Community of Inquiry: TeachING not teachER presence

Hey there blogger audience! Well, I assume someone is still there despite not having blogged in a great while. It's hard to believe that July is almost over, and there is only one more month of summer left (😢). Things have been fairly busy, between teaching INSDSG 684, doing a much (much) deeper dive into the CoI, and rewriting my intro chapter for the dissertation proposal†, there has been little time to blog.  Or rather, I guess I could have blogged, but due to my disconnect from my regular communities of practice, nothing really seemed worthwhile writing about.  Until now!

So, back when I was initially contemplating my dissertation topic I thought I'd do a mixed methods research study, possibly with the CoI instrument as that quantitative component.  I nixed that idea early on because I honestly thought that I would get someone who's a stickler for the notion that Quantitative must equal generalizability, and I know that from my sample (even if everyone participates), generalizability isn't attainable. Good description is, but not generalizability.  So I switched to to qualitative-only.  After a good discussion with one of my co-supervisors (where my fears were put to rest 😊) the issue of the CoI came up again (not by me).  This was the third time CoI was brought up (first by me, then by one co-supervisor in 2017, then another in in 2018). I figured that it would be worthwhile to pursue mixed methods again‡.

The next big decision was which elements of CoI to measure for our rhizocollabs.  Social (✓), Cognitive (✓), Teaching (?) How about some of the proposed extensions (?). Social and Cognitive seemed like a no brainer.  TeachING presence, defined as "the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educational worthwhile learning outcomes"♠ seems important as a coordinating function, and it emphasizes the doing not the doer so measuring some aspect of coordination in these collaboratives (be they "swarms" or not) seems important.  Garrison and others also point out (many, many, times) that it's teachING presence, not teachER presence, and students can exhibit such teachING presence as well in a CoI.  But, when one looks at the CoI survey instrument all questions regarding the teachING presence focus on the instructor. Hmmmmm😖. When you do transcript analysis I can see being able to identify instances of teaching presence amongst non-instructor members of a CoI, but the instrument seems to focus a ton on the instructor.  I've decided to try to measure teaching presence in our collaborations, but I'll be tweaking the CoI instrument questions in this category to be more group oriented rather than teacher and instructional design related.

Between the notes from the articles I read, and the notes from books on CoI, I've got around 40 pages of notes.  Over the next week or so I'll go over them and write a draft of the CoI section for my literature review.  Once I get the all-clear from my co-supervisors for my intro chapter it's full steam ahead to tweak the literature review, which is gargantuan.

Onwards and upwards!




Marginalia:
† I managed to trim five whole pages from the intro chapter while adding, what I hope is, much more detail about what I'd like to do.
‡ Hence the intro re-write, and the much deeper dive into CoI. I am actually glad this happened because through reading more of Garrison's work there is a connection between collaboration & CoI.
See here for more on TP.

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