From Feb. 4, 2011…..I feel very lucky to have been involved with Cohort V of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research. The organizers have tuned cultivating a research community to a T. They set up the organizational framework to maximize getting a serious commitment from all participants. Each team had to submit a proposal that promised that the school would promise to send a representative to workshops twice a year for three years and put money up front for workshop expenses. Each year they launch a new cohort with representatives from 7 to 10 schools, with the more experienced ones providing research findings, areas for further inquiry and sundry advice.
The leaders guide those new to the specialization through a serious research methods bootcamp, consisting of expert presentations and large group discussions interspersed with relevant individual and small group exercises. The leaders social-engineer the small groups so that participants first get to know a wide sampling of peers through round-robin encounters. Pairs of teams are given time to develop closer relationships through intense brainstorming and feedback sessions. Teams are guided in defining and refining their research question, finding relevant precedent research, approaching data collection and analysis, identifying relevant resources, allies and dissemination outlets. Required to plan a schedule of deliverables, each team a private consultations with a coalition leader between meetings. The check-ins help keep progress moving and provide a natural support base.
While we focus on pedagogical research to improve teaching and learning, we also get many useful ideas about effectively implementing technology in higher-education. Cohort members have shared tips about orchestrating change in complex organizations, and specifying, selecting and implementing specific types of eportfolio technologies.
As many of our colleagues have encountered big roadblocks due to funding crises, changes in leadership and staffing, organizational inertia or politics, poor technology partners, we feel relatively lucky to have muddled along without a big disaster.
While we felt guilty about not following a linear path in our research, we realized that gradually refining the research question through iterative efforts fit our professional practices. Just as in Design, in Action Research, the question is emergent rather than pre-determined. We can’t really determine the most relevant Yes or No until we get to know the territory. We began with a larger area of inquiry and gradually narrowed our inquiry to “Can we help students create meaning from curricular and co-curricular experiences through digital reflection?” As we moved from specification to implementation, we discovered and refined our interest.
We felt a little inept because we weren’t doing much counting. But at the final meeting we heard that the richness of qualitative methods were more robustly informative, interesting, and relevant to implementation since quantitative studies are so intrinsically bound to a specific context.
The lesson for the weekend is that Context matters. Keynote speaker of the VT Higher Education Pedagogy symposium, Carolin Kreber explained that quantitative studies tell what worked in one location at one time, not what will work universally. As our UO research partners come from Business, Arts Administration and Architecture, we have been constantly struggling to find commonalities across disciplines as well as to understand the uniqueness of each curricular situation and what combination of pedagogy and technology best suits it.
For our final INCEPR presentation, I concentrated on how words and graphics can complement each other in learning about architectural design. Words can help focus concepts while allowing the form to be fluid. Graphics and spatial models can organize complexity, but can lead to functional fixedness. Since the creative process depends on re-reading new possibilities, it is fostered by the open-ended quality of writing and messy sketches.
We can steer design students by being cognizant how words and images can be useful at different stages of the Kolb Learning Cycle. For example:
1. Concrete experience – On-site sensory reconnaissance
2. Reflective Observation – Site documentation – drawing & writing
3. Abstract Conceptualization – Analytical site diagrams
4. Active Experimentation – Scheming through design sketches & sketch models: iterative attempts to understand what works and doesn’t work
Designers use analytical diagrams for Abstract Conceptualization and parti diagrams, sketch models and sketches for Active Experimentation. Both graphics and text are important for design eportfolios. Words help focus intention while allowing formal flexibility and subtlety. Graphics can provide organizational frameworks for information. We need text because geometry can create functional fixedness – no ambiguity for rich reinterpretation.
My next steps include more in depth study of literature on reflection in eportfolios (Darren Cambridge’s book, Kemper’s scale of reflection, Cohort literature) and getting help on meaningful data collection and interpretation. I still feel like a novice at educational theory and have plenty to learn about both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Perhaps Helen Barrett or Jonathon Richter could help our team with an approach for interpreting the piles of interviews, surveys and portfolio analyses that we have generated.