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A five minute argument or the full week? April 26, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

Caterina Fake is apparently bored stiff these days, having sold Flickr, and being a good sport fancies having an argument with somebody, suggesting these rules of engagement:

The rules are these:

1. Suggest something in the comments that you’d like to argue about
2. Present your arguing credentials
3. Nothing too political, religious or inflammatory please
4. After a fair number of proposed arguments have been posted, I’ll choose one that I’d enjoy arguing
5. The argument will consist of 3 exchanges one from each of us, via email, 6 emails total, and to prevent them from getting out of control, probably 250-500 words each
6. How long this takes is up to us. A week?
7. We will publish our argument on our respective blogs, when done.
8. People should feel free to take up other people on their offers to argue too, and, I hope, publish their arguments as well.

What a great idea. It’s perhaps unfortunate timing for me, since I’m meant to be arguing amongst friends about research methodologies right now. Or could that also be contained within such framework?

I love the idea of presenting “arguing credentials” although I’ve no idea how to do it, but rule three is just a terrible wet blanket that disqualifies almost any topic I can think of!

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Research proposal April 25, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP, Action Research , add a comment

A discussion has ensued across three email lists following a question asked about Charters for Communities of Practice.

It’s all mixed up really, with the thorny question of trying to agree what constitutes a CoP, since some people will view a charter as totally contrary to the spirit of a flat hierarchical group while others believe one to be essential or at least preferred. Two possible resolutions to the definitional dissensus are emerging - one is to create a taxonomy which diverges from at least two seperate starting points, and the other is for a completely new concept and terminology to emerge from out of the present or future vibrant discussion. I believe I have a contribution to make, see: Taxonomy of CoPs, but that’s not what this post is about.

Rosanna Tarsiero wrote:

Another reason why I tend to like charters is that I think they foster trust in that one knows exactly what to expect (ie: which rules are in place, why, how they are enforced and by whom).

I suspect there is a cultural component in preferring such clarity that has escaped many studies. Plus, the field needs a study on it badly. Just as a starter, it would be nice to have somebody study the impact of charters on motivations of employee, their organizational loyalty AND (most interesting for VCoPs and CoPs) the psychological contract issue.

Man is a social animal… behaviours in small group tend to adhere to some form of rules (like most animals and most primates) imposed by some kind of majority, whether one is aware of it or not.

Which poses problems on how to design such studies… how can one explore subconscious/implicit constructs? This is the fascinating part, IMHO.

So I started mulling over the idea of trying to design a research proposal which would investigate the implications of charters and chartering on distributed communities of practice.

I know where to look for the data, and I have reason to be confident it will be found. I can envisage a lengthy reconaissance phase just looking at the historical data during which a method for selecting likely CoPs would be developed. A study of the past fortunes of a number of both chartered and unchartered CoPs would be undertaken, and then some which began as one and changed into the other. We might then attempt to interview some of the participants to obtain their stories, and finally arrive at some conclusions upon which an action research project to improve some CoPs might be designed and implemented.

The problem is, who might fund such a project?

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Researching the Classroom Displays Blog April 17, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP, Action Research , comments closed

Rather than just supply critical feedback to each other’s research, Linda Hartley suggested we might write each other’s conclusions, based on the idea that somebody other than the researcher closest to the research, may be in a better position to see some of the impact and draw conclusions. So these are my conclusions from Linda’s data about her research with the classroom displays Blog


Conclusions.

Linda’s research has yielded tangible and lasting results of a very real nature. This is no abstracted or hypothetical achievement, she does not say “this shows what might be possible if only…” but “This is what I have made, and made happen”.

Setting out to explore the potential of using simple but powerful new web based services and tools for communications, the classroom displays blog exceeded all expectations by becoming one of the best examples which leading edge commentators provide when they wish to demonstrate an inspirational case of new educational technology already being applied in practice.

TA Forum

When Linda sought out and discovered the TA Forum, she had the theoretical understanding to appreciate that despite initial appearances, this was no idle chatroom but the beginnings of a self-organised community of practice. What happens when substantial numbers of people who could all answer the question “I am a….(Teaching Assistant)” gather together on a regular basis? Why, they will chat about their work, exchange stories, form bonds of solidarity and begin to exchange tips ideas and resources to help each other solve some of the daily challenges. (Incidentally, this is a great example of the first type of CoP - the workers’ CoP as opposed to the corporate CoP defined in my proposed proletarian/bourgeois taxonomy.)

Postcards

And so it was possible to take the opportunities presented and skillfully relate them to immediate needs in the classroom with the postcards cycle, which used the internet to give children who often grow up in a very small world, a very real glimpse of other places and other lives. This is the kind of thing which may have been in the minds of policy makers when the funding was provided to increase the ratio of computers per child, and to install broadband “always on” connectivity. The National Curriculum even suggests building links with other schools and in no way prohibits the kind of inspirational lesson designs which Linda manages to construem, and yet very very few primary class teachers ever manage to build these exact kind of links which the TA forum people have managed. Instead, they seem to have been trained to view the web as a place from which you can download ready-made and “safe” lesson plans for printing out.

impact

Within the data, there is evidence that a functioning many-to-many link has been set up: “Great to hear other people’s feedback” thus providing a powerful resource which has a widely disseminating impact, not just an immediate or local one. And the impact very quickly multiplies by reaching the recipients’ students as well: “After I saw your poster, I gave my online students a link to a multicultural diversity test”

The fact that the classroom displays site is well optimised for search engines means that this collective resource does not languish unnoticed in some cupboard or online backwater, but is emminently findable by people worldwide who are actively seeking just this kind of thing, and the statistics show that they do so.

blocked

One negative finding which Linda importantly highlights, is the tragic side effect from badly executed internet access policies, namely the false positives or blanket blocking which results from over zealous filtering systems. “What a great use of a blog and flickr, I just wish we could see flickr in school”

Perhaps another impact from this pioneering project will be to provide one more compelling reason for why these blocking policies need to be revised. The publishing of this research should help to bring that day nearer, so that children and adults can benefit from the positive aspects of internet communications, armed with the knowledge and confidence to manage their own safety without being deluged by exaggerated fears and bureaucratic interference.

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Thesis on a wiki April 6, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Action Research, Wiki , comments closed

The next module which I have to complete as part of a year long dissertation through research is called “Validation and Defense”. One of the conclusions stemming from the online exhibition, and taking some of the comments into consideration, is that if the subject is supposed to be related to web2.0 in any way, then it isn’t really appropriate to offer a set of read-only pages with one-way podcasts and diagrams. Provision for engagement and feedback was via the comments functionality of a blog post, and while that did capture sufficient critical commentary, it isn’t fully appropriate.
For example, Derek said

“the exhibition seems to be content only, no tagging, no intereaction (I like content and intereaction to be close

and Stephen Powell wrote

“a downside … the ‘broadcast’ nature of it - that is I wanted to ask a ‘real time’ questions when I listened to the audio.”

After some thought, I entirely agree. In the past I did fleetingly toy with the idea of staging the exhibition on a wiki. Linda and I discussed it as well. Indeed, embracing the barn raising idea as part of the exhibition went some way towards that, but I would have held back from planning the entire thing to be hosted on a wiki for fear of pushing the innovative side of things just a little too far. My experience with institutional attitudes towards wiki has not been positive on the whole, and at first thought there would seem to be problems with attribution, drawing the line between collaboration and plagiarism, and presentation. I now believe that none of these drawbacks is unsurmountable so my defense against the above criticisms is to repond by writing the whole of my next assignment, (the work for assessment that is, unlike the exhibition itself which wasn’t formally assessed) as a page or pages on a wiki.

The page is initialised on the DARwiki here:

User:Andy Roberts/unh3602

And at midnight on May 8th, 2006 the page(s) will be locked and handed in. That means it will no longer be editable until after the work has been marked and finalised, although the parallel discussion pages will remain open for commentary indefinitely.

So with that done, now I’m off to seek any precedents I can find online.

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