or engagement that takes place at your everyday desk. Nothing new here, but it really brought it home.

what I was also aware of however was how utterly immediate it was. There was not a moment when I was not replying or reading a response or thinking of what to say next. I felt as if I was totally involved (when I WAS involved at all). The immediacy is impressive. Also it is so fast that I felt much freer to just say something - it was there and then it was gone. It didn't matter if it wasn't too deep.

and it's still going - plus I feel that there is now an accessible CoP, as opposed to a number of disparate attendees, a pile of business cards and lots of separate emails to send. Even if a conference sets up a social network like Bing, somehow that is still a closed off network....you can't then just dash something off to someone else. Twitter feels very interconnected in that sense - you get a sense of flow of ideas, from one to the other and back again....many different voices on many different subjects.....but you have to learn to go with the flow....and distraction is absolutely inevitable...almost part of the process...

OK, I'll write more as and when i remember it...

Here is their definition/explanation:

"A situation consists of the spatiotemporal ordering of objects and agents alongside physically given constraints or characteristics like gravitational force or light intensity. Of interest to an agent2 are the stimuli that it can perceive with its sensors. In our view, situatedness refers to specific situations in which actions take place. Actions are understood here not only as task oriented behaviour but in a broader sense (cf. Clancey, 2002). In contrast to situation, context is a general construct that depends on various factors and is definable on at least two different levels. On the one hand, there are socio-cultural (global) contexts such as language. On the other hand, smaller (local) contexts can also be found, e.g., the context of a seminar. The actions of an individual, from now on called an agent, are constrained by this context. A student at a seminar has to act according to her role as a student, i.e. she has to be attentive, ask smart questions, and discuss the topic of the seminar. Dancing, singing, or swearing is not expected from her as it is not licensed by the seminar context. In this sense, a context supplies certain patterns of behaviour and of analysis for situations an agent can be confronted with. A provision of this kind is exemplified in section 5. A situation is thus embedded in a certain context. This context influences or determines a situation and its analysis by the agent. In a
given situation, there is not a single context but a great number of different, possibly overlapping contexts. In order to analyze whether something is context sensitive or situated, it is necessary to look at the specific situation and figure out which contexts are present and which role the agent plays in each of them".