Discovering Informal Learning Cultures of Blind Individuals Pursuing STEM Disciplines: A Computational Ethnography Using Public Listserv Archives
Open Access
- Author:
- Seo, Jooyoung
- Graduate Program:
- Learning, Design, and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 03, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Gabriela Richard, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Roy Clariana, Major Field Member
ChanMin Kim, Major Field Member
Mary Beth Rosson, Outside Unit & Field Member
Heather Zimmerman, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- STEM
Computational Ethnography
Accessibility
Blind Learners
Visual Impairments
Machine Learning
Structural Topic Modeling
Data Science
Mailing List
Tidy Data
R
Mailing Lists
Python - Abstract:
- Over the past decade, the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has received a lot of research attention in formal and informal learning settings. Despite the comprehensive need for STEM literacy and its positive effects on learning, students with dis/abilities (who are increasingly participating in regular classroom experiences) face significant difficulties in STEM; blind students, in particular, can become disenfranchised with the visual orientation of many STEM practices. While several attempts have been made to address STEM accessibility issues for the blind, existing studies have primarily limited their contribution to either usability field tests or have designed special curricula from a top-down approach with little attention devoted to bottom-up research where the lived experiences of blind STEM learners, as central storytellers, are naturally portrayed to yield their own challenges and shared cultures. This study – led by a blind scholar - aims to discover the collective knowledge sharing patterns and informal learning cultures of blind individuals pursuing STEM disciplines as captured through computer-mediated mailing listservs. Using the National Federation of the Blind Mailing List, which is one of the world’s largest online mailing communities for the blind, this research conducts a longitudinal computational ethnography for the four STEM-oriented listserv archives in the public domain (i.e., NFB-Science and Engineering; Computer Science; Artists-Making-Art; BlindMath) between January 2009 and December 2019 to develop a comprehensive understanding of learning experiences expressed by blind individuals. Throughout this study, across a total of 24,858 messages, the following primary research question was investigated: What are the sociocultural characteristics and collective knowledge-sharing practices and patterns produced by blind learners pursuing STEM disciplines? The findings of this dissertation study aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary fields of the Learning Sciences and the Information Sciences by centering how blind students and scholars engage in STEM learning and research through rigorous, reliable, and reproducible methods offered by computational ethnography, where computer-assisted text analysis and humanistic deep interpretation complement each other.