Month: August 2013

As I blogged about earlier this month, I’m currently working with the OER Research Hub  team helping them to evaluate their progress, outputs and future developments.

The project is taking a collaborative research approach which includes  practitioners/teachers from a number of different educational sectors and countries as well as the “core” team of researchers based at the OU. Given the global spread of project fellows a key challenge for the project is to ensure that the team are able to share their findings and experiences between themselves effectively and provide the basis and data for the OER Research Evidence Hub.  

One of the approaches the team has been experimenting with is taking the premise of agile programming and adapting it to a research project (see Patrick’s post about the first research sprint for a bit more detail).  

Now, when I heard about this I was intrigued. Typically educational research “products” don’t really lend themselves to anything particularly agile,  particularly some peer reviewed journal outputs. Any research based on actual teaching practice does need more than a few sessions to generate meaningful results. Agile programming tends to have very specific,  pre-defined outputs, it’s actually often not the most creative of approaches. Whereas academic research (particularly in the education domain) tends much more open ended. Hypothesis are there more to be broken as well as to be proved, the unexpected is embraced. 

Bringing researchers who form part of a globally distributed team together for set periods to focus on certain aspects of research project does make sense.  As does having some kind of structure, particularly for focusing “group minds” on potential outputs (products), adaptation of peer programming could be useful for peer review etc. However implementing “proper” agile programming methodology to research is problematic.

But if we stick with the programming analogy and stop thinking in terms of products, and start thinking of research as a service (akin to software as a service) then maybe there is more milage.  A key part of SaS approaches are APIs, allowing hooks into all sorts of sites/ services so that they can in effect talk to each other.

I noticed earlier this week a post from Brian Proffitt on readwrite talking about the need for personal APIs  to help organise individuals interactions, but what I’m thinking of in this context is quite the reverse. I’m thinking of researchers seeing themselves as APIs. They need to be the hooks providing entry points into their research which create effective, interactive dissemination or more accurately communication (as described in this Is it time to ban the term ‘dissemination? post by Caroline Cassidy). 

In any research based on teaching practice as is the case with the OER Research Hub, there is always (imho) a tension between research and practice. Sharing effectively lessoned learned with actual teachers and at the same time producing the empirical data that qualified “proper” research requires is challenging and can actually create a gulf between research and practice. I think Learning Design suffered a bit from this. For example, as a teacher I really want to know quickly and easily what people did with OER, where they found it, how it actually changed things for them in the classroom, the pragmatic stuff, not the “science bit” with all the statistics. I probably don’t have time to read an academic paper.  As a researcher I may well be more interested in the quantitive data, and reading a “proper academic paper”. As a funder I really want to know what you’ve done with my money, what difference have you made? I don’t need you to regurgitate in several different ways the original project proposal.  Equally in all cases I might be interested in more “lite” reflection such as a descriptive blog post, video interview etc, or a combination of them all.  

The key thing therefore is for the researcher to think of themselves more as the interface between their work, the data, the findings, the “what actually happened in the classroom” bits and focus on ways to allow as wide a range of stakeholders to easily “hook” into them so they can  use the outputs meaningfully in their own context.

In many ways this is actually the basis of effective digital scholarship in any discipline and of course what many researchers already do.  In the context of open collaborative research into OERs and wider open educational practice in particular,  I wonder if the research as API analogy could help focus development of sharing research outputs and developing really effective interactions with research data and findings? 

The team have already identified a number of key challenges for next year including measuring impact -v- attitudinal data, the validity of comparing diverse contexts as well evidence for critical reflection and its relation to OER so have lots of potential hooks and the project blog is filling up with some really useful reflection and early findings from the research to date.

I’m joining the the team next month for their next sprint so will be getting lots more insights into how a ‘research sprint” actually works, but in the meantime I’d love to hear any views you may have.

Tweeting is part and parcel of my daily working life and I do genuinely believe it helps me stay connected, networked and informed in a way that wasn’t possible before.  But there are a lot of tweets out there and some are undoubtedly more useful than others. I have my own slightly random filters and value system but this  post on the LSE Impact blog by Paul Andre, Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther gives a properly researched overview of perceived values of tweets.

Our tweets might be funny, interesting, confusing, or just plain boring, but with little audience feedback it’s hard to tell; we’re often tweeting into a void. If we understood what content is valued (or not), and why, we may be able to 1) derive design implications for better tools or filters; and 2) develop insight into emerging norms and practice to help users create and consume more valued content.

As well as being an enabler of valuable conversations and interactions, twitter (like life) also has its dark side which has been highlighted recently in the UK with the Caroline Criado-Perez trolling scandal.  Although I’m online quite a lot I have, thank goodness,  only had one really offensive tweet (so far).  I can’t imagine getting 100s of these an hour.  There has been a lot of press coverage but I particularly liked Clare Allen’s take on Internet Trolls  and the overt and covert sexism the debate has raised about acceptable attitudes and behaviours.  

  . . .the journalist Toby Young argues against the introduction of a “Report abuse” button on Twitter. “Let’s not try and domesticate the wild west,” he writes. But it is worth remembering that the wild west was never a place that was particularly friendly to women, and certainly not to women who demanded sexual equality. In fact, perhaps Young has unwittingly drawn an apter parallel than he intended.

Much of my work this year has been around learning analytics and really appreciated Michael Feldstein’s Desire2Learn Analytics Follow Up post  which gives an insightful overview of the problems of the promise of analytics and the reality of current system capability to process data and produce reports within time-frames that users want and need. Echoing what I’ve heard John Campbell say many times before about starting with a simple problem first in analytics, Michael also suggests that D2L maybe need to concentrate on a smaller number of use cases and get them right, instead of the current situation where: 

they check a lot of boxes in terms of features that could be useful, but I’m not sure that they’ve quite hit the bull’s eye for solving any one specific teacher or student problem. 

Maybe IBM are going to help us all take a huge leap forward with data processing with their new era of cognitive computing,  which will provide an architecture that will work more “like our brain” and provide the “fluidity and interactiveness” that our current systems lack. Sounds great, but is it just me or is there always an undertone of command and control/minority report in these developments?

And finally, for something completely different, but equally worthwhile. Lou McGill ( well kent learning technologist, photographer and artist) has launched a website for her gallery Life’s Little Ironies.  Well worth a look to see some of Lou and her partner Tim’s work.