Patrick Carmichael

Teachers' networks in and out of school

A ‘mapping task’ was used to explore the networks available to head teachers, school coordinators and local authority staff. Beginning from an ego‐centred perspective on networks, we illustrate a number of key analytic categories, including brokerage, formality, and strength and weakness of links with reference to a single UK primary school. We describe how teachers differentiate between the strength of network links and their value, which is characteristically related to their potential impact on classroom practice.

Learning how to learn: Tools for schools

Learning how to learn is an essential preparation for lifelong learning. This book offers a set of in-service resources to help teachers develop new classroom practices informed by sound research. It builds on previous work associated with ‘formative assessment’ or ‘assessment for learning’. However, it adds an important new dimension by taking account of the conditions within schools that are conducive to the promotion, in classrooms, of learning how to learn as an extension of assessment for learning.

The Design and Use of a Mapping Tool as a Baseline Means of Identifying an Organization's Active Networks.

As part of the Learning How to Learn in Classrooms, Schools and Networks Project, a mapping tool and associated interviews were devised to capture practitioners’ views of the networks associated with their schools and local authorities (LAs). This article discusses the development and use of the mapping tool, including its trialing, and the first stages of analysis. The task was open‐ended asking respondents to represent with whom and how their organization communicates. LA advisers and officers offered an LA‐based perspective and both headteachers and school project coordinators offered a school‐based perspective. Forty‐eight maps have been collected from 18 schools and 5 LAs. Theoretically, the development of the mapping tool draws on three main areas of work—sociograms dating back to the 1930s, social network analysis, currently being used by Finnish researchers, and the work of Mavers et al. in mapping children’s representations of the virtual world of computers. Initial discussion of the range of map structures drawn by respondents is presented. In all cases it was possible to extract from the maps a list of people, groups, places and events, termed nodes, and information about how these nodes were connected, termed links. Most maps were organized around one or, in some cases, two central nodes. Descriptive analysis of both nodes and links has been used both to give respondents feedback on their maps, incorporating them in the validation of further analysis, and for comparative purposes. Respondents were largely positive about both the mapping task as a useful, reflective task to focus on their networking activities and the validity of the feedback given to them. Map representations are also explored from a spatial perspective with reference to ideas drawn from Sack and Castells. Reference is made to networked learning communities as supported and developed by the National College of School Leadership and also the Government’s Virtual Education Action Zone initiative, examples of which were represented in the project.

Case-Based Learning, Pedagogical Innovation, and Semantic Web Technologies

This paper explores the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support teaching and learning in a variety of higher education settings in which some form of case-based learning is the pedagogy of choice. It draws on the empirical work of a major three year research and development project in the United Kingdom: “Ensemble: Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case-Based Learning” which has been oriented toward developing a better understanding of the nature of case-based learning in different settings, but also exploring the potential for Semantic Web technologies to support, enhance, and transform existing practice. The experience of working in diverse educational settings has highlighted Semantic Web technologies that may be particularly valuable, as well as some of the enablers and barriers to wider adoption, and areas for further research and development.

Semantic web technologies for education – time for a ‘turn to practice’?

In this synoptic paper, the authors describe how the transformative potential of semantic web and linked web of data technologies for educational systems has been identified, but highlight the fact that there are few accounts of the pedagogical applications of these same technologies. The papers in this special issue provide accounts of these technologies in use in teaching, learning and curriculum development in higher education. Several of the papers suggest that these new web technologies have important roles to play in changing pedagogical practices in higher education settings in which teachers and students are seen as designers of their own learning technologies and as producers of new knowledge. The authors argue that the theorisation, development and adoption of Semantic Web and linked data technologies would be well served by a ‘turn to practice’ and a focus not on learning technologies in higher education but on the meaning-making practices, discourses and controversies around technologies in higher education.

The Doubtful Guest? A Virtual Research Environment for Education.

In this paper the authors describe a novel ‘Virtual Research Environment’ (VRE) based on the Sakai Virtual Collaboration Environment and designed to support education research. This VRE has been used for the past two years by projects of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme, 10 of which were involved in a research and development project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. The authors present vignettes of how the VRE has been implemented by three projects, drawing on extensive case records built up over two years of supporting and researching these projects. Rather than adopting the VRE as their sole locus of communication and collaboration, project members were careful to adopt specific VRE components which aligned well with the design of their research projects and established patterns of collaboration, some projects ‘hacking’ tools and other VRE functions in order to address specific needs and ways of working. The authors offer some interpretations of the contrasting patterns of adoption observed, drawing on Ciborra’s work on the role of new technologies in a range of organisational settings, and conclude with a discussion of how new technologies might be integrated into established educational and research practices.

Tribes, Territories and Threshold Concepts: Educational Materialisms at Work in Higher Education.

The idea of transformative and troublesome ‘threshold concepts’ has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the ‘concept of thresholds’ in the course of a cross‐disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted through established materialising discourses in different disciplinary settings and enacted through pedagogical practice, technology and assessment. This has implications for professional development and pedagogical practice and endeavours to create ‘self‐organising classrooms’ along Deleuzian lines.

Secret codes: the hidden curriculum of semantic web technologies

There is a long tradition in education of examination of the hidden curriculum, those elements which are implicit or tacit to the formal goals of education. This article draws upon that tradition to open up for investigation the hidden curriculum and assumptions about students and knowledge that are embedded in the coding undertaken to facilitate learning through information technologies, and emerging ‘semantic technologies’ in particular. Drawing upon an empirical study of case-based pedagogy in higher education, we examine the ways in which code becomes an actor in both enabling and constraining knowledge, reasoning, representation and students. The article argues that how this occurs, and to what effect, is largely left unexamined and becomes part of the hidden curriculum of electronically mediated learning that can be more explicitly examined by positioning technologies in general, and code in particular, as actors rather than tools. This points to a significant research agenda in technology enhanced learning.

Research ethics and participatory research in an interdisciplinary technology‐enhanced learning project

This account identifies some of the tensions that became apparent in a large interdisciplinary technology‐enhanced learning project as its members attempted to maintain their commitment to responsive, participatory research and development in naturalistic research settings while also ‘enacting’ these commitments in formal research review processes. It discusses how these review processes were accompanied by a commitment to continuing discussion and elaboration across an extended research team and to a view of ethical practice as an aspect of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ which demands understanding of specific situations and reference to prior experience. In this respect the interdisciplinary nature of the project allows the diverse experience of the project team to be brought into play, with ethical issues a joint point of focus for continuing interdisciplinary discourse.

BNCI systems as a potential assistive technology: ethical issues and participatory research in the BrainAble project

Abstract Purpose: This paper highlights aspects related to current research and thinking about ethical issues in relation to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and Brain-Neuronal Computer Interfaces (BNCI) research through the experience of one particular project, BrainAble, which is exploring and developing the potential of these technologies to enable people with complex disabilities to control computers. It describes how ethical practice has been developed both within the multidisciplinary research team and with participants. Results: The paper presents findings in which participants shared their views of the project prototypes, of the potential of BCI/BNCI systems as an assistive technology, and of their other possible applications. This draws attention to the importance of ethical practice in projects where high expectations of technologies, and representations of “ideal types” of disabled users may reinforce stereotypes or drown out participant “voices”. Conclusions: Ethical frameworks for research and development in emergent areas such as BCI/BNCI systems should be based on broad notions of a “duty of care” while being sufficiently flexible that researchers can adapt project procedures according to participant needs. They need to be frequently revisited, not only in the light of experience, but also to ensure they reflect new research findings and ever more complex and powerful technologies. Implications for Rehabilitation BCI/BNCI systems are not similar to existing switch-controlled or eye gaze systems. Users and those supporting them need to have their expectations carefully managed. BCI/BNCI are emergent technologies and side effects of long term use are not well understood: this demands an ongoing concern to ensure duty of care and maintenance of a “watching brief” regarding ethical issues. Practitioners need to be particularly careful when introducing BCI/BNCI systems to be sensitive to the meanings that are attached to them and how they may convey prognosis.