Mathemagenic

Can someone explain me (or point to something) differences between action research and ethnography?

My feeling that the differences should be somewhere around:

• role of action (~action as intentional/explicit goal of action research)
• process (cycles in action research)
• data collection/documenting focus
• ...

Have a strange, but nice experience of reading several books on ethnography at the same time (re: yesterdays's posts). It feels pretty much like hypertext or web browsing - I start somewhere, with the topic I'm working at, move along one book till I need a break or clarification or see interesting reference to another book. Then I switch - either looking for a relevant topic in another book or by following a reference. Then read a bit more, till the next switch...

This is the first time I do that with books. I often read several books in parallel or start from random/interesting chapters, but they are rarely so many on the same topic, so it never feels as hypertext browsing experience.

Of course, I do something similar when working on a paper - going through papers/books/printouts I reference, checking and cross-checking things, but then it's something that I have read before, over time, and not discovering new ideas.

I like it - as I like being online - being able to discover connections between things as I want when I need - not in the logic their authors assume...