Douglas W. Conrad - Action Research - Cycle One Journal
My Action Research journey so far or … a funny thing happened to me on the way to my Logic Model
My Action Research journey has been one where I began feeling like I knew where I was going. Although this research type was new to me, I identified what I thought was the project I would work on. My initial focus to work on a change project at Westmont College to work with stakeholders to find more ways for students on campus courses and students in off campus courses to collaborate academically is one that I can see is an important direction. I am still working on a design project for my Learning Design class called WEmail that would provide a shared writing space for groups of students and individuals studying at a distance to collaborate on the same project, bringing each of their unique perspectives to the academic lesson.
An interesting thing happened on the way to where I thought I was going. My perspective has sharpened for the needs and wants of the college, students and faculty. I did a action research values activity where we took our core values (collaboration, communication, relations are mine) and connected our AR project to those. I then did a Force Field analysis of my proposed project and realized that my initial idea may be something that could take a few years to implement and would have a lot of political ramifications attached to it. I took a step back (see my previous blog post) and it was at first frustrating as I really thought I knew where I was going with this. My second idea is something that I am working with faculty to implement this semester. Setting up students in two coursed with disposable Twitter accounts to address the faculty request to find an organic way for students to discuss and dialog about course topics beyond the walls of the classroom. As I did the values activity and then the Force Field analysis for this I realized that my first idea was not off base, it is just a later cycle of my Action Research. And this project using Twitter in the classroom is not the AR project of itself. It is cycle one of my overall AR project. Here are my values activity notes:
General issue: I care about encouraging academic collaboration and communication that is peer to peer and student to teacher beyond the walls of the classroom.
Specific issue: I hear from faculty that they wish there was a way to encourage student discussion and dialogue outside of classroom hours and even beyond the walls of the campus, that was something that students would naturally do rather than study groups that would need to be set up and managed. They are hoping for some form of organic application that students could easily adopt and use.
Specific AR statement: What action can I take to enhance and encourage academic collaboration and communication beyond the walls of the classroom?
Cycle One AR question: How would setting up a Twitter pilot project in two sections of a course enhance and encourage academic collaboration beyond the walls of the classroom?
Cycle Two or three AR question: If off campus semester programs were connected academically to one or two main campus semester courses using a shared writing project, how would this collaboration affect students learning outcomes and Westmont community life?
So … I feel like I have gone from clarity to confusion and back to some clarity. I am still reading and learning about the potential for action research to bring positive change to my college and the world around us. I feel like this portion of my AR journey has given me a greater understanding of what is possible and what is at stake. I feel like both my projects, rather than being at odds or competing, are subsets of what my overall core values reflect - Communicate, Collaborate, Relate … and change the world. I am just getting started but know that even on this first part of journey, we are going somewhere wonderful.
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Taking off the Training Wheels - Cycle one AR begins
When I was teaching my daughters to ride a bicycle we used training wheels on their bikes to give them a sense of freedom while having the security in case they might fall. The security was more for the parents as our girls were ready to ride fast right away. We kept the training wheels on for a little longer just to make sure. I feel a bit like this with my AR project as cycle one is set to begin. I am just learning the basics of AR and yet .... Here we go. I am wanting to ride fast with this project that inspires me but am thankful for the framework that will keep me from veering off while I get used to the balance required to do this form of research.
An important question to begin this cycle of action research is, why is the project necessary or desirable?
Westmont College, like many small residential colleges, excel in the face to face dialog that occurs in the classroom. One area Westmont and other institutions may not be fully leveraging is the potential for dialog beyond the walls of the classroom. There are study groups and academic projects, but much of the value from these interactions remains mostly in the closed groups involved. The change that this action research project will focus on is encouraging the expansion of academic collaboration and communication beyond the walls of the classroom.
The groups involved in cycle one of this action research project are Professor L, a Religious Studies professor and the students in his two Intro to Christian Doctrine sections. Professor L and I have discussed and researched the project, gleaning from others who have experimented with using Twitter in the classroom and have set up a plan of action that fits his pedagogical needs for his classes. The students in the classes are involved in the collaboration in that they are the actual users of the tool to explore taking the topics they learn in class, into their daily lives. One of the interesting areas of focus will be to see how this intersection of classroom topics and daily life might affect learning outcomes.
The action of this project is in two parts. The first part is planning and set up of class and student Twitter accounts. These accounts are set up for students to "follow" each other and follow the class account. The second part is for the students and Professor L. to use this tool. The discussions are not dictated initially. Students are told that their use of this tool constitutes a set portion of their class participation grade. Professor L is responding to individual questions that the whole group can see and join or audit the conversation. The majority of students signed up for this project on the second day of class last week and have begun to use this tool. Now that the action of the project is in motion, I will now begin to look deeply into what is happening beyond the surface data. What will the students use of this tool show about Twitter's potential to affect their learning? Will students find value in this communication opportunity or will it get lost in the stack of items on their to do list?
In this first cycle, we have set up the students with Twitter, showed them how to use it and given some guidelines for content. The students were given no prompts and no discussion starter questions. This is a bit out of my comfort zone to give up control but if this is to be a useful tool and channel for discussion, it has to be based on student choice. Given this gentle nudge to use Twitter, 1/5 of the students initiated conversations that were then joined by more of their peers and Professor L. As we head into the next two weeks of this cycle, I will look to set up a plan for assessment of the quality and quantity of the communications. I have it in my mind that I want this to be an idea that is widely adopted and found useful by these students. I have begun to realize that it is not about the end result of this project, but what we find out along the way that can add to the academic library of research on related topics. It feels like cycle one has started so quickly and like my bicycle analogy, I am a little wobbly. Rather than holding back, avoiding the bumps and hills and looking for someone to steady me, I am ready to take off the training wheels and head out into this AR project. I may get a skinned knee or head in the wrong direction at times but I am sure that the adventure will be worth the ride.
-----------
Twittering on the edge of cycle one or … What I don't know about what I don't know is what I don't know
Cycle one of my AR project is underway and I am beginning the part of the process where I look into what is going on and how I feel about what is going on. The saying, "it's what you don't know about what you don't know that you don't know" is where I am right now. I am in some ways one level disconnected from the action of this project in that I am working with the professor who is working with his class where the action is taking place. it is good because it keeps me in the place of working with folks in the environment rather than doing research to them. I have noticed now that the action has begun that students are not using this regularly. The uses seem to be meaningful for the handful that have used this avenue of discussion but I am not sure what the rest are thinking. I will meet with Professor L this next week to reflect on what has happened so far and see what it all means. Depending on how that goes, we may modify the guidance given the students or just let them organically do what they will do and see where that takes us. The focus of the action research is to see what affect academic collaboration outside the classroom will have on student learning outcomes so it does seem that cycle one needs to span the whole semester. The action is really only beginning so I will continue Twittering on the edge of this cycle and uncover more of what I don't know. It is my hope that this research will add to the academic collection of knowledge on student learning and communication.
The activités in this strand continue to help me refine my understanding of AR and what I am doing as a researcher. Today I finished the Lit Review Activity by looking at a similar AR project from Cadre 14. The focus was on using social media (Edmodo specifically) in the classroom. We were asked to comment on the organization and structure of the Lit Review. In looking at someone else's process and structure, I realized that I could stand to tighten up my word use and structure. It's almost as if Margaret and Bill have done this before and structure these activities to guide us :). I have also been reading Academic Writing for Graduate Students and working on finding my academic voice. I find the exercises helpful and know that it is a matter of time for me to get comfortable expressing myself by using words like "artifacts" rather than "stuff" when writing about the evidences of my research. I am beginning to find myself in the flow of MALTishness and on the Twitter-est edge am daily a bit more fine with what I don't know about I don't know being what I don't know … I don't know … or do I?
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Sept. 16 - 22, 2012 Journal entries
1.
Disposable Twitter accounts set up by students in two class sections - 55 students total with 30 tweets/discussions over two weeks. These virtual discussions occurred in the first week of classes. I will ask more questions of the professor as to why the initial surge and now the drop off. Are there other "natural" avenues for discussion such that students don't have a need for additional commentary? was there some tech issue that frustrated users? That Westmont is a residential campus, could it be that it is just as easy for students to go next door to talk to their neighbor or seek out the professor in the cafeteria or at his home next to the college that covers their academic collaboration needs? The initial "offering" of this tool was set up to see how students would use this without much overt prompting.
2.
The intended outcomes for this research are increased conversation outside of class times between students and between students and professor. The research is not promoting Twitter but using it as an instrument to gauge the affect increased access to academic dialog beyond the walls of the classroom. The unintended outcomes of this research are that students would not take advantage of the resource. I am still trying to schedule a meeting with Professor L so only have the anecdotal evidence of how much Twitter traffic the class has. The next step still remains to meet with Professor L to reassess the project and possibly make some changes or not. I will have to wait and see how much more input I can have into this process. No matter what happens, I will continue document this project with the hope that it will prove some benefit to continued research in this area of student learning.
3. I was not sure if the action of this ARP would have a relatively easy adoption. Twitter has been around for awhile and those who use this tool, see it as integral to their work and lives. But beyond the regular user, the use of Twitter drops off dramatically. The mobile characteristic of the tool seemed to be a good fit for discussion threads for students on the go. . This had the potential for me to collect a good amount of insight into the impact of mobile media technology tools have on academic collaboration outside of the classroom. Twitter may or may not be the tech communication tool of choice for the majority of users in these groups, but it seemed very possible that they would appreciate the opportunity to try something new. I feel like we often do assume that students are highly tech savvy when they really just know the use of technology that is familiar to them and not have a broad tech understanding. This could show up if the classes do not easily adopt the use of Twitter. Also, the professor asked me to help him with implementing a technology that would allow him to encourage his students academic discussions with the goal of knowledge building in their daily lives outside of the classroom; to encourage the class topics to infiltrate their lives. This seemed to be a good fit for this professor and his classes. From my initial research, mobile media technologies are a growing influence in our daily lives and are gradually entering the academic world; first as novelties, then as a distraction and now as communication and collaboration tools that may provide value to the learner and the community of learning. This ARP has been set up to discover the impact and potential of these technologies on academic collaboration beyond the walls of the classroom.
Sept 24 - 29, 2012
What I can do, what I want to do and what I want others to do
I had a revelation of sorts this week that I could do a parallel project with the 14 members of my student staff with a Twitter back channel. This communication route will allow me to be a little closer to the action, experiment with analysis and know what questions to ask of the professor and class that are doing the main action. At first I was excited to have my cycle one begin right away, but I do wish that I had a little more time to prepare. In reflection on the process so far, this is what I have learned.
- it is not enough to get faculty by in for a project, students need to be more involved in the research process. I think I did a good job of working with the professor to come up with a plan for implementation that fit his pedagogical goals for this course. What I did not think about was that the students would really need to understand the context for this action. When it came to getting the students started with Twitter accounts, I focused on the logistics of getting them set up with the service and completely left the motivation and direction in the professor's hands. In one way, this makes sense in that it is his class and his "opportunity" that we are using this research to address. But from the other perspective, without any direct input from me, once the students were set up, their use dropped off. The course is in progress and I am still looking for a way to give some more input. I am able to more work looking into the specifics of the uses of Twitter and the potential for assessing the value of a back channel discussion outlet beyond the classroom walls in my parallel action with my student staff. I have started using the Archivist for assessing the quality and quantity of discussion threads. This is a very useful tool to help the research team understand some of the specifics of the action that is taking place. The Archivist polls your Twitter account and provides graphs and lists to show the data broken down by user, date and type of tweet. This can be helpful in a course when this communication channel is to be part of the student participation grade. So … what I can do, I am doing. What I want to do, I will aspire to be doing and what I want others to do, I will help them find what they want to do.
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Oct. 1 - 7, 2012
This week I begin looking beyond cycle 1 to cycle 2. It feels like this will take a lot of preparation so … might as well get started. It may even be too late but this is where I am today. I found out that our main study abroad program for the Spring semester is the Jerusalem - Westmont in Jerusalem. Bruce Fisk and Tom Fikes are the co-leaders. An RS professor and a Neuro-Psychologist. I also met with Savannah Kelly, one of our resource librarians and an advocate for inter-disciplinary writing. She had some good insight into how to approach faculty and how possibly to structure the writing project. Describing the project definitely helped give me some additional focus for this action research. I will seek to target professors and courses that are already inclined to collaborate. I will look for their input for how the writing project is structured. Would the sources be defined ahead of time, leaving the students to write from the same academic base while including the unique perspective of their location. The abroad group would benefit the main campus group with the unique perspective of being "in country". The main campus group would benefit the abroad group with the more familiar perspective of where they are from. This ARP will look at the effect that this has on the students involved. If this collaboration were more the norm than an isolated project, a greater percentage of students would have a deeper connection to the off campus programs. As this ARP begins to take shape, a main variable that I have the least direct control in is faculty buy in. I will be involved this semester on an academic technology committee that will, as one of it's tasks, find connections and resources for faculty with academic technology. To connect this research to our college strategic plan will be a great help toward the faculty buy in question. I know that it is a busy life to prepare for, engage with and teach students so I will work to make my partnership with faculty a good fit for their pedagogical goals.
Also … for the cycle one of this ARP, I am starting to get traction with my second Twitter-verse pilot with my student staff. 8 out of 12 have signed up and are beginning to engage in discussion about technology. The natural adoption of this platform is not as organic as I had imagined so … I will look for ways to "prime the pump" and encourage the beginnings of this pilot stopping short of paying the students for their time. It is probably coincidental that I have not been able to track down Professor L but I just called him and, though he was busy, he gave guidance as to how to set up a time to meet. I will hope to meet with him on Thursday morning. In the meantime, I will keep working on how to view this all and keep in mind how this all ties to cycle two as I prepare sources for my lit review.
In our LC last night, I realized with the help of my mates, that I have just completed Cycle One of this ARP. I came up with a plan to address the opportunity for change that I identified. I strategized with Professor L on how to enact this action. I worked together with the professor and his classes to set up them up with Twitter accounts and how to follow each other to begin the discussions. I also set up my student staff in the same way to more directly experience the research path. I signed up for the Archivist (a Twitter analytic tool) which allowed me to see the details of the conversations from a numbers perspective. I will also do a TweetPoll to get more individual feedback from some of the users on their experience. I met with Professor L to asses the action and his students' experience and decided that this is a project that we both want to continue. I realized that throughout this first cycle, I let the immediacy of the action taking place blind me to the needs for framing the project with the students involved. Without any real understanding of the "why" of this research or any guidelines on frequency of Tweets, the students were at first excited but their use fell off greatly as the more pressing realities of studying and tests and papers pushed their Tweeting far down the list. For Cycle Two, we decided to take a more specific approach. Professor L will give his students the guideline that he will Tweet one main question per week that they all will need to respond to. He will also take the time at the beginning to explain more specifically what he is hoping that they can accomplish together through the use of this tool. We often think of students today as being so tech savvy that they will naturally adopt a new tool. But this AR cycle one shows that with little guidance, the students set this aside for the more familiar and more pressing demands of their classwork. At first I thought that this meant they were not interested and that I had chosen a research path that was a dead end. Now I realize that the pursuit is worth the effort and that the students are interested, they just need to be shown how to take advantage of this discussion tool. Also … the need for greater guidance and input from Professor L will help this along. Now I will write my Cycle Two question, and … work on looking forward to what cycles three and four might look like as we hope to take this from being about academic collaboration beyond the classroom to academic collaboration beyond the campus. This is much cooler now that I have seen the process first hand.
My Action Research journey has been one where I began feeling like I knew where I was going. Although this research type was new to me, I identified what I thought was the project I would work on. My initial focus to work on a change project at Westmont College to work with stakeholders to find more ways for students on campus courses and students in off campus courses to collaborate academically is one that I can see is an important direction. I am still working on a design project for my Learning Design class called WEmail that would provide a shared writing space for groups of students and individuals studying at a distance to collaborate on the same project, bringing each of their unique perspectives to the academic lesson.
An interesting thing happened on the way to where I thought I was going. My perspective has sharpened for the needs and wants of the college, students and faculty. I did a action research values activity where we took our core values (collaboration, communication, relations are mine) and connected our AR project to those. I then did a Force Field analysis of my proposed project and realized that my initial idea may be something that could take a few years to implement and would have a lot of political ramifications attached to it. I took a step back (see my previous blog post) and it was at first frustrating as I really thought I knew where I was going with this. My second idea is something that I am working with faculty to implement this semester. Setting up students in two coursed with disposable Twitter accounts to address the faculty request to find an organic way for students to discuss and dialog about course topics beyond the walls of the classroom. As I did the values activity and then the Force Field analysis for this I realized that my first idea was not off base, it is just a later cycle of my Action Research. And this project using Twitter in the classroom is not the AR project of itself. It is cycle one of my overall AR project. Here are my values activity notes:
General issue: I care about encouraging academic collaboration and communication that is peer to peer and student to teacher beyond the walls of the classroom.
Specific issue: I hear from faculty that they wish there was a way to encourage student discussion and dialogue outside of classroom hours and even beyond the walls of the campus, that was something that students would naturally do rather than study groups that would need to be set up and managed. They are hoping for some form of organic application that students could easily adopt and use.
Specific AR statement: What action can I take to enhance and encourage academic collaboration and communication beyond the walls of the classroom?
Cycle One AR question: How would setting up a Twitter pilot project in two sections of a course enhance and encourage academic collaboration beyond the walls of the classroom?
Cycle Two or three AR question: If off campus semester programs were connected academically to one or two main campus semester courses using a shared writing project, how would this collaboration affect students learning outcomes and Westmont community life?
So … I feel like I have gone from clarity to confusion and back to some clarity. I am still reading and learning about the potential for action research to bring positive change to my college and the world around us. I feel like this portion of my AR journey has given me a greater understanding of what is possible and what is at stake. I feel like both my projects, rather than being at odds or competing, are subsets of what my overall core values reflect - Communicate, Collaborate, Relate … and change the world. I am just getting started but know that even on this first part of journey, we are going somewhere wonderful.
-------------
Taking off the Training Wheels - Cycle one AR begins
When I was teaching my daughters to ride a bicycle we used training wheels on their bikes to give them a sense of freedom while having the security in case they might fall. The security was more for the parents as our girls were ready to ride fast right away. We kept the training wheels on for a little longer just to make sure. I feel a bit like this with my AR project as cycle one is set to begin. I am just learning the basics of AR and yet .... Here we go. I am wanting to ride fast with this project that inspires me but am thankful for the framework that will keep me from veering off while I get used to the balance required to do this form of research.
An important question to begin this cycle of action research is, why is the project necessary or desirable?
Westmont College, like many small residential colleges, excel in the face to face dialog that occurs in the classroom. One area Westmont and other institutions may not be fully leveraging is the potential for dialog beyond the walls of the classroom. There are study groups and academic projects, but much of the value from these interactions remains mostly in the closed groups involved. The change that this action research project will focus on is encouraging the expansion of academic collaboration and communication beyond the walls of the classroom.
The groups involved in cycle one of this action research project are Professor L, a Religious Studies professor and the students in his two Intro to Christian Doctrine sections. Professor L and I have discussed and researched the project, gleaning from others who have experimented with using Twitter in the classroom and have set up a plan of action that fits his pedagogical needs for his classes. The students in the classes are involved in the collaboration in that they are the actual users of the tool to explore taking the topics they learn in class, into their daily lives. One of the interesting areas of focus will be to see how this intersection of classroom topics and daily life might affect learning outcomes.
The action of this project is in two parts. The first part is planning and set up of class and student Twitter accounts. These accounts are set up for students to "follow" each other and follow the class account. The second part is for the students and Professor L. to use this tool. The discussions are not dictated initially. Students are told that their use of this tool constitutes a set portion of their class participation grade. Professor L is responding to individual questions that the whole group can see and join or audit the conversation. The majority of students signed up for this project on the second day of class last week and have begun to use this tool. Now that the action of the project is in motion, I will now begin to look deeply into what is happening beyond the surface data. What will the students use of this tool show about Twitter's potential to affect their learning? Will students find value in this communication opportunity or will it get lost in the stack of items on their to do list?
In this first cycle, we have set up the students with Twitter, showed them how to use it and given some guidelines for content. The students were given no prompts and no discussion starter questions. This is a bit out of my comfort zone to give up control but if this is to be a useful tool and channel for discussion, it has to be based on student choice. Given this gentle nudge to use Twitter, 1/5 of the students initiated conversations that were then joined by more of their peers and Professor L. As we head into the next two weeks of this cycle, I will look to set up a plan for assessment of the quality and quantity of the communications. I have it in my mind that I want this to be an idea that is widely adopted and found useful by these students. I have begun to realize that it is not about the end result of this project, but what we find out along the way that can add to the academic library of research on related topics. It feels like cycle one has started so quickly and like my bicycle analogy, I am a little wobbly. Rather than holding back, avoiding the bumps and hills and looking for someone to steady me, I am ready to take off the training wheels and head out into this AR project. I may get a skinned knee or head in the wrong direction at times but I am sure that the adventure will be worth the ride.
-----------
Twittering on the edge of cycle one or … What I don't know about what I don't know is what I don't know
Cycle one of my AR project is underway and I am beginning the part of the process where I look into what is going on and how I feel about what is going on. The saying, "it's what you don't know about what you don't know that you don't know" is where I am right now. I am in some ways one level disconnected from the action of this project in that I am working with the professor who is working with his class where the action is taking place. it is good because it keeps me in the place of working with folks in the environment rather than doing research to them. I have noticed now that the action has begun that students are not using this regularly. The uses seem to be meaningful for the handful that have used this avenue of discussion but I am not sure what the rest are thinking. I will meet with Professor L this next week to reflect on what has happened so far and see what it all means. Depending on how that goes, we may modify the guidance given the students or just let them organically do what they will do and see where that takes us. The focus of the action research is to see what affect academic collaboration outside the classroom will have on student learning outcomes so it does seem that cycle one needs to span the whole semester. The action is really only beginning so I will continue Twittering on the edge of this cycle and uncover more of what I don't know. It is my hope that this research will add to the academic collection of knowledge on student learning and communication.
The activités in this strand continue to help me refine my understanding of AR and what I am doing as a researcher. Today I finished the Lit Review Activity by looking at a similar AR project from Cadre 14. The focus was on using social media (Edmodo specifically) in the classroom. We were asked to comment on the organization and structure of the Lit Review. In looking at someone else's process and structure, I realized that I could stand to tighten up my word use and structure. It's almost as if Margaret and Bill have done this before and structure these activities to guide us :). I have also been reading Academic Writing for Graduate Students and working on finding my academic voice. I find the exercises helpful and know that it is a matter of time for me to get comfortable expressing myself by using words like "artifacts" rather than "stuff" when writing about the evidences of my research. I am beginning to find myself in the flow of MALTishness and on the Twitter-est edge am daily a bit more fine with what I don't know about I don't know being what I don't know … I don't know … or do I?
---------------
Sept. 16 - 22, 2012 Journal entries
1.
Disposable Twitter accounts set up by students in two class sections - 55 students total with 30 tweets/discussions over two weeks. These virtual discussions occurred in the first week of classes. I will ask more questions of the professor as to why the initial surge and now the drop off. Are there other "natural" avenues for discussion such that students don't have a need for additional commentary? was there some tech issue that frustrated users? That Westmont is a residential campus, could it be that it is just as easy for students to go next door to talk to their neighbor or seek out the professor in the cafeteria or at his home next to the college that covers their academic collaboration needs? The initial "offering" of this tool was set up to see how students would use this without much overt prompting.
2.
The intended outcomes for this research are increased conversation outside of class times between students and between students and professor. The research is not promoting Twitter but using it as an instrument to gauge the affect increased access to academic dialog beyond the walls of the classroom. The unintended outcomes of this research are that students would not take advantage of the resource. I am still trying to schedule a meeting with Professor L so only have the anecdotal evidence of how much Twitter traffic the class has. The next step still remains to meet with Professor L to reassess the project and possibly make some changes or not. I will have to wait and see how much more input I can have into this process. No matter what happens, I will continue document this project with the hope that it will prove some benefit to continued research in this area of student learning.
3. I was not sure if the action of this ARP would have a relatively easy adoption. Twitter has been around for awhile and those who use this tool, see it as integral to their work and lives. But beyond the regular user, the use of Twitter drops off dramatically. The mobile characteristic of the tool seemed to be a good fit for discussion threads for students on the go. . This had the potential for me to collect a good amount of insight into the impact of mobile media technology tools have on academic collaboration outside of the classroom. Twitter may or may not be the tech communication tool of choice for the majority of users in these groups, but it seemed very possible that they would appreciate the opportunity to try something new. I feel like we often do assume that students are highly tech savvy when they really just know the use of technology that is familiar to them and not have a broad tech understanding. This could show up if the classes do not easily adopt the use of Twitter. Also, the professor asked me to help him with implementing a technology that would allow him to encourage his students academic discussions with the goal of knowledge building in their daily lives outside of the classroom; to encourage the class topics to infiltrate their lives. This seemed to be a good fit for this professor and his classes. From my initial research, mobile media technologies are a growing influence in our daily lives and are gradually entering the academic world; first as novelties, then as a distraction and now as communication and collaboration tools that may provide value to the learner and the community of learning. This ARP has been set up to discover the impact and potential of these technologies on academic collaboration beyond the walls of the classroom.
Sept 24 - 29, 2012
What I can do, what I want to do and what I want others to do
I had a revelation of sorts this week that I could do a parallel project with the 14 members of my student staff with a Twitter back channel. This communication route will allow me to be a little closer to the action, experiment with analysis and know what questions to ask of the professor and class that are doing the main action. At first I was excited to have my cycle one begin right away, but I do wish that I had a little more time to prepare. In reflection on the process so far, this is what I have learned.
- it is not enough to get faculty by in for a project, students need to be more involved in the research process. I think I did a good job of working with the professor to come up with a plan for implementation that fit his pedagogical goals for this course. What I did not think about was that the students would really need to understand the context for this action. When it came to getting the students started with Twitter accounts, I focused on the logistics of getting them set up with the service and completely left the motivation and direction in the professor's hands. In one way, this makes sense in that it is his class and his "opportunity" that we are using this research to address. But from the other perspective, without any direct input from me, once the students were set up, their use dropped off. The course is in progress and I am still looking for a way to give some more input. I am able to more work looking into the specifics of the uses of Twitter and the potential for assessing the value of a back channel discussion outlet beyond the classroom walls in my parallel action with my student staff. I have started using the Archivist for assessing the quality and quantity of discussion threads. This is a very useful tool to help the research team understand some of the specifics of the action that is taking place. The Archivist polls your Twitter account and provides graphs and lists to show the data broken down by user, date and type of tweet. This can be helpful in a course when this communication channel is to be part of the student participation grade. So … what I can do, I am doing. What I want to do, I will aspire to be doing and what I want others to do, I will help them find what they want to do.
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Oct. 1 - 7, 2012
This week I begin looking beyond cycle 1 to cycle 2. It feels like this will take a lot of preparation so … might as well get started. It may even be too late but this is where I am today. I found out that our main study abroad program for the Spring semester is the Jerusalem - Westmont in Jerusalem. Bruce Fisk and Tom Fikes are the co-leaders. An RS professor and a Neuro-Psychologist. I also met with Savannah Kelly, one of our resource librarians and an advocate for inter-disciplinary writing. She had some good insight into how to approach faculty and how possibly to structure the writing project. Describing the project definitely helped give me some additional focus for this action research. I will seek to target professors and courses that are already inclined to collaborate. I will look for their input for how the writing project is structured. Would the sources be defined ahead of time, leaving the students to write from the same academic base while including the unique perspective of their location. The abroad group would benefit the main campus group with the unique perspective of being "in country". The main campus group would benefit the abroad group with the more familiar perspective of where they are from. This ARP will look at the effect that this has on the students involved. If this collaboration were more the norm than an isolated project, a greater percentage of students would have a deeper connection to the off campus programs. As this ARP begins to take shape, a main variable that I have the least direct control in is faculty buy in. I will be involved this semester on an academic technology committee that will, as one of it's tasks, find connections and resources for faculty with academic technology. To connect this research to our college strategic plan will be a great help toward the faculty buy in question. I know that it is a busy life to prepare for, engage with and teach students so I will work to make my partnership with faculty a good fit for their pedagogical goals.
Also … for the cycle one of this ARP, I am starting to get traction with my second Twitter-verse pilot with my student staff. 8 out of 12 have signed up and are beginning to engage in discussion about technology. The natural adoption of this platform is not as organic as I had imagined so … I will look for ways to "prime the pump" and encourage the beginnings of this pilot stopping short of paying the students for their time. It is probably coincidental that I have not been able to track down Professor L but I just called him and, though he was busy, he gave guidance as to how to set up a time to meet. I will hope to meet with him on Thursday morning. In the meantime, I will keep working on how to view this all and keep in mind how this all ties to cycle two as I prepare sources for my lit review.
In our LC last night, I realized with the help of my mates, that I have just completed Cycle One of this ARP. I came up with a plan to address the opportunity for change that I identified. I strategized with Professor L on how to enact this action. I worked together with the professor and his classes to set up them up with Twitter accounts and how to follow each other to begin the discussions. I also set up my student staff in the same way to more directly experience the research path. I signed up for the Archivist (a Twitter analytic tool) which allowed me to see the details of the conversations from a numbers perspective. I will also do a TweetPoll to get more individual feedback from some of the users on their experience. I met with Professor L to asses the action and his students' experience and decided that this is a project that we both want to continue. I realized that throughout this first cycle, I let the immediacy of the action taking place blind me to the needs for framing the project with the students involved. Without any real understanding of the "why" of this research or any guidelines on frequency of Tweets, the students were at first excited but their use fell off greatly as the more pressing realities of studying and tests and papers pushed their Tweeting far down the list. For Cycle Two, we decided to take a more specific approach. Professor L will give his students the guideline that he will Tweet one main question per week that they all will need to respond to. He will also take the time at the beginning to explain more specifically what he is hoping that they can accomplish together through the use of this tool. We often think of students today as being so tech savvy that they will naturally adopt a new tool. But this AR cycle one shows that with little guidance, the students set this aside for the more familiar and more pressing demands of their classwork. At first I thought that this meant they were not interested and that I had chosen a research path that was a dead end. Now I realize that the pursuit is worth the effort and that the students are interested, they just need to be shown how to take advantage of this discussion tool. Also … the need for greater guidance and input from Professor L will help this along. Now I will write my Cycle Two question, and … work on looking forward to what cycles three and four might look like as we hope to take this from being about academic collaboration beyond the classroom to academic collaboration beyond the campus. This is much cooler now that I have seen the process first hand.