"Professor of learning technology at Glasgow Caledonian University"

Director of the Caledonian Academy

Work and Learning at the Boundaries of Knowledge: A funded PhD Fellowship

Posted by on Mar 9, 2012 in Organisational Learning, Professional Learning | 0 comments

Applications are invited for a PhD research studentship within the Caledonian Academy (www.academy.gcal.ac.uk) in Glasgow, UK.  The Caledonian Academy is seeking a talented,  PhD Fellow for a project studying learning practices within groups of knowledge workers at Google and the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments.The studentship is for a period of three years, subject to satisfactory progress and provides payment of tuition fees at the UK/EU rate  plus an annual stipend of approx £14k. The successful candidate is expected to undertake up to 6 hours of academic support activity per week, which will include research, teaching or administration.

Purpose of Studentship

The Caledonian Academy is offering a 3-year studentship, starting October 2012, to carry out research leading to a PhD investigating work and learning at the boundaries of knowledge. Data will be collected at two sites at Google (USA) and the Chartered Institute of Securities (UK).

Research project

Societal changes, as well as changes in the nature of knowledge mean that knowledge workers are increasingly asked to operate at the boundary of knowledge, or to source and use knowledge across different domains (Nardi et al, 2000). Examples include Software Engineering where technology innovation demands constant reconceptualization of knowledge, and Finance, where changing regulations and recent failures require new solutions and process innovation. Knowledge workers in such contexts must learn continually to maintain expertise. Little is known about how knowledge workers make connections across distributed networks (Edwards, 2010), however social technologies (web2.0) play an important role in supporting learning networks through which knowledge workers can learn from and with each other as they exchange and create new knowledge (Littlejohn et al, 2012) .

This study is a GCU partnership with two leading organisations: Google and the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments (CISI). The study will examine the learning practices of:

  • a software engineering team at Google – capturing, creating and distributing knowledge in a dynamic and global environment.
  • investment operations professionals devising new processes within global finance institutions, associated with CISI.

 

Learning practices within these groups will be explored to identify commonalities.

The goal of this study is to identify and model the strategies used by knowledge workers to plan and direct their learning for work. The key research questions are:

  • What factors (individual, organisational, social and technological) constrain and enable effective learning for connected knowledge work?
  • What methods and practices do connected knowledge workers adopt to plan and direct their learning?
  • How can these practices be supported through the use of social technologies?

The project will use a mixed method approach to collect data from target groups of knowledge workers as they learn in the workplace. Instruments will include semi-structured interviews and network analysis.

 

Supervisory Team

The studentship offers a unique opportunity to work with an internationally-renowned research team which has strong links with leading research centres and the industry.  The supervisory team comprises: Prof. Allison Littlejohn, Dr Colin Milligan and Dr. Anoush Margaryan Further details are available at http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/people/index.html

 

Education/Experience sought:

The fellowship is open to candidates from EU countries. We are looking for a smart, dynamic, curious and motivated person who has the following skills:

  • Experience, or interest in, conducting mixed methods applied research
  • Strong abilities in writing and oral presentation in English
  • Ability to structure own work to achieve results within strict deadlines
  • Ability to communicate research findings efficiently to both academic and non-academic audiences

Essential:

  • Applicants must be graduates (Masters or Bachelors Degree plus relevant Masters) with a background in Learning Science or its sub-disciplines. Candidates with a background in Social or Behavioural Sciences are also eligible to apply, though interest in Organisational Learning  is essential.
  • Strong interest in conducting applied research
  • Interest in researching adult workplace learning areas is important

Desirable: 

  • Experience  in contemporary network theories is a plus.
  • Familiarity with relevant research on workplace learning is also an advantage

 

Contact

Those seeking further information should contact the supervisory team colin.milligan@gcu.ac.uk  allison.littlejohn@gcu.ac.uk or anoush.margaryan@gcu.ac.uk before April 10th 2012.

How to Apply:

Applicants should submit each of the following documents by e-mail to fiona.hughes@gcu.ac.uk before April 10th 2012

1. Letter of interest specifying how you learned about this vacancy and outlining how your skills, experience and background meet the essential and desirable criteria for this studentship.
2. CV

3. A writing sample (e.g. a recent journal publication or a chapter from your Masters thesis)

4. Names and contact information of two references (academic and/or professional).

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Grand Challenge in Open Learning

Posted by on Mar 5, 2012 in Higher Education, Professional Learning, Sustainable Learning | 0 comments

During Open Education Week, the JISC UKOER evaluation and synthesis team, Lou McGill, Isobel Falconer, Helen Beetham and I, are   collecting together ideas for a Grand Challenge in the areas of Open Education or Open Learning. This is following on from my work  with the EU-funded STELLAR  Network for Excellence in TEL in developing ‘Grand Challenges’. 

A Grand Challenge is about taking the areas of Open Education and/or Open Learning to a new level. It’s about focusing global attention on a specific problem – a problem that is important but has not been solved. Through a Grand Challenge, we identify a problem, link  people and disciplines to build new concepts  and  innovative solutions. Each Grand Challenge should be defined by a problem state­ment, rather than a solution, which is stated simply, measurable and time bound.

Identifying how realistic and desirable a Grand Challenges might be is complex. Every Grand Challenge brings together ideas and concepts from different disciplines to help solve some of the biggest problems associated with Open Education and Open Learning. The likely impact of each on human learning is governed by a complex interplay of factors including:

Contextualisation – Groups of people directly involved with each Grand Challenge will bring to the project their practices, cultures and values, grounding emerging ideas and solutions in known ways of learning and working. A high degree of contextualization embeds the research and outputs within specific settings, reducing the risk of solutions not being taken up. Conversely, a high degree of contexualisation makes the abstraction and diffusion of concepts to other settings more complex.

Interdiciplinarity – Inclusion of a wide range of disciplinary groups within a Grand Challenge enriches the outputs and solutions generated through the project. At the same time, the knowledge generated through the project is likely to be more abstract and less easy to apply directly to solutions across a range of different contexts. Consequently, projects with a greater the number of disciplines tend to be more complex and incur a higher the risk that the outputs will not be adopted widely.

Timescale  - The timeframe for the impact of concepts and solution on human learning is proportional to the complexity of the Grand Challenge. Complex, interdisciplinary projects will require a longer timeframe for the adoption of solutions, as knowledge is diffused across and interpreted by different stakeholder groups.

Let me know your ideas for a Grand Challenge in Open Education or Open Learning by writing a short problem statement. Outline the context, disciplines required to seek solutions, timescale and measures (ie how we will know the Grand Challenges has been completed). 

For example:

By 2022 learners will be able to use and contribute to all knowledge from publicly funded projects. The project will include researchers from  information, organisational, social and learning sciences, computer and material scientists as well as research funding bosdies, schools, colleges, universities, health services, museums, NGOs, legal entities  and government agencies. By 2012 all public projects will be asked to identify how learners can have access to and can contribute to the project knowledge prior as a condition of a funding agreement.

http://www.openeducationweek.org/

 

 

 

 

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SCORE-UKOER

Posted by on Jan 20, 2012 in Higher Education, Sustainable Learning | 0 comments

Change is not easy. Traditional values, beliefs and practices prevail. We have uncovered evidence of existing values and beliefs restricting change in open education and open learning practice.
On Jan 19th I presented findings from our Evaluation and Synthesis study of the UKOER (Open Educational Resources) Programme funded by the UK Joint Informations Systems Committees and the Higher Education Academy at a SCORE event at the UK Open University. The evaluation is being carried  out in the phases: phase 1 (2009-10), phase 2 (2010-11) and phase 3 (ongoing) and is being taken forward by Lou McGill, Isobel Falconer , Helen Beetham and me.
The study is framed by new Open Education and Open Learning Practices of learners and teachers in universities. We are observing palpable changes in the way people learn and teach. Do these observations signal sustainable changes:
  • in culture moving from focusing on conent owndership to focusing on open sharing?
  • in practices of releasing, reusing and repurposing open resources?
Our findings challenge whether observed practice change is taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by open resources and technologies.
Although we have evidence of changes in open education and open learning practices of learners and teachers, these are not accompanied by obvious shift in pedagogy, taking advantage of the affordances of open resources and technologies. In other words, although we are observing changes in how teachers and learners perform, there is no obvious change in what they do.
We also observed adherence to ingrained values in relation to the drivers for releasing OERs. We reanalysed the phase 1 evaluation data using activity theory analysis. Three main motivators driving the release of OERs emerged:
  • marketisation, signalling increased commercialisation within the Higher Education sector
  • academic commons, reflecting the move towards sharing knowledge;
  • technological momentum, in which the evolution of technology influences practice change.
Our analysis warns against over-reliance in the development and release of OERs within Communities of Practice (CoPs). CoPs offer promising impact on OER release and reuse through existing trusted relationships within tightly-knit  groups.  However, these existing communities tend to retain attitudes, beliefs and values that can stifle change.
We aim to publish these results shortly. In the meantime the presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/caledonianacademy/oer-score190112 and the event cloudsteam is at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2375#cloudstream

 

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LFI-Engage

Posted by on Jan 17, 2012 in Organisational Learning, Professional Learning | 0 comments

We have been funded by the UK Energy Institute (EI) and Shell International BV in the Netherlands to help companies in the energy sector improve the effectiveness of organisational learning from safety incidents. The Caledonian Academy was one of only two international research centres invited by Shell and the ENergy Institute to bid for this award.

We (Anoush Margaryan, Dane Lukic and I) have been working with a range of leading industry partners, including Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP, to improve organisational learning from incidents in the workplace. This latest initiative will help improve the effectiveness of safety learning in Shell through a series of learning interventions involving frontline managers.

The energy sector has invested in a range of initiatives to improve safety through Learning From Incidents (LFI). However, two main problems limit the impact of these. Firstly, frontline employees tend to engage with learning from incident initiatives in limited ways. Secondly, frontline managers and supervisors are not fully equipped to engage staff in learning in ways that maximise reflection and sense making. The new initiative, LFI-Engage, addresses these two problems. As well as research outputs, we will produce an easy to use and practical Toolkit that will help frontline managers to embed sense-making and reflection in learning processes at Shell.

The project is grounded in our Learning From Incidents PhD project, funded by Shell and the Energy Institute. LFI-Engage will make use of conceptual and methodological instruments developed empirically within this doctoral research. LFI-Engage will run from April 2012 to April 2013.

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MOOCs and self-regulated learning

Posted by on Jan 6, 2012 in Higher Education, Professional Learning, Sustainable Learning | 2 comments

We are launching a research study into self-regulated learning  in massive open online courses Massive Open Online Courses. Little is known about the impact of MOOCs on learning so we want to form a better understanding of how they support different types of learning.

Anoush Margaryan, Colin Milligan and I are interested in self-regulated learning outside formal learning contexts. We have designed a study, which aims to surface, describe and systematise the activities and strategies that adult learners use to self-regulate their learning in the context of the Change 2011 massive open online course (MOOC).
We are looking for volunteers to participate in this study. Anyone who has signed up for the Change11 MOOC is welcome to participate. Participation in the study will involve completion of an online questionnaire (in January/February 2012) and participation in a telephone or Skype interview (in or around March 2012).

 

Sign up to participate in the study at:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R2GK6W2

 

For further information see the blog post at worklearn.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/research-study-self-regulated-learning-in-massive-open-online-courses

 

or contact colin.milligan@gcu.ac.uk

 

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UKOER 2 Final Report

Posted by on Nov 25, 2011 in Higher Education | 0 comments

On November 14th 2012  we released the UKOER2 final report (http://tinyurl.com/bu5lvge). UK Open Educational Resources (UKOER) is a largescale programme funded by the UK Government through the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) . The programme aims to encourage academics in universities and colleges to openly release educational resources under s creative commons licence.

The report is due mainly to the hard work of my colleagues Lou McGill, Helen Beetham and Isobel Falconer and the collaboration of all the project teams at 23 universities and collages across the UK. The programme was divided into strands grouping projects with a similar goal, for example those who were focusing on ‘release’, ‘projects that aimed to ‘cascade’ expertise, those who wanted to form ‘collections’ of resources and projects that were developing open materials for accredited professional development courses.

The evaluation and synthesis of the programme was led by Lou, Helen, Isobel with me. Our evaluation instrument was a synthesis and evaluation framework which:

 

a) Focusses on a  number of themes emerging during the programme lifecourse. Themes include Practice Change, Development and Release issues, Cultural considerations, Institutional/Organisational Issues and Impacts & Benefits;
b) Asks a number of key questions around  each of these themes;
c) Collates and analyses evidence from each project as they answered these themed questions.

The data collected by the project teams was mapped to the questions  in the programme evaluation framework, providing an overview of key issues and trends across the programme.

In the final report, the outcomes are presented as issues and trends across the programme and across each of the programme strands. When you read the report you can  explore the broad trends and issues, then dip down into the more detailed outcomes, examining the evidence around these.

The final report is a rewardingly rich resource. But what does it tell us about  the programme?

 

We have evidence that the programme has triggered  practice change (i.e. changes in knowledge sharing practices) amongst the academics  and support staff who participated in the programme. Developing resources for open release under a creative commons licence prompts a change in work practices as people become more comfortable with the idea of releasing resources openly for use by others.

Yet, it seems that many of the new practices are still within the confines of traditional ways of working. Often ‘open release’ of resources simply means ‘release of resources within a  b bounded group/ community’. We still dont have the mindsets or trust for open knolwedge sharing.

What needs to happen for minds to change? We need to place much more value on what happens around knowledge resources – how people use them for learning.  The MIT Open Courseware Initiative has been explicit about this from the outset.

 

People learn through negotiating their own understanding of knowledge within the network, connecting different fragments of knowledge, articulating new meanings while developing new knowledge artefacts and  products. Placing value on the dynamic interactions of learners  and  teachers, that link resources gives within a network helps us have a realistic view of the value of knowledge resources and the role they play in learning.

 

Perhaps the problem is that interactions are not as tangible as knowledge resources, therefore it’s more difficult to place a value on these. Yet, this is the basis for a knowledge economy.

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UKOER3startup

Posted by on Nov 19, 2011 in Higher Education, Sustainable Learning | 0 comments

On 14th november 2012 I travelled to Birmingham (UK) to join in the UKOER3 startup event. The event marked the start of phase 3 of a major programme funded by the JISC and the Higher Education  Academy. The UK Open Educational Resources Programme.

 

The UKOER is one of the  largest programmes of its kind in the world, aiming to encourage  academics and institutions to create and release educational resources under a creative commons licence. So far the programme has involved hundreds of academics from over 60 UK universities and colleges across the UK.  It is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) who have invested tens of millions (£).

 

We, at Glasgow Caledonian University’s Caledonian Academy, are leading the evaluation and synthesis of the programme. The project team includes another three, internationally-renowned experts with whom I really enjoy working: Helen Beetham, Lou McGill and Isobel Falconer.  Our research is now in the third year, building on two previous phases (UKOER 1 and 2).

During UKOER2 (20010/11) we identified key benefits and motivations for academics   and institutions to create and release Open Educational Resources. The   use of OERs triggers changes in knowledge sharing p students, helping the sector a step closer to participation in an open  knowledge economy.

Our role in UKOER3 is to lead the evaluation of the programme from October 2011-October 2012. We are working  with 18 institutions, universities and colleges, across England as well as a variety of national   support initiatives, to identify key messages for the JISC, the HEA and   the sector as a whole.

We will evaluate the programme  using the synthesis and evaluation framework we developed through phases 1 and 2. The framework has a number of key themes, each with a range of evaluation questions that are asked by project teams as they carry out their individual project evaluations. The data they collect was mapped to the questions  in the programme evaluation framework, providing an overview of key issues and trends across the programme. Thus we  identified key lessons learnt and outcomes and highlighted significant outputs that demonstrate evidence of this.

If you’re interested in OERs, here are some useful  resources from the UKOER programme:

 

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