SCoPE: Seminars: Education Research in BC

I'm intrigued by the stated mandate of SCoPE as a place that brings together those with an interest in education research.

One activity I've always wanted to do around this mandate is to gather together and showcase all the education research currently being done in BC. Who are the researchers? What are they researching? What are the results of their research?

If we had a high level view of who is doing what education research in BC I'd then be keen to bring about interaction between researchers and practitioners to better facilitate transfer of research results into practice.

A place to start in this regard might be profiling the education research currently being conducted at SFU as well as a survey of the BC public post secondary sector to see what others are doing.

This can easily expand to include national and international education research initiatives.

Paul

Re: Education Research in BC

by Cindy Xin - Thursday, 18 August 2005, 5:56 PM

Paul, I love the idea and your proposal. It will certainly interest faculty members who are in education. Faculty members who have grants to do their research normally are required to disseminate their research results. The usual ways of publishing through journals and presenting at conferences are generally not good enough nowadays to satisfy many of the grant agencies. Disiminating and sharing through a community like this one can be very desirable and effective. Also as you mentioned, it is not only good for the researchers, it is also valuble for practitioners. Needless to say, there would be a good flow of energy (using the old New Age term) that could generate a virtuous circle and end up benefiting both researchers and practitioners.

I like your proposal of surveying the Ed research at SFU specifically and BC post secondary sector in general to start with. You and Sylvia know many people and also have the power of persuasion. You can also spread the word and get people to come here and show case their research works.

Re: Education Research in BC

by Sylvia Currie - Friday, 26 August 2005, 7:50 AM

Paul's idea to gather together and showcase education research is fabulous. It deserves a special area in SCoPE, and ties into so many other resources and communites, such as the national SAGE for Learning project, the ALN WebCentre, etc (there are so many) branching out to more opportunities for exchange and collaboration.

Where to begin, where to begin!

Begin gathering research project URLs. This could be accomplished through del.icio.us, forum posts, etc.
Decide what additional information we want to collect (who, what, results, province, country, etc)
Decide how to best organize the resources. Ultimately we could maintain this in del.icio.us and feed it into SCoPE. The glossary tool serves many purposes as well, and can be used as a repository. All members can contribute and comment on items.
Invite researchers to share their work and research results through moderated discussions.
Showcase work through SCoPE newsletters, website, etc.
...

This is an exciting idea and it needs further exploration. What are some ways you see this working?

Re: Education Research in BC

by Elizabeth Wallace - Friday, 26 August 2005, 10:46 AM

I'm not sure if this is a good place to start, but could we build a list of educational conferences that are being offered? Since research papers are always a big focus of most conferences, that would help us to highlight research presentations, as well as provide us with a useful list of what's happening when (and where).

Re: Education Research in BC

by Paul Stacey - Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 9:35 AM

One suggestion I have on how to start is to identify education researchers at SFU. People like Andrew Feenberg, David Kaufman, Phil Winne, John Nesbit, Janet McCracken, Mike Dobson, ... Profile them and invite them to share their research interests, projects, and results in SCOPE.

Paul

Re: Education Research in BC

by Sylvia Currie - Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 12:07 PM

I'm on it! Great idea to start at home, Paul. I see this shaping into a seminar series, and eventually we can map out the research projects by topic, location, education sectors, etc. Thanks for the suggestion!

Also, Liz suggested tracking conferences. This would be a very useful resource for SCoPE members. I'm on several listservs and always appreciate notifications of upcoming conferences and proposal deadlines. We have our "Open for Anything" forum that Vivian suggested -- a place for ongoing questions, announcements, observations, etc. Perhaps this is a place to begin sharing our information about conferences. Would that be a good start?

Re: Education Research in BC

by Paul Stacey - Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 1:35 PM

I like the idea of tracking conferences although I'm reticent to duplicate effort already invested in that regard in the BCcampus EdTech Online Community where the calendar has been listing conferences for over a year now. One option might be to review the EdTech Online Community calendar and see if there are specific conferences worth also listing in the SCOPE community?

Paul

Re: Education Research in BC

by Brent Lee - Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 2:12 PM

Does the BCcampus EdTech Online Community have an RSS feed? We can hook in RSS in SCOPE to replicate that if it does...

Cheers,

Re: Conference Listings

by Sylvia Currie - Thursday, 1 September 2005, 8:37 AM

As Paul mentions the BCcampus EdTech community publishes information about conferences. That's one of the resources I rely on to find out what's going on and where. Another good resources is T.H.E. Journal conference calendar. The interface is a little wild, but a fairly up-to-date and efficient conference finder. There are probably many other lists and databases of conferences out there.

I can plug in relevant conferences into our SCoPE conference calendar, and encourage members to share their event information which I in turn put in the calendar and mention in newsletters, etc. It would be an interesting project to figure out how to automate some of this, making it easy to tap into other calendars & listings, and for members to contribute and find events. It would also be useful for sharing other items, like job postings.

So many ideas! Lots to think about!

Discussion re Education Research initiated by Baljeet

by Sylvia Currie - Thursday, 1 September 2005, 1:33 PM

I'm copying the discussion topic initiated by Baljeet to this space for fear it will get lost. (The current settings for the SCoPE Announcements & Newsletter forum are open for all to post & reply, and this will likely change so we can keep it solely for broadcasting announcements)

Or is it only the functional aspect of educational research we are talking about?

Baljeet

Hi Baljeet, and welcome to SCoPE!

Absolutely, we are open to educational technology research. In fact, I expect it will be a main focus for our activities. During the first phase of the SCoPE project we dropped the "e" from "elearning" in the community description, thinking that it might encourage a focus that may no longer be as relevant or necessary as it once was. What do you think? Was that a mistake? I encourage you to raise these questions and others in our SCoPE: Next Steps discussion where we are sorting through these types of issues.

Thanks Sylvia.

Well I feel the elearning is a big part of edtech. Besides we have lots of expertise here at SFU itself. Besides the people Paul mentioned at http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=20 , we have Vive Kumar and Marek Hatala as well. I am sure they will be happy to contribute to a forum like this. I might be wrong here, but my impression is that elearning supporters will tend to use these kind of forums more often than people carrying out pure educational research.

Regards