Consciousness | hanfod.NL

How does your research methodology impact methods?

This blog has been rather quiet for various reasons but, as we are cruising towards the next Networked Learning Conference (NLC), the time is ripe (if not very overdue) to share some media, including the video (poor sound though sorry), from my ‘short paper’ presentation in Malta 2024, slides as images below. I’ve hosted the video on archive.org because there are less concerns about big tech profiteering over there, however this also may mean the video does not play, or not play smoothly for you. There’s a link to the submitted paper below.

We at hanfod.NL have some exciting plans for the coming conference and I’ll share more in another post.

The paper highlights one of the key methodological insights from my doctoral thesis and recent book chapter. At the conference, in short form, the paper was a provocation, as much as anything, trying to encourage researchers to reflect on what exactly they think they have when they gather data. In many areas of research it is presumed that data will be collected, analysed, and presented. However, there are so many assumptions made all along that method. One thing that phenomenology teaches us is that there is a gap between some thing and what we notice about it, and probably even more drift between the thing and what other people tell us about it. Phenomenologists try to account for this gap by focusing on the phenomena, rather than the person’s individual experience of that phenomena (which should ring alarm bells for readers who want phenomenology to be ‘ideographic’, focusing on an individual’s experience). This is why we have ‘bracketing’: we may wish to try and exclude some thoughts as polluting my conscious distilling of the essence of a phenomenon. To whatever extent this may be possible, my paper suggests that we may also wish to actively pre-load our thinking as we approach data gathering. If human science values the human researcher as the premiere research instrument, more attention could be given to the researcher’s frame of mind in those epic moments when phenomena are encountered.

Johnson, M. R. (2024). Mobilage thinking and empirical encounters: Data gathering and analysis of networked learning experiences. Proceedings of the International Conference on Networked Learning , 14(1). https://doi.org/10.54337/nlc.v14i1.8087

Many seek to investigate experience(s). Experience is one of the keywords that demarcates qualitative from quantitative research. However, if we will attempt to investigate it and represent it for others, we must ask, ‘what is experience’? I fear that many never pause to consider this but ways ought to be found to trouble the surface of our assumptions before we default to techniques and methods, such as slicing and dicing interview transcripts.

Gadamer notes that in the continuity of experience, just as music is more than the notes, but also the motifs which they support, experience as a whole, “…is not an act (a becoming conscious) and a content (that of which one is conscious). It is, rather, indivisible consciousness. Even to say that experience is of something is to make too great a division.” (p226 2013ed)

In the very act of observation, experience is already fractured.

Photo credit: CC Michael J

hanfod.NL

Phenomenology & Networked Learning

Tag Consciousness

Mike’s paper at NLC 2024 Malta

Gadamer on experience