Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Some Perplexities of Teaching Philosophy Online

Author: Annamaria Carusi

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 5

Number: 2

Start page: 153

End page: 172

Return to vol. 5 no. 2 index page

Introduction

In 'Taking Philosophical Dialogue Online' (2003), I put forward a rather optimistic view of the possibilities of using online discussion as a way of developing or enhancing students' higher order cognitive skills and argumentational skills. Adopting a strategy from Lakatos, I suggested that 'this may be a period during which the hypothesis that computer-mediated communication leads to [...] learning benefits, is protected from disconfirming evidence, since there is good reason to think that ultimately it will be well-supported' (Discourse Vol.3 No.1, 2003 p.130). Despite conflicting evidence, it seemed that the medium should work if used 'properly', and I made a few suggestions as to what 'properly' meant.

There were three main grounds for this optimism:

These three grounds together should add up to adequate preliminary support for the view that putting forward, defending and challenging arguments in an inter-subjective forum which allows for informal but written articulation of thought should be beneficial for the development of argumentation skills.

Since then, I have designed and written two online philosophy courses, one for the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, a history of ideas course on human nature, and the other, an introductory philosophy course for the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and my experience with the medium is now much more extensive, both as a teacher and researcher. In particular, the course titled 'Introduction to Philosophy' was designed to put into practice some of the principles of 'Taking Philosophy Online', including a number of student-led discussion activities as recommended in that article. As a researcher, I have been interested in online discourse as a medium for social interaction, as well as in the more pedagogical question, evaluating whether it is indeed a good medium for developing argumentational skills; as a teacher of philos-ophy, I am interested in evaluating how well it works as a tool for teaching philosophy and philosophical skills.

The 'Introduction to Philosophy' course is a continuing education course aimed mainly at adults. Although assessed, these courses are undertaken largely for pleasure and curiosity. In comparison to teaching philosophy to adults in traditional face-to-face contexts, it seemed—albeit on an impressionistic level—to be a quantum improvement with respect to the quality of the interaction, and the levels of student-student and student-tutor engagement. Not only did I, as the tutor, believe that students' skills improved over the duration of the course, but the students seemed to share this view, as reported in post-course surveys and questionnaires. On the whole, students said that they had enjoyed themselves enormously and that they felt that they had learned much, in particular that they had learned 'to argue' 1. Indeed, the course has been successful in that it continues to attract students, who go on to do further courses, and in that its basic design has been used in other philosophy courses. However, there were also some students who were not quite as persuaded by the efficacy of online discussion for their own learning, and one student in particular expressed his personal reaction to it in a way which I think may capture the frustration of many philosophers using the medium:

During my career [...] I became skilled at participating in chaired meetings where body language played a part and the answer to a question was gradually moulded into an acceptable form through a recognisable thread of discussion. Consequently, what I find I have great difficulty in coping with is an unmediated discussion where ideas are tossed around in a seemingly near-retention fashion. It seems like building a dry-stone wall where, no sooner have you found the best stone to fill a hole than someone either takes that stone away or chips bits off so that it no longer fits the hole. 2

The discussion was supposed to be a structured and moderated one, in line with the suggestions for online discussions made in 'Taking Philosophical Dialogue Online' ; clearly, however, the order and (more-or-less) coherence that this form of dis-cussion is supposed to bring was not experienced by this student, and, I suspect, many others. Indeed, as I started to analyse the discussion subsequently, I could not find the order and coherence that I had believed to be there, as the tutor of the course.

  1. As I am not reporting on the evaluation of the course as such in this paper, details of numbers etc., and other aspects of the analysis of post-course surveys and questionnaires will be omitted.
  2. Email correspondence, used with permission.

This article is not meant as a systematic evaluation of the extent to which online discussions were indeed pedagogically effective, and if so, whether they were more effective than face-to-face courses for similar groups of students. Instead, I am interested in a more basic set of questions into how to carry out the research which will allow an answer to such questions as the following:

These are for the most part questions that need an empirical research approach. However, perhaps the most surprising discovery of my expe-rience of online discourse for teaching philosophy has been the extent to which philosophy is involved in framing and guiding the empirical research of the discourse.

Some initial perplexities of research

The very first perplexity of researching online philosophy, the one which gives rise to all the others, is that there is no way of distancing oneself from the technology in order to answer these questions. Just as it is not easily available to us to stand outside of literacy in order to answer the question of whether writing and reading has affected the way we think, so—in at least some not insignificant senses—we're getting to the position where we cannot stand outside of the new tech-nologies to answer the question of what effect they're having. Of course, there are still some senses in which we can do just that: to the extent that we know what non-online-technological learning is, we can gauge whether it has been affected by being 'supported' or 'enhanced' by online technologies. That means holding fixed the non-online-tech-nological conception of learning while testing to see what difference technology has made. However, it is that very conception of learning that the technologies may be putting under pressure. This is not an idle speculation: distributed cognition, critical and interpretational practices geared to hypertext and the World Wide Web, and slippages occurring in notions and expectations of knowledge and information are, at the very least, testing traditional conceptions of what it is to learn anything, including philosophy.

There is another way in which research on the new technologies cannot distance itself from the new technologies, and that is in the tools used to carry out the research. For example, teaching in the medium of online discussions also means that there is an automatically generated 'transcript' which can be subjected to any number of different analyt-ical techniques, quantitative and qualitative, very often supported by technologies. This will be a whole new area of research: how do the technologies that we have for counting, searching, segmenting, anno-tating, commenting, organising, saving, encoding, decoding etc. affect the kind of research that is done on material that is itself technologically couched? 3

The situation is that we are trying to understand the nature of online discussion; our research into online discussion accesses the discussion online, and can operate upon the online discussion in much the same way as can participation in online discussion with respect to the manipulation, ordering and sequencing of items in the discussion; and it can do much more—subjecting it to concordancing, data-mining, A comparison with the way in which instruments impact on science will be worthwhile. For example, Hacking (1983). coding, etc. (for example, Wegerif & Mercer 1999).

Where is neutrality and objectivity when the means for doing research do not come apart from the thing researched? These are old questions for philosophy of social science, so perhaps we are, after all, on the familiar terrain of known uncertainties that bedevil enquiry. This problematic can be distinguished into issues relating to (1) the fact that the 'object' of research has a view; and (2) the fact that researchers are not distinct from that which they research. In technological research on technological genres of discourse there is a third fact, (3) the research itself—its agenda, its topics, questions and procedures—is (at least partly) driven by the technology. We may say that this is a not unencountered problem or set of issues (and again a comparison with Hacking's discussion of the use of instruments in science would be of interest), but, then again, it is unclear whether it is indeed the same old issues re-emerging, or whether, faced with this newly emerging research scenario, we cannot help but try to probe it with some old but now inappropriate questions. At this early stage, answering these questions is like trying to get a grip on jelly with jelly.

Teaching philosophical argument online

Online discussions are a 'blend' of the oral-aural and the written. This is particularly marked in asynchronous discussions, which are supposed to allow for reflection before contributing (before partici-pating, before writing, before uttering), and the type of turn-taking which borrows more from the exchange of letters or emails than does synchronous discussion (or 'chat', the very name of which shows its modelling on speech). I have already mentioned how I had thought that this should be an advantage as a discursive strategy in getting students to learn how to 'do' philosophy: not quite the seminar, but not quite the essay either. Noting however, the tendency of online discus-sion to be chaotic, trivial or to simply die out, I stressed the importance of structuring discussions, and of moderating and guiding them. The following is an example of the way in which the discussions were structured.

Activity 2.2 (required)

This is a group activity in the form of a student-led discussion. For this activity you'll work with your tutor group: Hume, Berkeley or Locke (you'll have received an email to tell you which group you're in). Your tutor will nominate a leader. For this activity you should consider the questions:

Procedure for this activity:

Because this is a group activity, which you will all be moving through together, you need to work together to a timetable. The overall deadline for the activity is [deleted]. However I have suggested deadlines for each stage—though I would urge you to try to respond as promptly as possible in order to make the leader's task easier. The discussion leader will post to the discussion board his or her answer to these questions, and try to convince other students that he / she is right. (Suggested deadline) All other students in the group will challenge the discussion leader's answer. (Suggested deadline) The discussion leader responds to challenges; to which others in the group will reply by saying that they either are or are not persuaded (giving reasons). (Suggested deadline)

And this is an example of guidelines given to students with regards to the discussion leader's role:

This is a student-led discussion; the leader will be nominated by the tutor. Leaders will initiate discussion by putting forward what they think are the most important questions to arise from Strawson's article. The other group members will agree or disagree that these arethe most important questions, and give their reasons.

In guiding the discussion, leaders can include any combination of the following in their response:

Try to make some contribution to this discussion at least every second day, so that the discussion is kept going quite briskly.The main discussion should be completed by the evening of [deadline]. Remember that each member of the group is respon-sible for making the discussion interesting and lively: and the sine qua non of this is turning up regularly!

Over and above the discussion leader, the tutor also keeps track of the discussion, and intervenes when necessary—for example, when students are way off course, or are at a dead end. What I had underestimated was the extent to which such measures cannot—and ought not to?—obliterate the fact that the medium of this discussion/'conversation' is hypertext. That is, it is a series of linked discursive turns; but this is misleading. It is a web of linked discursive turns 4 . If there is anything of which hypertext is the enemy it is of linearity. Asynchronous online discussions are many-to-many conversations in the medium of hypertext. Time lends some directionality—and one can open and close discussions or parts thereof at set stages so that students move through stages together. However, students do not follow the same rhythms, and even in a more-or-less controlled environment, it is unclear whether access occurs in the same order as the responses and replies were made. Exponentially, when dealing with a large number of contributions, this leads to a very complicated picture.

It is this feature of online discussion that, it seems to me, gave rise to the feeling of the student quoted above, that it is not just that someone can take apart your argument by criticising it or recasting its terms, but that one's own argument and indeed the wider discussion in which it is embedded, can change and shift according to the shifting network of discursive turns, depending on what is linked to what, in which order 5.

Of course there are many ways of building linearity into hypertext, for example, making the links unidirectional, but then i) why use hypertext? and ii) if the links were unidirectional, it could not be used to generate discussion on the technical level. The tree structures that are often used in the discussion board interfaces to show the relation of first turn and response or reply in a thread are often not followed either by the way in which participants access the discussion (what they click on), or indeed in the content of the messages 6. There is also quite a difference between looking away from a person and not listening to them in a face-to-face context and not reading their whole discursive turn when one first clicks on their message. In online discussion, the trace of the discussion is there, one can go back, juxtapose it with other entries and contributions, print it out, read it over morning coffee, or find oneself not able to face it and setting it down (all actions that students reported on doing as the discussions progressed).

These are all problems of trying to reconstruct the order, sequence and organisation of the discussion as it was experienced by participants in the discussion. In fact, at this point, we may wonder if there is 'a' discussion at all, whether there are many, or none in the tra-ditional sense thereof. In the next section, the repercussions of this problem on attempts to evaluate argumentational moves are outlined.

Analysing discourse for argument from the cognitive point of view

Tutors and teachers and designers of courses have their own conception of what counts as argument prior to the discussion—what they (more or less) explicitly have in mind as they teach and guide and facilitate and moderate, and what they are counting on as they interpret, either for their interventions, or for research. In the case of philosophy tutors, they are likely to have quite a well-developed and articulate view of this. For my own purposes, I used the following rough and ready set of distinctions for trying to see what kind of argumentational moves students made:

These will be very familiar to a philosophy audience, but are certainly not in the general literature on critical reasoning in technologically enhanced learning. Thus even though there is a great deal of research expounding the benefits of using online discussions as a way of improving reasoning, it is often not done with a sufficiently finely tuned conception of argument to suit the purposes of philosophy, often simply relying on categories such as 'question', 'challenge', 'claim', 'assert', and not being sufficiently sensitive to the parts of argument, nor to their structure (for example, Buckingham-Shum & Hammond (1994), Jeong (2005), Jermann & Dillenbourg (1999), Veerman, A. L., Andriessen, J. E. B., & Kanselaar, G. (2000) and (2002)).

Students are not given these categories of argument beforehand in this particular course. They are asked only to abide by the principle of charity and to avoid the fallacy of constructing strawmen. As the dis-cussion unfolds, they are given more guidance in analysing and evalu-ating their arguments and examining what alternative strategies they could use. Thus they were not following an already worked out set of argumentational principles, but working on their own hunches and expectations of what argument is. Pedagogically, I use this technique as a way of teasing out intuitions and expectations and then broaching them in discussion. For the research, it meant that I could not analyse the discourse according to explicit understandings of categories of argument that the students already had. Even with a more-or-less clear picture of what I counted as philo-sophical argument, and of the kinds of moves which I would like to see beginning philosophers learn to make, the analysis of the discourse generated by the discussions, in order to answer the question of whether these were 'good', 'effective' strategies for teaching some aspects of philosophy, presented challenges directly related to its nature as hypertext, and the ways in which this renders our interpretive strate-gies unreliable. The hypertextual nature of the discussions made it difficult to know how students progressed through the discussions (what they linked to what, in what order). It was also difficult to know how to hook their argumentational moves up to the rest of the discus-sion, and for this reason, it is difficult to start to analyse their 'moves' (e.g. into premise and conclusion or sub-conclusion, joint or independent premises, etc.).

However, there were also problems of analysis stemming from the conception that I had of argument to start off with. How much would I be prepared to allow the medium to question this conception?

Under pressure from hypertext, it is claimed that different forms of argument will emerge, of which the structure will not be captured by the standard textbook argument structures. In particular, hypertext shatters linearity. Whereas not all philosophical arguments are linear in their presentation, the idea that an argument essentially consists in some statements supporting others—a unidirectional relation—is not one that it is easy to forgo. For example, in 'Socrates in the Labyrinth', (1994) David Kolb reminds us that 'linear' philosophy (that is, philosophy on the printed page) does far more interesting things than linear argument and has always done so (cyclic arguments, spiralling arguments, etc.). But even if straightforward linearity is not the way in which philosophical argument always gets done, there remains an argu-mentative 'line' which connects claims to one another. Would hyper-textual philosophy (not simply philosophy presented in the familiar linked form, but philosophy in the web-like structure typical of hypertext, where there is no 'beginning', 'middle' or 'end', no direc-tionality) still be philosophy? Since what counts as philosophy changes over time—and with the media that we use—this is unanswerable (could oral philosophy foresee written philosophy?). Kolb suggests that perhaps 'to be called philosophy the writing maintain something of the Socratic watchfulness over itself and the abstract or conceptual struc-tures [philosophy] employs, and that it be responsible in the claims that it makes' (339). This is as modest a view of traditional philosophy as it is possible to retain, but it is important to note that it does retain the idea that what is to be watched over are the relations of support among reasons and claims, with which we are familiar, even if our interpretive capacities will be stretched somewhat in trying to grasp what they hold between.

The question of what form philosophy may take in a future hypertextual incarnation, and which discursive genre will embody it, is very closely connected to the question of what the form and rhetoric of argument will be, since, although philosophy is not exhausted by argument, it certainly is a central part of how modern Western philos-ophy understands itself. There are important questions to ask about cultural conceptions of philosophy, but here I wish to focus on the question of how the medium affects the way in which philosophical argument is carried out, interpreted and evaluated. The most important point is that of directionality, and how much pressure can be put on that before we are dealing with a different form of discourse. An alternative notion of argument that may become stronger on the internet is one which we find in classical rhetoric, as well as a meaning of argument which is retained in European languages such as French and Italian: that is, argument as topos, or topic and everything which falls under its rubric, however it is related. This notion of argument approximates a Quinean web of belief more closely than an Arisotelian syllogism, in that there is no particular relation holding between beliefs, and nothing holds necessarily, everything is up for revision. Notwithstanding this, Quinean webs of belief do allow for relations of unidirectional support among claims, even though these are revisable (albeit changes are generally not as fast as may be expected in hypertextual philosophy). In this sense, this conception of argument may give us an alternative model of argument which is better suited to the form of argument to be found in online discussion.

Speculating on questions like this takes us very far from the relatively modest aim of teaching philosophy online to interested adult learners, or to complement course offerings in traditional face-to-face teaching of philosophy. Philosophical argument in an online discussion is not hypertext strictly speaking, since it ought to be governed by the principles of discussion, and the principles of philosophical argument that are being taught. In the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course, students were exposed to texts by, among others, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Strawson, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, alongside their online discussions. They were being exposed to traditional exemplars of philosophical argument at the same time as trying to 'do' philosophy themselves. They were also given guidance as to how to go about engaging and interacting with the philosophical arguments in these texts, how to reflect on them, be critical of them and so on. It was made clear to them that their own doing of philosophy needed to be modelled on these exemplars; that in a way, they were in an apprentice role, learning by emulating masters of a craft. The problem came in as they tried to do so in the form of online discussion which, no matter what students thought they were doing, can be accessed as hypertext—that is, in no particular order. This has a definite effect on their (and my) interpretation of the structure of arguments, of what served as a reason or as a conclusion, on what was the substance of the claim, and on whether the claims as interpreted are those proposed by their 'authors'.

It has the effect of fragmenting the context of 'discursive turns', first of all by disengaging them from their writer/utterer and secondly by dis-engaging them from the turn/s to which they are a response. Incidentally, it is of little use to remind participants in discussion not to dislocate contributions from their contexts in this way, as one cannot be sure that they do not anyway, especially as the medium so easily lends itself to such dislocations that it is more natural to do so than not to.

I am not claiming that the nature of argument is indeed changing—especially not that it is changing to an unrecognisable form which would evidently be self-defeating. I am suggesting that teaching philosophy online requires watchfulness over how the hypertext medium works to exert pressure on the form and rhetoric of argument which we as philosophy teachers may simply take for granted. Whether we choose to watch it emerge to see what happens, or whether we choose to play a more interventionist role to propagate the conception of argument which we think students ought to adopt, depends on other pedagogical choices and the broader context and purposes of such dis-cussions, but tutors do need to be aware of the tricks that the medium can play on their carefully worked out strategies.

Social and interpretive aspects of argument

It is a commonplace that the style of arguing which is associated with Western philosophy, in particular the Anglo-American variety, tends to be adverserial. This is a social dimension of argument. Of course, argument need not be adversarial in the worst sense thereof, and in the best cases, the kind of adversity to which it is subjected, in the form of robust criticism, should only make it stronger. The testing of an argument in analytical philosophy is closely modelled on the testing of a theory in philosophy of science (Popperian and other), with the to-ing and fro-ing of counter-arguments, challenge, opposition and defences doing the work of stringent testing. However, many philosophers have interrogated this form of philosophy, and it certainly is not a universal feature of philosophy (Moulton, 1983/1990 but see also Taliaferro & Chance, 1991). This, too, was an aspect of argument discussed in 'Taking Philosophical Dialogue Online', and seen as a further reason for using online discussion as a way of teaching philosophical argument, as it would encourage students to see themselves as partici-pating in a collaborative effort of putting forward and testing arguments.

Online discussion is a space where 'adversarial' can quickly degenerate into the worst sense of the term. It is not sufficient simply to caution anyone who might want to give this a try to take care and to take measures against misunderstandings and 'flaming'. Runs of the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course subsequent to the pilot course included explicit guidelines to philosophical dialogue as well as neti-quette, with links to helpful sites, including Monty Python's argument clinic as an example of a way not to do it.

Online philosophical discussion brings to the fore just how problematic this conception of argument is, and this is not just because of the lack of physical presence and body language which attenuates potential aggression or the appearance thereof. In the more dispersed mode of argument which is characteristic of online discussion as described above, an adversarial style of argument loses its point. Argument takes on a different social as well as cognitive character.

Even more important is the fact that online discussion tends to brings to the fore all that on which argument must rely if it is to proceed in an intelligible and interactive mode of real engagement, let alone in an adversarial mode in the best sense thereof. It makes much more evident, or allows us to reflect on, the conditions of possibility of that sort of engagement. It is useful to bear in mind Davidson's point that disagreement must rely on 'massive agreement'7 as a pragmatic point for the way in which worthwhile disagreements occur, of the type that really advance an argument or line of thinking, as well as a philosoph-ical one about the nature of meaning. The very fragility of assumed agreement in online discussion reveals this. In particular, there must be agreement in terms of the context that students are drawing upon to provide an interpretive frame for their own and others' discursive turns.

For example, as the discussions in the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course unfolded, it was clear that students had very different conceptions of the genre of discourse they were involved in during the course of the discussion, some of them using principles drawn from conversation, others from writing (letter-writing or emailing), others used a more journalistic style, somewhat like the editorial comment, and others instead used the style of scholarly writing (including footnotes and references in one case). They also used different interpretive strategies in line with these different genres of discourse 10. It is not just that online discussion does away with physical co-presence, but that this tends to increase the probability that people no longer express themselves in the same discourse, and no longer use the same set of principles to interpret each other. This is compounded by the fact already mentioned that hypertext tends to disengage discursive turns from their authors, such that participants in the discussion may no longer be reading for each others' intentions. That this leads to misunderstanding, with the attendant ill-feeling or missed opportunity for a good discussion, is unsurprising.

Whether one's co-participants in a discussion 'intend' an argument, or anything approximating an argument, depends heavily on the context. But context is precisely what is most problematic in online discussions (particularly when they are entirely online and students do not meet face-to-face at all). This became very clear in the analysis of the discussion in order to see whether students were in fact engaging with one another's arguments in making their own argumentational moves. Before seeing whether this had occurred, and, if so, how suc-cessfully they had engaged, the question of what each discursive turn meant for the participants had to be answered. However, it was difficult to tell because I had no way of knowing i) how they had constructed their context, or ii) what context they had assumed. i) is important because what something means depends on what else it is linked to—this is the context that emerges as the discussion progresses; ii) is the context that participants bring to discussions and of which they are not normally completely aware, and which overlaps substantially with what hermeneutic philosophers call the 'lifeworld' 11including, in the case of adult learners especially, their own professional fields or other disciplinary allegiances 12. There are thus three different aspects of context: (a) the place in which discussion happens (the discussion board, its place within the overall course—analogous to the role of the seminar room or lecture hall within the institution), (b) the medium in which it happens (the technological arrangement of turns and its impli-cations), and (c) the lifeworld upon which participants draw in order to formulate their turns, and in order to interpret those of others. All three of these aspects of context play a role in determining the meaning of the discursive turns that make up the discussion. However, the third encompasses the other two, as students make sense of the activity they are participating in, of the discussion board and the order and arrange-ment of discourse in large part from the basis of their own set of expec-tations and their social, cultural and epistemological world. Analysing the argument proceeds by a reconstruction of these three aspects of context and their interplay.

The combination of the effects of hypertext and of lifeworlds means that it is not by analysing the discussion alone that one can answer questions regarding how turns were intended or interpreted, whether participants succeeded in engaging with the arguments of others, whether they were even talking about the same topic, and which, if any, argumentational move they were making. Analysis must be supplemented by surveys and interviews to at least try to get a sense of what students believed themselves to be doing while participating in the discussion. However, beyond that, it is probably impossible to reconstruct the meaning of each turn in an online discussion for each of its participants to a point where we can reach any firm conclusions regarding how effective it is for developing argumentational skills in a traditional conception of argument. We will need to rely on more oblique and indirect ways to gauge this—looking at how it affects students' performance in other activities which are easier to evaluate.

Thus, doing the research to test the validity of my earlier suggestions for teaching philosophy online left me with a far more complex picture than I thought would be the case. The complexity is mainly due to the fact that there is neither a way of extricating the philosophy from the evaluation of the teaching method, nor from the research, and nor indeed, from the medium. Echoing the sentiments of my student, it seemed that between the design of the online teaching strategy and the testing to see whether it worked, the shape of the hole it was meant to fit changed. And it keeps on changing. Of course, it never was a timeless and static shape, and doing the research—and indeed teaching in this way—has only brought it out more clearly. The most interesting aspect of teaching philosophy online is perhaps just that: the reflection and awareness that it brings about concerning what we do when we teach philosophy in any medium.

Endnotes

  1. As I am not reporting on the evaluation of the course as such in this paper, details of numbers etc., and other aspects of the analysis of post-course surveys and questionnaires will be omitted.
  2. Email correspondence, used with permission.
  3. A comparison with the way in which instruments impact on science will be worthwhile. For example, Hacking (1983).
  4. Other terms could be used instead of 'discursive turn', such as contributions, utterances or lexias. Which term is used marks a slightly different research approach and conception. A lexia, for example, is a reading unit, the borders of which can be arbitrary and are set by reader/user not necessarily according to the overall 'purpose' or intention. Utterance uses the model of spoken language. Discourse is language as used, where usage defines and determines its meaning and interpretation; it is neither necessarily spoken or written. one can open and close discussions or parts thereof at set stages so that students move through stages together. However, students do not follow the same rhythms, and even in a more-or-less controlled envi-ronment, it is unclear whether access occurs in the same order as the responses and replies were made. Exponentially, when dealing with a large number of contributions, this leads to a very complicated picture.
  5. Technically, the means exist to reconstruct the paths taken by participants in a discussion in accessing and replying to other turns; however 'clicking paths' are not a reliable guide to what people actually do once they've followed a link.
  6. It must also be mentioned that the discussion facility in the Bodington VLE in which these particular discussions occurred is not optimal for extensive and complex discussions; a fact which did not help.
  7. 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', Davidson (1984)
  8. This course was taught entirely at a distance; students were distributed across the globe, and also came from very different backgrounds. Thus, these kinds of differ-ences were to be expected to a greater degree than in blended learning contexts, where students are co-present at least some of the time.
  9. See Carusi & De Laat (2005) for an elaboration of the notion of the lifeworld as a way of understanding the context in which discursive turns have meaning and can be analysed and interpreted.
  10. See Steinkuehler (2002), who uses Toulmin's notion of field dependence in the context of an analysis of online argument.

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