Procrastadabbler

I think I’ve found something here. I’ve been struggling struggling struggling with the article I’m trying to write based on my past year’s research. My original question was what are the digital literacies of adolescents outside of school, what are they doing inside of schools, and what do they see as the connection (or not). What I’ve found is that what students do outside of school is actually pretty narrow. And what they do inside of school is pretty narrow. And there’s minimal overlap in terms of actual technology use, but there is overlap in terms of the underlying practices of information grabbing and remixing. But that’s not what I’m writing about. That will come next.

What I’m struggling with now is how technology mediates participation. I’m finding that it needs to be analyzed through a CHAT lens because the construction of participation is the complex interaction of multiple elements. But more interestingly (at least to me) is how participation can be deleted or negated.

Now this isn’t meant to denigrate the teacher I work with. She’s terrific. This is a co-constructed event.

Schegloff described something called sequential deletion. Not much has been written about it in the research literature. I’ve searched and searched and found little (three articles in medicine to be exact). But what I’m seeing through the close analysis of this event is that the students are trying to participate, but their efforts (one student in particular) are deleted either by their actions/interactions, by the teacher, or by the technology. Contributing to this, of course, is the context of the school, the community, and their lives. It’s never so simple as the actual act.

I’m excited that I finally seem to be making some headway in making sense of this, but I’m frustrated at how slowly my writing is going. I really want to get this article completed and out soon and then start writing the next, more macro piece.

And, oh yeah, there’s teaching to be done to.
And committee work
and service to the community
and family
and…