Categories
collaboration rant Uncategorized

Finding common ground, a small Rant

man showing distress
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Those who know me will know that the edvisor community is a big deal for me. (If you don’t, I mean, collectively, education technologists, learning designers, academic developers and people in those kinds of Third Space roles) .

We face a number of challenges on a daily basis in being heard and having our experience and expertise recognised by those people that we try to help to do teaching and learning better. I caught up with a number of colleagues for a semi-informal chat recently about ways that we might collaborate more effectively in terms of the resources and training that we provide in our different faculties and centrally.

I’d like to make clear that individually I like and respect the people that were in the conversation. It was a combination of learning/education designers (instructional designers, whatever – insert your preferred term here) and education technologists. Mostly learning designers though. And that’s where the fun started.

Now these are some of my theories about how universities work and their problems. They are a bit untested and hopefully some of that will come out of my PhD research. I don’t actually think they are particularly controversial. Essentially there is a prestige hierarchy of knowledge in higher ed: Discipline > Pedagogy > Technology. People may downplay this but at times there can be a deep seated belief amongst learning/education designers that people on the technology side only ever talk about which buttons to push. This can occasionally come across as an attitude that unless you are a real education/learning designer, your pedagogical understanding is minimal. And if an academic should happen to come to you with a technological question rather than a purely pedagogical one, they might as well have defiled the graves of your ancestors*.

Let me divert for a moment to my primitive understanding of practice theory, where a practice is composed of three elements – the material (the things you need to do the practice), competencies (the knowledge you need) and cultural (the social context in which it occurs). These may not be the official terms but lets roll with the broad concept because that is more important right now. I would argue that if you don’t have an understanding of all three, you probably don’t know enough about the practice to advise others about it well.

My second theory about higher ed is that many academics feel that they are expected to have pedagogical expertise (alongside their discipline knowledge) because they are working in a role where they are expected (usually) to be able to teach. One of our challenges then as edvisors is that we, as people who are not working in teaching roles, are not seen as people to go to for pedagogical advice. (Also, asking for pedagogical advice is to admit to a lack of knowledge and higher ed is a place where your knowledge is your power and your currency). This does vary between disciplines, depending on how confident people feel in their identity as a discipline expert. (Medical educators seem to be more open than many academics to receiving advice about pedagogy). This isn’t a universal rule and some academics are perfectly comfortable trying to develop themselves as educators but, anecdotally at least, the many academics engaging in pedagogically oriented professional development will do so mostly because it is a mandated part of promotion or career progression.

Asking for technological advice however is easier because nobody will judge you for that. My personal experience is that academics are more open and honest about their skill gaps in these kinds of workshops, even their pedagogical gaps, because expectations of them are lower. Maybe this is just my approach but as an educational technologist, I see an opportunity then to bundle pedagogical thinking with discussion of the technology. They are all part of the one practice, after all.

What works for me doesn’t work for everyone, of course and might not even be the right solution. (Assuming there is only one right answer to the question of how edvisors can lead educators to the water of better learning and teaching and get them to drink).

I mentioned the word ‘training’ earlier. In our wide-ranging discussion about how we (education technologists and learning designers) collectively educate educators, I referred to this as training. One of the learning designers leapt upon this to point out that the work that I do is basically a behaviorist, push-this-button push-that-button pedagogy-free zone whereas their ‘workshops’ are richer. Rather than focus on the idea, they fixated on the semantics, the specific presentation of a form of the idea. (I have a separate post coming about form vs content). When I pointed out that I felt there was a certain amount of snobbishness in the way technology vs pedagogy was seen and discussed in our work, there was a defensive bustle of ‘no, we love technology’ but I don’t think I got my point across.

I do also recognise that sometimes we have emotional reactions alongside rational ones. Both are a part of life but it can take a bit of sifting to know whether you are in the right. Then again, being factually right isn’t always the only thing that matters. As a community of practitioners who struggle to be heard and recognised, it’s important that we can also hear and recognise our colleagues in the different roles of our discipline. Feeling disrespected I believe underpins many of the dumb, unproductive tensions and simmering conflicts in our environment.

Ultimately, I would say that collectively our job is to improve learning and teaching, by whatever means necessary. Putting ourselves into tiny silos and refusing to engage with an educator when they come to us with a question because ‘that’s not my job’ is bad practice, IMHO. If you legitimately can’t answer the question, sure, help them by directing them to someone that can but don’t miss the opportunity to build a relationship of trust with someone because you feel that they didn’t respect your primary focus. Also, for the love of God, let’s not set up an ‘us and them’ culture between pedagogists and technologists – that doesn’t help anybody.

Anyway, maybe we need to start by considering what our common ground is and working our way out from there. Remembering that we are all messy and complex and see a range of paths to the promised land is probably a good first step.

Thank you for indulging in my therapy session.

* I do want to acknowledge that I think it is more of a philosophical approach than anything else. There can be valid reasons, it’s just not my personal style.

Categories
case study methodology

Thoughts on: Five misunderstandings about case-study research (Flyvbjerg, 2006)

One of the things that I’ve noticed as I explore the scholarly world is that there appear to be as many different ways to do research as there are researchers. Every time I’ve discussed my research with someone, they seem to have had a different take on the best way to do it. This, I guess, comes down to their experiences and how they would do it if it was their project, based on their way of seeing the world and the knowledge within. It shouldn’t surprise me then that, as people make these approaches and paradigms part of their identity, that they can get strangely passionate and maybe even political about ‘the right way to do things’. (Not everyone, mind you, but more than a few).

Which brings us to Flyvbjerg and this take on the value of case studies in qualitative research. Rather than simply talking through the nature and merits of the case study as a way of understanding something, the author positions it in opposition to common criticisms of this form of research. Kind of mythbusters for qualitative research I guess.

To be frank, I’m still getting my head around what research is, so rather than follow him down this rabbit-hole in depth, I’m just going to share the parts of this that stood out the most and that got me thinking about what I want to do. A significant part of the thrust of the paper seems to lie in whether we can be confident that a case study tells us something meaningful about the world. He comes back several times to a larger philosophical tension between case studies and larger scale quantitative research that seeks to prove a hypothesis or demonstrate the existence of things that in combination add up to something meaningful.

In addition, from both an understanding-oriented and an action-oriented perspective, it is often more important to clarify the deeper causes behind a given problem and its consequences than to describe the symptoms of the problem and how frequently they occur. Random samples emphasizing representativeness will seldom be able to produce this kind of insight; it is more appropriate to select some few cases chosen for their validity. (p.229)

For me, the main points of contention are: Is this simply a one-off outlier that you are describing or is this a situation that is likely to be seen repeatedly? (Generalisability) What does the fact that the research chose this particular case to study mean in terms of its independence or representativeness? (Verification bias) Is it possible to extract meaningful truths from this story? (Ability to summarise findings).

Generalisability

Flyvbjerg contends that looking at one case can indeed tell us a lot. The idea of falsification is, in essence, that it only takes one example that contradicts a stated belief to change that idea.

The case study is ideal for generalizing using the type of test that Karl Popper(1959) called “falsification,” which in social science forms part of critical reflexivity. Falsification is one of the most rigorous tests to which a scientific proposition can be subjected: If just one observation does not fit with the proposition, it is considered not valid generally and must therefore be either revised or rejected. Popper himself used the now famous example “all swans are white” and proposed that just one observation of a single black swan would falsify this proposition and in this way have general significance and stimulate further investigations and theory building. The case study is well suited for identifying “black swans” because of its in-depth approach: What appears to be “white” often turns out on closer examination to be “black.” (p.227-228)

Verification bias

In some ways, the other side of this is what we learn when the things that we didn’t expect to happen, do. Flyvbjerg seems to feel that this is a fairly compelling counter to the idea that researchers conducting case studies choose the cases that are most likely to match their hypotheses, noting that we learn much more when the unexpected occurs.

A model example of a “least likely” case is Robert Michels’s (1962) classical study of oligarchy in organizations. By choosing a horizontally struc-tured grassroots organization with strong democratic ideals—that is, a type of organization with an especially low probability of being oligarchical—Michels could test the universality of the oligarchy thesis; that is, “If this organization is oligarchic, so are most others.” A corresponding model example of a “most likely” case is W. F. Whyte’s (1943) study of a Boston slum neighborhood, which according to existing theory, should have exhibited social disorganization but in fact, showed quite the opposite (p.231)

Summarising findings

Life is complex and not everything can necessarily be boiled down to basic truths. Flyvbjerg largely rejects the position that this is a weakness of case studies, instead valuing ambiguity

The goal is not to make the case study be all things to all people. The goal is to allow the study to be different things to different people. I try to achieve this by describing the case with so many facets—like life itself—that different readers may be attracted,or repelled, by different things in the case. Readers are not pointed down anyone theoretical path or given the impression that truth might lie at the end of such a path. Readers will have to discover their own path and truth inside thecase. Thus, in addition to the interpretations of case actors and case narrators,readers are invited to decide the meaning of the case and to interrogate actors ’and narrators’ interpretations to answer that categorical question of any case study, “What is this case a case of?” (p.238)

I’m not sure that this level of ambiguity sits comfortably with me but I can see value in the case study as a whole. In terms of my own work, there’s a final additional quote that I like that speaks to the idea of research undertaken by practitioners – something I have noticed as somewhat of a gap when it comes to research about edvisors.

Here, too, this difference between large samples and single cases can be understood in terms of the phenomenology for human learning discussed above. If one, thus, assumes that the goal of the researcher’s work is to under-stand and learn about the phenomena being studied, then research is simply a form of learning. If one assumes that research, like other learning processes,can be described by the phenomenology for human learning, it then becomes clear that the most advanced form of understanding is achieved when researchers place themselves within the context being studied. Only in this way can researchers understand the viewpoints and the behavior, which characterizes social actors. Relevant to this point, Giddens (1982) stated that valid descriptions of social activities presume that researchers possess those skills necessary to participate in the activities described:

“I have accepted that it is right to say that the condition of generating descriptions of social activity is being able in principle to participate in it. It involves“mutual knowledge,” shared by observer and participants whose action constitutes and reconstitutes the social world.” (Giddens, 1982, p. 15)

(P.236)

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Categories
methodology reflection

Research update #59: I’m back – what did I miss?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

I took a little time off – as it appears many of my fellow candidates are – due to the plague and the impact it is having on, well, everything. Work in the online education space has been frantic and it seemed like a good time not to try to do too much.

One thing that I’m very conscious of now is the fact that the role and value (at least hopefully perceptions of value) of edvisors has changed now. I know this will impact what I’m looking at but it’s not really clear yet how. Academics are absolutely far more aware that we exist and largely seem to be appreciative of this fact. What does this mean for my main research question?

What strategies are used in HE to promote understanding of the roles and demonstrate the value of edvisors among academic staff and more broadly within the institution?

To be honest, I’ve been thinking for a while now that this isn’t the right question anyway. It doesn’t explain why I’m doing this research (the problem) and it moves straight into looking for a narrow set of solutions for an assumed problem. This problem being that academics and management don’t know what edvisors do or what they contribute. It also assumes that edvisors and edvisor units have the time, energy, skill or political capital to develop and implement formal strategies to address this.

The heart of the issue is really, to put it plainly, why don’t people respect our skills, experience and knowledge and take our advice seriously? Which seems possibly a bit pointed or needy as a research question but that’s not hard to tweak. So this is something that I’m thinking seriously about at the moment.

Something else is the fact that I’ve never been entirely happy with my methodology. Unfortunately, as someone who hasn’t done a lot of research before – at least at this scale – I’m dealing with a lot of unknown unknowns. How much data do you need for a good thesis? People have said to me recently that the best PhD is a done one, so maybe the question is just how much data do you need for a thesis – but I feel like if I’m putting in the time, it needs to be good.

Generally my approach when faced with a big project is to gather up everything that seems to have some value and throw it at the wall to see what sticks. Then it is just a gradual process of filtering and refining. The problem is that the scope of “everything” has expanded to cover edvisors across three roles, academics and leaders in potentially 40+ universities around Australia, as well as policy documents, job ads and position descriptions, organisational structures and whatever else crops up along the way. Given my ties to the TELedvisors community, I’d hope that this group will also play a substantial part of what I’m doing.

But maybe this can be done more cleverly.

Could there be enough material just in the edvisor community? Even in the TELedvisor community? (486 members and counting). I’d long felt that case studies were an interesting way to tell a story but lack something authoritative. But I’ve been reading Five misunderstandings about case study research by Flyvbjerg (2006) and I’m starting to see the possibilities. (I think I’ll do a separate post about this)

If the world’s going to change, I might as well join in.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363
Categories
ethics imposter syndrome reflection research

Research update #58: I’m ethical

There’s a lot about the PhD experience that I find quite daunting – I don’t think I’m alone in this – but the administration side seems particularly nerve-wracking. Getting accepted, getting my thesis proposal accepted, getting ethics clearance: they all speak directly to imposter syndrome. Most of the time this just burbles away happily in a small dark corner in the back of my mind, tempered largely by knowing that this is just part of scholarly culture and it is pretty much universal. Hearing the many many stories of others in my position through online communities and blogs like The Thesis Whisperer has been hugely helpful in understanding that this is just part of the process.

All the same, having to pass these institutional hurdles for the first time still brings it to the fore. This is when the faint nagging doubting comes into the light because there will be proof, one way or the other, that I belong or I don’t.

Happily, I do. (At least for now)

HREC came back to me on Thursday to say that they are happy with the extra information that I provided in response to their questions and it is time to move forward.

Given the current flurry of activity in universities in responding to the challenges of the COVID19 Coronavirus, I have a feeling that this may not be the optimal time for me to be asking for the time of people in roles like mine. It’s a fascinating time to be supporting learning and teaching in Higher Education in Australia, particularly given how many of our students now come from (and are still stuck in) China. Being on-the ground in institutions that are sometimes seen as slow movers when it comes to learning and teaching change and seeing how they take rapid and decisive action at scale in seriously embracing TEL is pretty exciting. There will be a lot to say and learn when the dust finally settles – whenever that might be.

Suffice to say, I’m mentally factoring in longer than normal response times for surveys and interviews. (Not that I know what the norms are anyway, but you know). At least hopefully contact uni HR teams for more generic data about numbers and titles should be less dramatic.

I can’t remember what I’ve mentioned before about my methodology but in this first phase I’ll be seeking to survey and interview edvisors about a range things relating to professional identity and perceptions of their place and value in institutions. I know essentially nothing about what to do in terms of wrangling this data and turning it into a story – I know there will be coding and Nvivo involved for the qualitative responses – but I’m looking forward to learning it.

It also occurred to me the other day that there is a great deal to be learned about what people think edvisors are and do from successful and failed job applications. The ethics around accessing the latter in particular seems like a massive swamp but it’s something I’ll think about for later.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Categories
ethics methodology politics Professional staff

Research update #57: Curly questions in ethics

I heard back about my ethics application a few weeks back – it’s mostly fine but there is a big question that I need to respond to before I can go ahead. It’s essentially to do with whether the institution or individuals in the institution are the real participants.

I want to work with key informants in edvisor roles in most (ideally all) of the universities in Australia to learn about their perceptions and experiences in these roles. That’s the easy bit. I also want to gather some rich empirical data about the numbers of peoples in these roles, both in central and faculty – and other? – teams, and how these teams are structured. That’s the hard part.

The ethics committee wants to know what I am going to do in terms of getting permission from the institution to collect this data. In hindsight, this is clearly something I should have given more thought to in the research design. While to me, this data doesn’t seem particularly sensitive, there’s all manner of university politics and other sensitivities surrounding this, apparently.

My feeling is that for this data to be truly meaningful, it needs to reflect all the universities. Otherwise it is just an average or an estimate. (Which is what most of the existing research I’ve found provides.) So what happens if some institutions don’t want to share? (I don’t really expect that to be the case but people being people, who can say?)

The logistics of obtaining permission is another challenge. Am I looking at one person in the institution (maybe like a DVCA – but really I have no idea) or do I need to clear this with them and leaders in each individual faculty? Assuming 6 faculties per institution on average, 280 people? Clearly this isn’t practical.

A few things I’m going to follow up that will hopefully shed light on this. The Council of Australasian Leaders of Learning and Teaching (CAULLT) recently released a very useful environmental scan of professional learning in HE that captured exactly some of this data – though only in central teams from what I can tell. Hopefully the report’s author Kym Fraser can offer some advice on what they did in terms of permissions.

There are also some statutory reporting requirements that HE institutions in Australia have relating to reporting on staffing numbers to the government that might also demonstrate that permission isn’t needed. From what I’ve seen so far, this data doesn’t go into the level of detail that I need though and probably doesn’t go into organisational structures either. Most unis have Business Intelligence units that manage this kind of data – moreso for internal use – I’m also going to chat to them. I don’t think they will be able to make a call on permission but they may have a better idea where to go next.

Another significant question that the Ethics committee has thrown up is whether universities will have issues with their staff working as a key informant for a few hours to do work that is outside that person’s ordinary duties. I really have no answer to this – though I kind of wonder if this question would have been asked if it was academic staff that I was planning to work with. (I probably won’t say that in my response.) It does bring me back to the seeking permission question/dilemma.

Have you had any experience with these kinds of questions? Got any tips?

Categories
Uncategorized

Research update #56: Tying theory to methodology

While I’m waiting for faculty approval to submit to university ethics, I have time to consider some of my bigger questions sitting in the ‘later pile’. A big one relates to how (if?) my theoretical framework relates to my methodology in a meaningful way. There are a couple of theories that I’m drawing on for this research, though to be honest I’m not sure how officially ‘theoretical’ they are.

There’s work by Whitchurch and others about the Third Space as it relates to Higher Education, the liminal space between admin and academic that edvisors occupy. And there’s work relating to Social Practice theory by Shove and others that I feel may be helpful in defining the different kinds of edvisors by the work edvisors they do. It may also reveal something about how we/they work with academics and management in terms of the ways practices are disseminated and evolve. This seems to crossover into the realms of change management, which I seem to be hearing a lot about recently in this space and which perhaps seems like a useful angle to take, strategically. (Truth be told though, I think that too much weight is probably given to change and not enough to maintenance and sustainability of existing good learning and teaching practices, so who knows where I’ll land on that)

There are a couple of concerns that I have – are the theories that I’m looking at robust enough to inform the research that I’m doing? Are they even really theories, as such? Shouldn’t they be providing me with some ideas about how I should be designing my research data collection? To date, I’ve been largely assuming that they will come to the fore when I eventually get onto data analysis and trying to make some meaning from the things I’ve collected.

Nobody seems to be jumping up and down about this though – which has become my default indicator of whether I’m going horribly wrong – so I guess I’ll just keep meandering along. I have reached out to a couple of academics in business faculties now though, with an interest in the way organisations work because I have a strong feeling that this is an important factor in successful edvisor/academic/management collaboration but I have no idea what the language is that I need to describe this or what models or frameworks will best help to understand it. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about doing this PhD study is the opportunities that it creates to reach out to people who have done interesting work, who, for the most part seem willing to share their expertise.

It draws into sharp contrast a comment yesterday from one of the academics on my progress review panel. I asked whether my blogging here, as a way of getting my ideas straight, might prove problematic down the road with my thesis – i.e. are there risks of being pinged for self plagiarism or something? I’m pretty sure that my writing style here is far more casual than my academic writing style but we do also have go-to turns of phrase and words that we favour. (I know I really overuse ‘particularly’, ‘however’, ‘interesting’, and a few others but I struggle to find replacements that feel as much like me). Anyway, the academic seemed just as concerned about people stealing my ideas. Which I guess it was nice that someone thinks I might have ideas worth stealing but, given that my entire aim with this research (as far as I know currently) is to improve and change practices and relationships with edvisors, I’m mostly of the opinion that I want my ideas to circulate and evolve. But maybe I’m naive.

Anyway, more things to think about.

Categories
academic developer academic development academics attitudes edvisor Professional staff

Reflecting on: The Academic/Professional divide

YouTube captioning tries so hard but sometimes it doesn’t quite get there

I ran a webinar for the ASCILITE TELedvisors network on Thursday, with a focus on Academic Developers. One of the things that I’m enjoying most about the research process is the way that it lets you put the existing research literature and your own ideas to the test.

Of the three broad edvisor types that I believe reasonably sum us up (Academic Developers, Learning Designers, Education Technologists), it seems that ADs are the most clearly defined. I’d suggest that this is because they are almost entirely academic roles, which makes it much easier for ADs to undertake research relating to their work. One of my go-to references has been the International Journal of Academic Development. I’ve never come across a journal for educational technologists.

Based on the literature, my experiences and those of my colleagues, I’d say that one of the biggest barriers to effective collaboration between edvisors and academics is the academic/professional divide. I’d characterise this as an underlying tribalism that comes from a sense of one side not really understanding the drives and day to day experiences of the other. At its worst there can be an element of snobbery at play but for the most part it seems to come from Higher Ed culture that has customarily been relatively siloed and ‘us and them’.

All of the presenters noted that they felt that by holding an academic role as ADs, academic teaching staff were more likely to take their advice seriously. When I asked what professional staff might do to earn this kind of relationship of trust, most of the answers were variations on a theme of spending 1-1 time with academic teaching staff and demonstrating your knowledge. Which I appreciate but at the same time, this seems to have significant limitations.

Discussion about how professional staff can develop same relationship of trust with academics as Academic Developers have

Another recurring idea was that academic teaching staff will respond more to advice about teaching and learning when it is tied to evidence based research and theory. I can see the value of this and I wonder if there is a case for more effective use of it when it comes to the dissemination of institutional learning and teaching initiatives in particular. Part of me does wonder though, whether this creates an escape clause for some of the less engaged academic teaching staff who might just pick holes in the theory to justify not doing something they had no interest in doing in the first place. But maybe that happens anyway. And maybe worrying about the worst cases at the expense of the greater population isn’t that helpful.

One more area that I think the academic/professional divide is manifested is within edvisor circles. While all the presenters seem respectful of edvisors in professional roles, there did at times seem to be a gap in understanding of the depth of the pedagogical knowledge and skill of learning designers and education technologists. One of the aspects of my research that I’m hoping will shed more light on this is exploring the way that edvisor units are organised in institutions. Whether ADs work alongside LDs and ETs or whether they are all separate. I have a feeling that we lean towards the latter and that this can lead to these understanding gaps. The fact that we had representatives of two AD only communities of practice that there is a strong sense of operating in a specialised domain. (Though I have noticed similar gaps between LDs and ETs at times, in professional roles).

I’ll be very interested to see if there are differences in the levels and types of collaborations based on organisational structures. I think I need to explore organisational theory a little more deeply here – it’s moving away from education to an extent but I suspect that it might be enlightening. Do you have any suggestions about this? Leave a comment (if commenting works) or say hi on twitter – I’m @gamerlearner

Categories
reflection research technologist TEL edvisors

Research update #55: 10 months later

The cool thing about not blogging for a little while is that I get to do one of those cool narrative jumps that you get in your better TV shows* where a bunch of stuff happens between now and then but we just focus on the now.

I’m close to putting my ethics application in, I think I’ve got a fairly decent set of survey and interview questions and I have a reasonable idea of what data I want to capture in the first phase of investigation. The plan is still to work with around a dozen local Key Informants (KIs) in universities around Australia, edvisors who will help me sense check the questions and also help source information about numbers of edvisors in their institution, where they are located and how this is arranged (i.e. faculty vs centralised units, do learning technologists work side by side with learning designers etc).

I’m kind of concerned both about the ethics process – mostly because I haven’t been through it before, not because what I think I’m doing is unethical. This comes back to a lifelong wariness of authority I suspect. Recruiting KIs is a bigger worry, I think I do my best work when I don’t have to rely on other people and I don’t think I’m particularly good at asking other people to do things – specially things that will involve a bit of effort. I mean, I do it and I’ve done it but I don’t think I do that bit very well, the getting people excited and bringing them along for the ride bit. I raised the idea of paying the KIs some kind of honorarium when I spoke to Peter (supervisor) the other day but he was against it. (Ethics mostly I think).

One great thing that has happened in the last year has been the way that the TELedvisors network (and I) seem to have become a touch point for people doing research in this area. I should say, for professional staff and PhD students doing research in this area. I think I’ve been contacted personally by maybe 7 or 8 people wanting a chat and/or to use TELedvisors to help recruit participants to various studies. These all centre around Learning Designers, interestingly enough. I guess Academic Developers, coming moreso from the ranks of academics still tend to steer clear of professional staff and nobody really gives a damn about learning technologists, except me. (That’s not true, there’s a fair body of research about technologists out there but it’s a far small slice of the pie).

I’ve also reached out to a few people doing research in this space, and some taking it off in interesting new directions. I don’t feel at all insecure about saying that I feel like many of these people are smarter than I am, so it’s nice to be able to extend myself through the complexities of their ideas. Sarah Thorneycroft, someone I’ve been fortunate to know in the sector for a few years now has started her PhD on learning design, but for organisations. I think what I admire most about practitioner driven research is that it has a tight focus on meaningful outcomes rather than feeling like some kind of loose thought exercise.

One idea that I’ve been wrestling with has been about the difference between Learning Technologists (LTs) and Educational Technologists (ETs). Part of this was sparked by my gut reaction to ALT’s definition of LTs. ALT is the UK based Association for Learning Technology. In the TEL sector, they are a pretty big deal and their annual conference is one of the events of the year, from what I understand. They run CMALT, an accreditation scheme for learning technologists and also have learning technologist of the year awards. The 2017 winner of this award posted a reflection blog saying that she works as and probably sees herself more as an academic developer. In the post she does discuss “proper” learning technologists, people with this as a blog title but neither her or ALT saw not being a learning technologist as a barrier to being the best one of 2017. Which brings us back to ALT’s definition.

We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology.

We believe that you don’t need to be called ‘Learning Technologist’ to be one.  

Vasant, S. (2014, March 31). What is a Learning Technologist? Retrieved September 11, 2019, from Blog.jobs.ac.uk website: https://blog.jobs.ac.uk/education/teaching-learning/what-is-a-learning-technologist/

As a professional staff member in a Higher Education institution and someone who has worked as an actual Learning/Education Technologist for a number of years, I struggle with this for a few reasons. The biggest relates to the academic/professional divide. My immediate, visceral reaction is that academic hobbyists are barging into a domain and claiming ownership like some European coloniser here to save the poor, ignorant local natives from themselves. Clearly that is a gross overreaction. It comes from an array of experiences (shared with my peers) of being disrespected and marginalised by (some, not all) academics as a professional staff member. Research is the key word at issue, as in most institutions, professional staff are excluded from this activity.

There is a second divide, lesser spoken of than the first, the pedagogical/technological divide. While I don’t have literature to back this up, I’d suggest that there is a hierarchy of knowledge in HE that goes 1) domain/discipline, 2) pedagogical and at a distant 3) technological. Given the purpose of HE, I don’t necessary disagree with this, although it does depend on what weighting we give research over teaching as a university purpose as to the gap between 1&2 and I also question the need for the size of the gap between 2&3. Both of these factors mean that, as a “proper” learning technologist, I can sometimes be sensitive to a sense of othering not just from academics but even from some edvisors in more pedagogically oriented roles and so this sense that ‘anyone can be a technologist’ probably grates more than it should.

But, I need to recognise that my feelings aren’t the only show in town and none of this has been consciously factored in to the ALT definition. Looking at it from another angle, it is about fostering an inclusive community of inquiry and practice, which is obviously a good thing. If there is one thing my research has made clear over the last 3.5 years, it’s that language in this space is hazy and fluid and just because I believe (for some good reasons) that the term learning technologist should represent a dedicated profession, it doesn’t mean that others have to. Stamping my feet about it is certainly not going to get me anywhere, anyway.

All of which led me back to the perennial question of what does a learning technologist do. Most of the ALT definition actually does capture it, though I think we need to go deeper. Managing, supporting and enabling learning are a big part of my work, with some understanding and some researching. (I consider myself fortunate to now be working somewhere that actively supports professional staff participation in research – oh yeah, one of the things that happened in the 10 months was that I got a new job). Managing, arguably is where the main dividing line between academic and professional and pedagogical and technological can be found. (Probably supporting too but let’s stick to managing for now).

Thinking about managing educational technology led me to the realisation that we should have educational technologists (ET) and learning technologists. Both need to have a strong understanding understanding of both technology and pedagogy – a fact that many people seem to miss. The difference between ET/LTs and IT staff is that our focus is ultimately always on the best application of technology to enhance learning. Without the learning, there is no need for the tech. If it doesn’t enhance the learning, there is no need for the tech. This isn’t to say that IT staff don’t have ideas about how tech can enhance learning but this is not their primary function. (I raise this – and will come back to it in a future post – because one of the biggest misconceptions about LT/ETs is that we are primarily IT staff).

So what’s the difference between a learning technologist and an educational technologist then? Great question, thanks for asking. I would suggest that an LT is principally focused on the connections between learning, teaching and technology. They tend to work more closely with teachers and will more commonly be found in faculty/college based units than in central ones. An ET, on the other hand, does this as well but has a lot more to do with how the education technology works in and serves the needs of the wider institutional education ecosystem. They are more commonly found in central teams and will work more closely with the institutional IT teams to manage and implement systems and platforms.

These central teams are often the business owners of the tech, and In addition to the impact tech has on learning and teaching, they need to be across the practicalities of how it is supported, what happens when it breaks, how it integrates with other institutional systems (e.g. student management), how its use aligns with university policies (e.g. academic integrity), legal requirements (privacy, security, intellectual property), how the implementation works with the available staff resources to actually get the work done (amidst competing priorities) and financial considerations. These are some of the less interesting aspects intellectually of using technology in education but nonetheless, they are essential for facilitating the big picture operation of the institution beyond learning and teaching.

Now, as I’ve mentioned once or forty times before, the semantic landscape when it comes to describing edvisors is more of a jungle than a garden, but in terms of making sense of the different responsibilities of types of technologists, using educational vs learning seems helpful. Whether this might also be applied to learning designers or academic developers is something for further consideration.

It feels good to get that all out of my head.

In terms of what’s next, I have a long list of things that I’m trying to cut back to something manageable and less overwhelming. A big thing overall would seem to be to do more writing, so returning to this blog feels like a positive step in that direction. The advice I read about doing a PhD is not to wait until you’ve collected your data to start writing it – because there are going to be many many drafts before it is ready. Setting up Scrivener to support this seems to be a good next thing to do. I’ve been flipping between whether I want to set up individual Scrivener projects for each chapter or just put everything in the one. A single one feels like it might be unmanageably large but maybe there would be problems if I want to quickly access content/ideas/etc between chapters if I do it the other way. Compartmentalising by chapter feels like it might better support a sense of progress and achievement. I’ll probably do that.

Time to crack on then.

*Apropos of nothing much, one of the best shows I have watched recently, to the point where I felt the need to ration it out, has been a series called Patriot. This low key spy comedy is like nothing I have seen on TV before. It has the sensibilities of a great indie film, deep rich characters, imaginative production, a profound love of language and just superb story telling. It takes it own time and I could never tell where it was going, which makes the comic moments leap out. Stephen Conrad, the writer/director has gone on to make Perpetual Grace Inc. which is equally amazing. These are true auteur shows. (Below is a nice example of the fun they have with language – I’d share a series trailer but there are too many joke spoilers, just watch it)


Categories
methodology reflection research

#Research Update 54: No more excuses

(Caution – this is very rambly and introspective and I think I largely used this to tease out some ideas that seem quite obvious in hindsight. You can pretty safely skip this post, even if you sometimes find my other ones interesting)

A couple more months have passed since I went through my confirmation and while I’ve been letting ideas percolate and I’ve been developing plans, it feels like there hasn’t been enough pixels put to e-paper

I caught up with Peter, who continues to assure me that I’m not aiming too high, and he said a few times that more than anything else, I need to be taking notes about everything. That was one thing that I was using this blog for and it is the thing that I am returning to.

I actually like writing and I don’t feel like I get to do enough of it in my day-to-day – or at least I should say, I don’t get to do enough satisfying writing. Emails written and instruction/process writing has skyrocketed as I slowly get my head around the challenges of a shared management role in a Higher Education institution. In those cases (other than instructions and processes), a lot of what I’m writing still feels like it is wrong because the landscape is changing so quickly that it is incredibly difficult to have the context and rationale of many of the things I’m responding to. I am quickly – though not quickly enough – learning that I’m not in a position to raise questions about decisions made at an executive level and I need to get on with just implementing them. Which is ironic I guess because I feel as though many of the calls that I have been making are similarly questioned by my team members and I know how frustrating that is. (Because I have the full context perhaps and they don’t? Who knows – that does at least seem to be one thing I can try to do better anyway)

The apparent binary between rational factors and emotional factors in decision making and activities at all levels is definitely something I had never given enough thought to before. Both types of factors are valid and need to be addressed, working with the emotional is a lot harder though. I feel as though I have touched on this a little in the Lit Review as far as teachers/academics goes but have greatly underestimated its impact across the educational ecosystem. I do suspect that this ecosystem is relatively unique in terms of workplaces and that people accustomed to working in “normal” work environments frequently don’t make allowances for it when they try to apply typical change management strategies and tools. It feels as though I have already seen it bewilder and crush the spirits of more than a few sensible and good people. It is probably both a strength and a weakness of Higher Education and I guess I need to find some way to explore and explain it in my research. I keep coming back to the Brew, Boud, Lucas & Crawford article from 2017 about “Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic” as something that both shocks and enlightens me about aspects of university culture. This culture seeps through all areas of the institution.

Coming back to methodology, one of my big concerns as I work out how to do the first round of interviews with Key Informants (approx 12 across edvisor and manager roles – maybe some teacher??) has been how to find a reflective sample of Australia’s Higher Ed landscape. In broad brushstrokes, we have city and regional/rural universities, “elite” research institutions (the Group of Eight), technology oriented universities, younger research focussed ones and a large set of ‘others’ that are often considered by learners as having more of a career-gaining purpose (though quality research is also done in these ones). Some institutions are financially well-off and others struggle for survival – which could both make them more open to innovation and teaching and learning support offered by edvisors as well as less able to pay for it. Culturally, the ‘elite’ universities – and particularly the academics within (to apply a ridiculously broad brush) might have much more restrictive internal hierarchies and cultures that downplay teaching support from ‘non-academics’ – or even teaching over all.

So how to allow for all of these factors (and so many more) in choosing which institutions to focus on in a logistically feasible study. Peter’s feeling – which surprised me but kind of makes sense – was that these distinctions fade away somewhat if I ultimately aim to gather rich data from all the Australian universities. All 40-43 of them (depending on the inclusion of private and international unis with Australian campuses).

In a separate writing practice I like to write ridiculously unfilmable science fiction and horror scripts. I used to write like a producer, only including the things that I thought were actually doable (not that I have the experience to know what that is any more). After a while though, I realised that this seriously stunted the enjoyment that I got from telling crazy stories and I decided that the first drafts needed to have everything and I could leave the problems of actually realising them as someone else’s problem. This feels a little bit like that in some ways and maybe it’s a terrible analogy as none of the scripts have ever been made but at the same time, it seems increasingly like the only way I am going to really learn what it is to be a researcher is to aim too high and then let reality whittle that down into something achievable.

So I guess I’m aiming to explore the relationships between edvisors, academics and management in all Australian Higher Ed institutions, in some way.

The key informant interviews are still as much about working out how to do this substantive piece of research and the different avenues that I might need to follow in order to get access to institutional data. Given that every institution is different, I guess I can only hope to get indicative insights into how this might be done rather than definitive information.

Any way I cut it, I need to actually be doing it to learn about this rather than trying to work out the perfect fully-formed solution in my head before I go and do it. Which will be a challenge but one not unlike my current new work role.

This has been my TED talk, thanks for listening. (It was really just about committing to some ideas I now realise and there is no better way to do this than have to commit them to screen.)

Categories
methodology PhD research

Research update #53: Methodology or Messodology?

I have identified around 17 different types of data that I want to collect for this research. I have been waiting for people who know more about this than I do to say – ‘you’re out of your mind’ – but as yet, nobody has.

It looks a little something like this.

More than a few of these things (edvisor numbers, quals, entry points, unit structures) don’t even necessarily answer my research questions but seem important in the journey towards them. The I.T bit in the corner is more of a stray thought because I’ve been spending a LOT of time in my own edvisor practice lately chatting to them and there is wealth of research to be done on their role in edutech projects that nobody seems to have touched on yet.

Determining how, where and from whom to gather this data is my first stage and will involve working closely with a set of key informants across institutions. I would assume a mix of edvisors, edvisor unit managers (or higher level types – DVCAs maybe?) and I’d imagine teachers but that seems slightly hazier right at the moment. One of the edvisors on the review panel did note that there is a major difference between types of edvisors and while I believe I have acknowledged that, I can probably give it a lot more thought in terms of considering the relationships between edvisors (academic developers, learning designers and learning technologists) and our perceptions of each other. So that’s fun.

For now, the logical thing to do seems to focus on the interviews with key informants, which are intended (amongst other things) to provide some insights into how to go about collecting the rest of this data. I’d like to get a reasonably representative cross-section of people in a range of different types of unis (I considered TAFE and private providers but that’s just too much extra), so I figure I need Group of Eight, Australian Technology Network, Innovative Research and Regional ones. But maybe that’s overdoing it. I do think there is something to be seen in comparing teaching oriented vs research oriented ones and perhaps also (though maybe this is the same thing) well resourced vs less well resourced institutions. Then again I haven’t considered any of these things as factors in my proposal so far, so ??? Anyway, I guess that falls under the research apprenticeship side of this whole endeavour.

But, be honest, this still seems like way too much to be trying to do right?