Decisiones metodológicas para el estudio de la escritura colaborativa en el ingreso universitario: un abordaje etnográfico.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the research decisions involved in an ongoing ethnographic study of students’ collaborative writing practices within a three-week entrance course at the Social Communication Faculty (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina). The research strategy was designed to meet the dynamics of an intensive course to produce different types of data through a variety of instruments. In this article, we focus on three key instances of data collection (which are connected to three moments of the course): a student survey delivered at the start of the course; observation of digital literacy events during a class activity to become familiar with Google Docs as a writing platform; and talk-around-screen interviews once students had turned in their final collaborative writing task (i.e. a reading report). We describe the research choices that we made throughout the fieldwork period, present some preliminary results and outline some conclusions about the potential of the approach adopted for the study. We conclude that interweaving these different types of data sources yielded a broader and more complex view of the writing practices carried out by students during their first contact with academic literacies in higher education.