If ethnography means studying groups from up close, then my research project on online writing may be a type of ethnography -- or several types, as I learn different ways of observing in this new environment. My work is part of EvNet, a SSHRC-funded research network that evaluates the uses of technology in education and training. As the literacy person in the group, I'm trying to put together a picture of the ways that online writing in a range of courses contributes (or not) to students' mastery of literacy skills.

The ten or so courses in the project range from secondary ESL classes corresponding with "keypals" through university courses in Economics and Literary Theory. Course listservs extend class discussion to huge pre-med courses in Cell Biology where students know each other mainly through the multi-folder Web-based conferencing. All this online writing is built into course structures and encouraged by grades. Instructors participate in the exchanges to some extent -- their ways of doing so and their effects are another interesting thing to observe.

I too took part in the secondary classes, along with Scott Kenney, a graduate student in Sociology. We wrote back and forth with students and visited the classes regularly, notepads in hand, recording what people did and said. We also gave out two questionnaires and did some taped interviews. That was a rich experience, giving us a chance to see behaviour patterns and personalities. The teachers were glad of our presence because we made students feel their work was important; I guess we also modelled nativespeaker English. But as social-science theorists warn, our presence also affected the nature of the online writing and interactions. Students played up to us, appealing to our sympathies and asking for our admiration or at least our attention. Well, we were used to that as teachers, and I think we did help students learn. Most worked hard at developing their ideas, trying out various styles of writing, and getting as much language correct as possible. Their progress pleased them, their course instructors, Scott and me. But it made it hard to see how online writing would work when there weren't always three teachers around.

In the university courses, I'm trying to cast a lighter shadow, though I'm not entirely a lurker. I send an early message describing the research and asking students to return an online consent form (most do). I read the flow of messages fairly regularly (students in some systems can see my name listed as a reader). I post an online questionnaire late in the course (nearly all students reply). But I don't take part in discussions, and my presence doesn't seem to be noticed. It's like standing behind one-way glass in a psych lab, and it lets me think I'm seeing the students' world, not a performance. I feel successful when I'm not having a visible effect -- an odd position for a teacher.

There's lots to watch. Students fool around, set up meetings, collaborate on homework, complain about instructors and assignments, raise issues not covered in class, and argue about tangential topics: in the Cell Biology folders, for instance, the environmental effects of salt on roads, the desirability of immortality, the gender of God, and people's motivation for writing so much online. Students pay lime attention language correctness, though they create effects deliberately, using typography and punctuation and playing rifts on key words and phrases. Paragraphing is either absent or creative, sentence structure ranges from fragmented to baroque, vocabulary is indecorous but wonderfully colourful. Somehow the topic of online communication -- its affordances and constraints, strategies for managing it effectively -- always arises for discussion. I can see learning happen.

As a hopeful ethnographer, I want to understand how it happens. That means reading huge amounts of electronic text and noticing patterns, re-reading to confirm them, and finding yet more things to notice. [m told this is the sociological method of "content analysis." It feels like childhood reading: going through the same texts over and over, finding favourite parts and seeing what new things crop up -- though as a kid, I never felt the need to take notes. Record-keeping is crucial, though, when you call it research. With Irena Ganeva, a graduate student in Second-Language Education, I have learned to harness a data-analysis program called NUD*IST (Nonnumerical Unstructured Data by Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing). It lets us code messages and other data for things that strike us as interesting, and then it shows us what we've noticed. It's like scribbling notes in the margins and then being able to find them again and look at them as a set, with the added advantage that they're legible.

What I'm learning to see in this data encourages and surprises me: students really are interesting people, courses in Economics and Biology can be exciting entities, and literacy is changing in front of our eyes. I hope to report at the May 2000 Inkshed conference on what I'm looking at.