Making learning ordinary: ways undergraduates display learning in a CMC task

Abstract We report findings from a discourse analysis study situated within a discursive psychology framework that examined how undergraduate nutrition science students took up a computer-mediated communication task in which they were asked to write about what they learned after attending a lecture. Students made learning displays by orienting to the lecture as a news receipt and making assessments of this new information in variable ways. Some did this by marking an extreme change of state through surprise tokens and realization patterns, functioning to position the new information as so extreme that anyone would have learned something new. Others displayed more neutral assessments of the information or claimed no change of state at all, functioning to distance themselves from having learned anything. Both strategies are ways of “doing being ordinary,” while completing a delicate task that presented them with a potential dilemma of displaying their learning for an invisible audience of their peers.

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