ENSEMBLE

The conceptualisation of the project as an interdisciplinary culture of inquiry – a learning environment in its own right – means that the distinction between sites of research on the one hand and sites of interpretation and analysis on the other, does not hold.

All of the following will be seen as research sites and sources of data for subsequent co-interpretation and collaborative analysis:

• the teaching and learning environments, broadly conceived, to include not only classrooms, laboratories but other physical locations;
• the online environments in which the construction of cases takes place and the other virtual spaces in which research participants interact;
• design, envisioning and prototyping workshops, focus groups, user groups and informal spaces;
• project collaboration and conversation spaces including meetings, seminars, and user conferences.

Research approaches will include rich observation and description methods drawn from ethnomethodology , adapted in the light of lessons learnt from research case studies (for example by  Garfinkel et al., Suchman,  Haraway, Latour, Law and Mol). There will be a strong empirical focus and extensive data will be collected, to include accounts of actants, relations, and activity at the research sites, and, importantly, the materialisations and knowledge that flow in and out of each setting. These include technologies, equipment, information from databases and other sources, course documents, textbooks and papers, programme evaluations, representations in diagrams and schemas, interview with students and staff, evaluation data, and assignment).

Online data including the content of case studies, routine data such as server logs, and examples of the online discourse that accompanies the construction and reconstruction of cases, will also be collected and will provide a focus for discussion and co-interpretation with participants.

These processes of data collection and analysis will be enabled by the use of visual approaches such as video, audio and still photography. With these approaches, as with the others employed, validation and sense-making activities such as focussed interviews, stimulated recall and critical incident analysis involving project participants will be of central importance.