Author: George Veletsianos Page 46 of 81

Webinar: Building a Research Agenda using Design-Based Research (DBR)

We (the AECT Research & Theory Division) are hosting another Professional Development Webinar, organized by Enilda Romero-Hall and Min Kyu Kim!

Date/Time:     July 24 at 12:00 pm (EST)

Topic:              Building a Research Agenda using Design-Based Research (DBR)

Panelist: Dr. Susan McKenney and Dr. Thomas Reeves

Registration: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=v0o9j6tm6llu

 Summary

Design-Based Research (DBR), Educational Design Research (EDR) and DBIR (Design-Based Implementation Research) share the dual aims of (1) deriving new knowledge through (2) the design and implementation of solutions to problems in educational practice. This family of research approaches involves intensive, long-term collaboration between researchers and practitioners during the development of viable solutions to practical problems while also conducting empirical investigation on or through the solutions created. While collaboration with practitioners stands to increase the relevance and practicality of work; it also poses challenges to researchers, whose mission requires them to: seek out research-worthy problems; employ rigorous methods; and generate new knowledge that is of value to others (outside the immediate context of investigation). This presentation discusses challenges, pitfalls and recommendations for establishing a research agenda using the DBR, EDR, and DBIR family of approaches.

Presenters

RTD_Webinar McKenney.png

Dr. Susan McKenney is Associate Professor in the Welten Institute at the Open University in the Netherlands and at Twente University. Her research focuses on understanding and supporting the interplay between curriculum development and teacher professional development, and often emphasizes the supportive role of technology in these processes. Dr. McKenney is committed to exploring how educational research can serve the development of scientific understanding while also developing sustainable solutions to real problems in educational practice. Since educational design research lends itself to these dual aims, she also works on developing and explicating ways to conduct design research. In addition to authoring numerous articles, she co-edited the book, Educational Design Research and, together with Tom Reeves, wrote the book, Conducting Educational Design Research. Dr. McKenney is also current editor of Educational Designer, the journal of the International Society for Design and Development in Education.

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Dr. Thomas C. Reeves is Professor Emeritus of Learning, Design, and Technology at The University of Georgia. A former Fulbright Lecturer in Peru, he has been an invited speaker in the USA and more than 30 other countries. His research interests include evaluation of educational technology, socially responsible educational research, public health and medical education, authentic learning tasks, and educational technology applications in developing countries. From 1997-2000, he was the editor of the Journal of Interactive Learning Research. In 2003, he received the AACE Fellowship Award from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, in 2010 he was made a Fellow of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), and in 2013 he was awarded the David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. His books include Interactive Learning Systems Evaluation with John Hedberg, A Guide to Authentic E-Learning with Jan Herrington and Ron Oliver (2010 Outstanding Book Award, Division of Design & Development, AECT), and Conducting Educational Design Research with Susan McKenney (2013 Outstanding Book Award, Research and Theory Division, AECT).

Additional Resources

  • Resources about Educational Design Research (also known as Design-Based Research)

http://dbrxroads.coe.uga.edu/

  • Conducting Educational Design Research book site

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415618045/

Assumptions underpinning open scholarship

Fecher and Friesike reviewed the literature relevant to open science and found that “open science is an umbrella term that encompasses a multitude of different assumptions about the future of knowledge creation and dissemination; an umbrella term however that comprises five more or less distinct schools of thought with different assumptions about what exact aspect of research should be ‘open’ and ‘open’ to whom.”

One of these schools of thought is the “public school” whose advocates appear to believe that “the social web and Web 2.0 technologies allow and urge scientists on the one hand to open up their research processes and on the other hand to prepare research products for interested non-experts.” 

There’s a number of interesting results here, lending  support to, and further defining, the following assumptions and themes of open scholarship we identified in Veletsianos & Kimmons (2012):

  • Open scholarship has a strong ideological basis rooted in an ethical pursuit for democratization, fundamental human rights, equality, and justice
  • Open scholarship emphasizes the importance of digital participation for enhanced scholarly outcomes
  • Open scholarship is treated as an emergent scholarly phenomenon that is co-evolutionary with technological advancements in the larger culture
  • Open scholarship is seen as a practical and effective means for achieving scholarly aims that are socially valuable

 

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning,13(4), 166-189. 

MOOCs, automation, artificial intelligence seminar

I will be visiting my colleagues at the University of Edinburgh in mid-June to give a seminar on MOOCs, automation, artificial intelligence and pedagogical agents. This is a free event organized by the Moray House School of Education at the U of Edinburgh and supported by the Digital Cultures and Education research group and DigitalHSS. Please feel free to join us face-to-face or online (Date: 18 June 2014; Time: 1-3pm) by registering here.

This seminar will bring together some of my current and past research. A lot of my work in the past examined learners’ experiences with conversational and (semi)intelligent agents. In that research, we discovered that the experience of interacting with intelligent technologies was engrossing (pdf). Yet, learners often verbally abused the pedagogical agents (pdf). We also discovered that appearance (pdf) may be a significant mediating factor in learning. Importanly, this research indicated that “learners both humanized the agents and expected them to abide by social norms, but also identified the agents as programmed tools, resisting and rejecting their lifelike behaviors.”

A lot of my current work examines experiences with open online courses and online social networks, but what exactly does pedagogical agents and MOOCs have to do with each other? Ideas associated with Artificial Intelligence are present in both the emergence of xMOOCs (EdX, Udacity, and Coursera emanated from AI labs) and certain practices associated with them – e.g., see Balfour (2013) on automated essay scoring. Audrey Watters highlighted these issues in the past. While I haven’t yet seen discussions on the integration of lifelike characters and pedagogical agents in MOOCs, the use of lifelike robots for education and the role of the faculty member in MOOCs are areas of  debate and investigation in both the popular press and the scholarly literature.  The quest to automate instruction has a long history, and lives within the sociocultural context of particular time periods. For example, the Second World War found US soldiers and cilvilians unprepared for the war effort, and audiovisual devices were extensively used to efficiently train individuals at a massive scale. Nowadays, similar efforts at achieving scale and efficiencies reflect problems, issues, and cultural beliefs of our time.

I’m working on my presentation, but if you have any questions or thoughts to share, I’d love to hear them!

 

Networked Scholars open course

NetworkedImage courtesy of NetWork

In the Fall, I will be teaching an open course entitled Networked Scholars. We are having our first design meeting this week, and in preparation for that, I have written up a course description (see below). The course is my response to the fact that Research Methods courses in the social sciences rarely examine scholarly practices in the digital age. Digital, networked, and open scholarship are topics that students and academics discover and examine on their own. These topics are too important to ignore. I believe that we should be teaching them in research methods courses. I am creating this course to help introduce individuals to these topics and to create an open online resource to help those who want to integrate these topics into their research methods courses. If you are interested in integrating aspects of this course with your (on campus or online) research methods course, I’d love to talk to you!

Course Description

In this course, we will examine the tools and practices associated with networked, open, and digital scholarship. In particular we will investigate the emergent practice of scholars’ use of social media and online social networks for sharing, critiquing, improving, furthering, and reflecting upon their scholarship. Recent reports indicate that social media are at an early stage of adoption in academia, even though mindful participation in digital spaces is a significant skill for today’s academic and knowledge worker.

Participants will study scholarly presence online. They will examine how particular tools and practices may enhance the impact and reach of scholarship, and will explore the challenges and tensions associated with emerging forms of scholarship. By gaining an understanding of modern forms of scholarship, participants will be better equipped to use digital technologies and networked practices in their own work.

This course will be of immediate relevance to doctoral students, academics, and knowledge workers. Faculty members who teach research methods courses and faculty development professionals may also find this course valuable.

August 20, 2014 update

The course will run on the Canvas network (and concurrently on social media via the #scholar14 hashtag). The course registration page is live.

June 4, 2014 update

Course hashtag: #scholar14

If you’d like to be informed about the start of course or if you’d like to give feedback on the content and design of the course, please fill in the short survey below (also found here).

MITx and HarvardX make some of their MOOC data publicly available

MITx and HarvardX deserve huge congratulations for making data associated with a number of their MOOCs publicly available. Four months ago, I wrote that the “community would benefit from access to the data that HarvardX and MITx have, as other individuals/groups could run additional analyses. Granted, I imagine this might require quite a lot of effort, not least in the development of procedures for data sharing.” It seems that the researchers at MITx and HarvardX have tackled the issues involved to make the data available, and have developed thoughtful procedures to ensure de-identification. While some of the steps taken may limit analyses (e.g., the de-identification process document notes that “rows with 60 or more forum posts were deleted,” thus eliminating highly active users), this is a big step in the right direction and it should be celebrated.

Now… can we have some qualitative data? If any institutions are interested in making those available, I’d love talk to you, give you input, and work with you toward that goal.

 

Invitation: Learning ecologies presentation by Dr. Albert Sangra Morer

You are invited to join us on campus or online for a presentation by Dr. Albert Sangra Morer, Academic Director and UNESCO Chair in Education, Technology and Social Change at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain.

When: Tuesday, May 27, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Where: Face-to-face (Centre for Dialogue, Learning and Innovation Centre, RRU) or online

This event is hosted by the Faculty of Social and Applied Science Dean’s Office and the RRU School of Education and Technology.

Dr. Albert Sangra will present  his research on the informal approaches to professional development teachers are taking and what this means for developing a “learning ecology.” The concept of learning ecology can be a useful tool to help professionals create a personal strategy for professional development and relations, Morer says. Currently, there is a myriad of digital resources teachers use to informally develop themselves professionally such as MOOCs and communities of practice. There is a move towards each individual being responsible for taking his/her own decisions on learning, rather than simply accepting those formally proposed, he says.

A key aspect of the updating of professional development is personalization: adapting policies to the specific needs of each individual, according to their learning style. Morer’s research aims to analyze and understand the ways in which learning ecologies are and will be contributing to the professional development of primary school teachers. In this presentation, the design and the current stage of the research will be introduced, as well as its initial outcomes.

Two videos: one of alienation, one of connection

Last week, the “Look Up” video went viral. In the words of the Sydney Morning Herald, it’s a video urging people “to take a break from their online lives to experience real connections.”

This week, the “CNA – Speaking Exchange” video is being shared. It’s a video connecting Brazilian students wanting to improve their English language skills with seniors in the United States living in retirement homes (it reminds me of Sugatra Mitra’s Skype Granny project)

Discuss.

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