Planning: Design of study

I am currently part of a small group comprising of graduate students and one faculty member that meets every fortnight to discuss research.

At a yesterday's meeting, I discussed my possible research designs:

1. A "between" groups design (blogs vs. discussion forums)
   
2. A "within" groups design (teachers use one tool first and then the other)
   
3. Pool all reflections regardless of tool

The first two designs will be difficult to implement given the current set up in PIHnet. Teachers already use the discussion forum to share and exchange ideas while a small group is already using it as a journal. It would be against current practice (and probably a harmful venture) to force the use of either tool or one tool followed by the other. Furthermore, with only about 20 teachers attending each summer seminar, the results might not be statistically convincing.

The pooling of reflections arose as a result of a suggestion by a fellow graduate student and my first CMDA reading. If the blogs and discussion forums were virtually identical in terms of medium and situational variables, they were not separate treatments. The unit of analysis could then be the message as opposed to the teacher (as would be the case in the first two designs).

Therefore the third design appealed to me but there was the task of convincing people that the blog and discussion forum as used in PIHnet were the same.

I was also offered an alternative using my first design. More on that a bit later.