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Questions to Think With: Research Practice Partnership

Megan Bang and Phillip Bell kindly participated in last week’s DML Commons Design-Based Research webinar on co-design and collaboration. They presented their rich experiences of closely working with research participants. how they established sustainable research/practice partnerships based on exciting networks, and how their work ties into the theoretical and practical considerations of DBR and DBIR. 

Magan and Phil kindly provided their presentation slides for further reference:

http://dmlcommons.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Bang-Bell-DML-DBR-webinar-partnerships-public.pdf

Through the presentation, Megan and Phil answered many of the questions we prepared to discuss. We wanted to share our questions to Magen and Phil here as a resource and starting points to consider when thinking about a design-based research project that commits to ethical and holistic participation.

Establishing relationships

  • What are strategies for learning about context before engaging in design (e.g., initial observations of the context, development of partnerships, understanding and specifying partners’ goals)?
  • What are strategies/tools for beginning and building relationships with participants?

Co-constructing the design process

  • How do you co-construct the design process with participants?
  • How did you begin working with your participants?
  • What barriers/challenges did you face? How did you overcome them?
  • How do you negotiate and document decision making in design-based research?
  • How do you share your data collection, data analysis and design practice with participants?

Sustaining a project and participation

  • What happens when participants are resistant to change, or go in a direction that you might not think is in the best interest of kids/young people?
  • How do you sustain the project and participation (handover to participants)?
  • How long should/could DBR go on for? How do you know when to continue and when to stop?
  • How do you plan for how intensive and long the process will be?
  • Do you know in advance how long a project may be? (6 month, 10 years?)

Co-Designing in Formative Design Research

I just finished the DMLcommons salon on co-designing our research spaces. I am amazed at the work the teams have done. I also have a long reading list now. Thanks Megan Bang. I hope to use these ideas in my own work and reach out to others so we can co-design a future together.

Rigor Begins with Trust


flickr photo shared by purplejavatroll under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

In her work with Native Communities, Megan Bang, mentioned that new researchers did not begin as ethnographers. Instead they had to visit a community and have lunch with the elders.

From the onset research was not done to a community. It was done for the community with the community.

I want to apply these ideas to my volunteer work with CoderDojoErode. I basically inserted myself into their community. I did not ask. Just set up a server space to see what happens.

What I realized was I was already a part of CoderDojoErode. I have spoken with the club captain and mentors for some time on Twitter. They followed my work and designed their learning spaces without me knowing. The boundaries of communities have expanded.

I do worry about exploiting local communities on the ground. This fear materialized most when I help to launch a fundraising efforts for CoderDojoErode. Successful fundraising takes stories but I am an outsider shaping the stories of others. Many who may not read English. I am also trying to rise funds so the story I tell has an emotional appeal built in. This appeal centered around economic disparities.

In order to protect the children of CoderDojoErode I gave admin rights to all the mentors. They can chane anyword I write. They have veto power over any post I publish.

They own the story. It maybe our community but it its their village.

I did not get involved with CoderDojoErode as a research project. I simply wanted to do good. I realize now I can do better by helping to shape a Formative Design Project.

Distributed Knowledge and Teams

Co-Designing in Formative Design Research


flickr photo shared by Emilie Ogez under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

The researchers in the podcast discussed the difference between action research and DBR. They focused on the idea that PAR may not have the same political motives. The speakers also discussed how par is smaller in both scale and scope. They mentioned how DBR requires distributed knowledge and teams

This is where I need help. I have no team and no funding. I do have IRB for my projects. That’s a plus. I am willing to join other squads or I invite young researchers, graduate students, or others with my passion to #teachtheweb to join me.

Three Ongoing Projects

Co-Designing in Formative Design Research


flickr photo shared by wageslaves under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

I have three concurrent projects with different threads of formative design weaved through in different ways.

#Walkmyworld

The #WalkMyWorld Project is a social media project in which we share and connect online at Twitter using one hashtag. Groups of learners across the globe are connecting and sharing for 10 weeks using the #WalkMyWorld hashtag.

This is a unique project in the #ccourses spaces. Mainly because it has a global hub but there are on the ground local nodes being run by classroom instructors.

All of our iterations and planning have been done in the open. We were not deliberate from the off-set that it was a DBR project. We just wanted to good and have students learn. We iterate based on these goals.

I was impressed with Chris Hoadley’s work on retrospective analysis in DBR. I am going to push the facilitators to begin the restrospective review of our past iterations.

#QuestionTheWeb

I have documented my difficulties with #QuestionTheWeb. Basically I was missing the distributed team necessary for the project. I am going to take the idea of getting the community more involved.

I am going to try and relaunch in the fall. By the time I got the curriculum and learning spaces designed and IRB approval SBAC and PARCC testing started. There were no computers available for projects unrelated to testing.

I have started recruiting school districts in Connecticut for on the ground sessions. I will also teach the class in the Open for those who want to join in. If you want to get involved let me know

Mozilla Web Clubs

We have a chance, the distributed expertise, the metrics, and the stories to make the Mozilla Learning Networks the largest worldwide formative research project. I want to fork my own little corner in Connecticut and be deliberate in design.

I am going to start the Elm City Web Club this summer with our GearUP students. I will continue to fork EDU 106 to align it with the Web Literacy Map. I am also reaching out to folks at #Edcampct, #ctedlead, and #ctedchat to try and encourage clubs to start up around Connecticut.

Personally in the Greater New Haven area I am trying to get clubs up and running at different schools and libraries. I keep trying for grants to fund this initiative but I will move forward on the cheap. People matter more.

I want to keep working with the CoderDojoErode but I want to ensure they want to work on co-designing the space together. I am trying to be very intentional of the ethics involved here. I think as long as we stay committed to co-learning and the mission of doing good. It’s all good.

Practicing Public Speaking

Photos by: Naomi Thompson

My aim for the Spring 2015 was to practice public speaking. It seems like quite many opportunities were made available through conference presentations, webinars, workshops etc. The journey has been a huge learning curve and a lot of fun at the same time. I’d like to share a short reflection on my experience, by focusing on my discovery of the Keynote application as a helpful tool.

At the recent AERA conference in Chicago, I had the chance to present research I have had the pleasure to work on with Dr. Karen Wohlwend and Dr. Kylie Peppler. The work relates to the design of a new curricular model for making that helps facilitate and reverse approaches to making in holistic ways: the Design Playshop Model.  

This was my first AERA presentation and my first US conference presentation ever! I was super excited and also pretty anxious to get it all right. Our work was a qualitative study and included many cases to illustrate orientations to making and how the merging of orientations deepened and broadened children’s engagement with making. At the same time, my presentation was only supposed to be 12 minutes long. In this short time, only some salient examples could be shared.

Given my level of experience, rather than cutting rich content, I decided to partly script the presentation and to use paper notes to help me while presenting. The night before leaving to Chicago, I discovered the Keynote iPhone application that can be connected to Mac Books and makes the iPhone act like a clicker. This tool helped me tremendously during my presentation especially because it let me reference my notes on my phone rather than bring paper. Here is how the application works:

Practicing Public Speaking

Open Keynote on the computer and on the iPhone while being connected to the same wifi on both devices. Let the app find the computer. 

Practicing Public Speaking

Once it computer and phone are connected, you can click play.

Practicing Public Speaking

The presentation starts on the computer, and as you swipe the phone the slides change on the computer. I set the phone view to display the current slide plus notes, but other views are possible too (e.g., next slide + notes, just current slide etc.). The current slide plus notes made me feel comfortable presenting and allowed me to better engage with the audience. I was flexible to move and had the option to glance at my notes without appearing as if I was reading. One big plus was that the AERA wifi was so reliable!

Failing a Little Bit Better But Want to Fail Together


Creative Commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

I guess I am an educational psychologist. At least that’s what my fancy diploma says. I consider myself a teacher and literacy researcher. Does that make me a learning scientist?

This question has perplexed me since watching Bill Puenell and reading about the grammar of Design Based Research. Bill set up the article as a dichotomy between educational psychologists and learning scientists.

This debate, while alluded to in the article, traces back to the cognitivists and situativists. The article set up an almost either or situation (as a side note manyof the words on the Wikipedia Article on Situated Cognition are still mine ours).

Can I be a Deweyian Pragmatist about this? Can I draw from both traditions based on my line of inquiry and more probably from the funding sources I chase?

Then I joined Chris Hoadley, Rafi Santo, and Dixie Ching to discuss Design Based Research in the field.

I really liked Chris description of DBIR and the routes to iteration. My big question came about as post-reflective data analysis. This impacts #walkmyworld. We have been doing this project for two years and we iterate. We are not explicity DBR, maybe. We collected all of out planning documents, archived the emails, hosted reflective video conferences. The data is there.

What Chris taught me was to not just look between iterations but across all the iterations. I have some background with DBR. I trained with Dave Reinking on his ideas of Formative Design. I need to hash out the difference between Formative Design and DBR but I am seeing Formative Design synonomous with DBIR.

Then Rafi and Dixie shared their work from the Hive Research Lab. There methodology for tracking growth and development across different domains is mind blowing. I am going to steal it. One of my first joys was discovering Rafi’s work with Hive. I knew him from Twitter and XMCA listserv but had no idea he was involved in Hive. I have a long term dream of elevating New Haven to a Hive City

Failing a Little Bit Better But Want to Fail Together

Creative Commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by fdecomite

 

My History with DBR

 


At the same time we were using Formative Design to develop Internet Reciprocal Teaching the tension between educational pyschologist and learning scientists boild over in my every day. Don Leu, my advisor, studied under Jean Chall. You can’t get more edpsychy than Dr. Chall’s work in reading.

This created a tension in the project that was a microcosm on the field. Plus many iterations in the porject had nothing to do with design or learning but with political power. As an IES grant there were strict rules as to what counts as research. We handled this by building in Formative Design in Year Two and empirical testing in year three.

Yet we were in local contexts. You can’t control the noise. You have to embrace it.

Failing a Little Bit Better But Want to Fail Together


Creative Commons licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by Marcus Ramberg

My Future with DBR

I am currently engaged in a DBR project. Well I might have given up. Not really. Just put the iterations on hold.

The project, #QuestionTheWeb was designed to create a learning space to build the critical evaluation of websites and argumentative writing.

Long term I want to create something like this. Short term I just needed to develop the reading activities and pilot test biased think-alouds.

Once again real life impeded design. By the time I got the learning environment built and the Institutional Review Board approval I bumped into Smarter Balanced Testing. Every computer in most Connecticut tools is no longer available for learning they have to be used for testing.

So here is where I need your help. If anyone wants to give me feedback, do some cognitive labs, on the the Think Alouds I am open to it.

Failing a Little Bit Better But Want to Fail Together


Creative Commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Kalexanderson

Our Future with DBR

I learned that DBR can’t be done alone. This isn’t unique to me. I am a researcher at a teaching university. This means no doctoral students, no centers, no senior faculty to bounce ideas off of or study under. Everything I do I am often alone.

Then there is the whole 4/4 load. (I am lucky here as I have release time for Gear Up and this semester I was given 9 credits for research). The University gives me the space to work. What I need now is the community. We did start a STEM center (who hasn’t), and our new Provost wants to elevate research. Our new Dean is also focused on external funding. Capacity is developing on campus but I want to look outside.

I think the future of DBR has to be distributed. We open scholars need to network and develop our projects outside of the usual channels. We need to play and hack together.

I believe the problems we face and investigate are to big for one person and to complex for one discipline. You need developers, instructional designers, ethnographers, learning scientists, and someone to do the all the paperwork.

We need to design the future together.