In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a hybrid ethnographic paradigm, taking the best points from the different approaches of ethnographic research. The pioneering proponents of ethnography differed in their conceptualization of the method, resulting in the development of three distinct schools of thought-holistic, semiotic and…

Design-based research studies are conducted as iterative implementation-analysis-modification cycles, in which emerging theoretical models and pedagogically plausible activities are reciprocally tuned toward each other as a means of investigating conjectures pertaining to mechanisms underlying content teaching and learning. Yet this approach, even…

Drawing upon observer participation in a first grade classroom, we present a systemic functional analysis of classroom communication located in relation to social semiotics, cultural historical activity theory, and ecological psychology, relating context to meaning making. Two years of observation include field notes, student assessments, audio…

Using the viewpoint of semiotics, this paper "re-reads" Karl Marx's labor theory of value and suggests a "triple triangle" model for commodity production and shows how this model could be a model for semiosis in general. The paper argues that there are three advantages to considering homogeneity of the sign production and the…

When education (teaching and/or learning) is considered to be an art, then it seems obvious that the methods of artistic inquiry would be appropriate analysis techniques. Such analysis seems to be rare or non-existent in educational technology. Semiotics, the theory of signs, provides one such set of methodologies for examining text. This…

Original version of this paper presented at Indiana University, Bloomington, on February 7, 1972. (VM)

Support groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, based on the 12 steps of recovery, have grown tremendously over the last several years. Personal narratives are an integral part of the recovery process because the signs that are used, and the semiotic webs that they form, are similar among people who belong to 12-step groups. In these groups,…

The training of researchers in the educational technology field has continued in the traditional vein of the experimental paradigm. This document describes a workshop presented to balance that training and to prepare students to undertake research in a non-traditional way. The workshop aimed to acquaint students with non-causal naturalistic…

This book is the product of a forum titled New Research Directions and Paradigms, held at the Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency in Australia in August 1992. The book presents 13 chapters, all written within a critical paradigm for disability research which critiques the reification of…