Category Archives: presentations

Practice-based research methods: Challenges and potentials

Posted on May 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

This stack of slides comes from the presentation entitled “Practice-based research methods: Challenges and potentials” given before the master class on practice-based research on the 11th of December 2018, at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding.

Screenshot 2019-05-03 20.03.52

Abstract

Education as an applied interdisciplinary research field faces acute challenges in defining the nature and scope of practice-based research. Constantly shifting notions of what it means to learn and, consequentially, what it means to teach make practice-based research a fluid and muddy concept. Increasing technologisation of learning environments and heightened expectations concerning the role of evidence in situated educational decisions have led some scholars to suggest a range of new approaches that are seen as more suitable for quickly changing research and practice contexts and capable to connect research with practice, design with teaching, and data with action. In this presentation, I discuss some different ways of thinking about these connections and emerging from them methodological implications. I argue that practice-based research has to ground itself in a much better understanding of diverse ways of knowing. It requires knowledge and skill to engage in methodological craftsmanship.

Leave a comment

Posted in methods, presentations

Tagged interdisciplinarity, practice-based research, professional learning

Interdisciplinarity and Epistemic Fluency: What makes complex knowledge work possible

Posted on April 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

This small deck of slides comes from the EATEL webinar “Interdisciplinarity in Technology-Enhanced Learning”. It was conducted as as dialog between Lina Markauskaite and Carolyn Rosé, December 12th, 2018.

This presentation, entitled “Interdisciplinarity and epistemic fluency: What makes complex knowledge work possible”, draws on the notions of “epistemic infrastructures” and “epistemic games”. It argues that each research field needs to build its own epistemic infrastructure for doing joint knowledge work. Constructing shared epsitemic infrastructures is particularly important (and challenging) for interdisciplinary fields, such as TEL. In order to do this, the field needs to understand much better how researchers (and practitioners) do joint knowledge work and then build deliberatively robust socio-technical epistemic infrastructures that enable to work across disciplinary boundaries productively.

Epistemic infrastructure and Epistemic games

Abstract

The topic chosen for the second edition of the Webinar series is “Interdisciplinarity in TEL”. The TEL field is interdisciplinary by definition. This makes TEL an especially interesting research field. Yet, it also brings complexity at different levels. A challenge for TEL researchers is to properly understand what is interdisciplinarity in our field, its challenges and implications. In the first part of the dialog, Lina Markauskaite will elaborate on the concept of epistemic fluency as “the capacity to understand, switch between and combine different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing about the world” (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2016). Carolyn Rosé will talk about the history of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era, why it was important to her to work towards that as the personal objective of her past presidency in ISLS. She will also talk about interdisciplinarity in her own research bringing learning sciences, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence together. The second part of the dialog will consist of a ‘questions & answers debate’ by the two speakers, with participation of the audience.

Leave a comment

Posted in Extensions and reflections, presentations

Tagged epistemic fluency, epistemic games, epistemic infrastructure, interdisciplinary research

Quality multiplied: Learning that matters in a runaway world

Posted on November 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

The keynote for the OpenLearning Conference 2018 on the 27th November 2018, in Kuala Lumpur. It synthesises the main practical insights and implications for design of individual courses and education as a socio-technical system. The slides could be dowloaded here, the abstract is below (Presented by Lina, but see the acknowledgements)

Screen Shot 2018-11-26 at 5.02.28 pm

Abstract

How can we help prepare students to solve wicked problems when nobody knows exactly what these problems will be, for jobs and professions that do not yet exist and for a society whose contours, as Anthony Giddens put it, ‘we can as yet only dimly see’?

For the last ten years, I have been researching how university students learn to integrate different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing needed for innovative and skilful professional action in the world — how they develop a capability called ‘epistemic fluency’. Drawing on my studies and related innovations in my teaching, I will argue that education needs to go beyond the established notions of ‘learning as knowledge acquisition’ or ‘learning as participation’ and go beyond developing courses or shaping students’ experiences. Instead, it should focus on learning that enables students to re-imagine their future, co-assemble their own environments, and co-create actionable knowledge that runs away outside the educational institutions. This is a risky business that requires openness to the world in which the students will live, in fact, to the world which they will co-create.

Universities and other educational institutions have skin in this game. They need courage and wisdom to move beyond their secure ‘industrial’ methods for assuring educational quality, and embrace a greater diversity of ways in which they teach and produce socially valuable knowledge.

Leave a comment

Posted in Epistemic fluency in professional education book, Extensions and reflections, presentations

Tagged design, epistemic games, higer education, innovation, society

Assessment as boundary work: between the discipline and the profession

Posted on June 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

We added to our slideware a set of slides from a half-day workshop entitled “Assessment as boundary work: between the discipline and the profession” that we facilitated last year at Deakin University.

Summary

This workshop is for academics, learning designers and academic leaders who work with developing assessment tasks across the spectrum of work integrated learning initiatives. Participants are asked to come with an assessment task that they have used, or plan to use, for students preparing for, or reflecting on, a work placement, practicum or simulated work experience. The workshop will explore how these types of assessment tasks create a dialogue at the boundary between academic discipline knowledge and the reflexive knowledge of a skilled practitioner. Peter and Lina will draw on their recent work on epistemic fluency to introduce the workshop. They have analysed a range of assessment task designs in a variety of professional education contexts to try to identify the multiple forms of knowledge and ways of knowing with which students have to become fluent in preparing for professional practice. Many aspects of professional work involve the creation of new understandings – such as in inter-professional dialogues or client consultations. Often this epistemic work goes unnoticed, though sometimes it involves conscious problem-solving and innovation. The workshop will be a hands-on investigation of how these ideas about epistemic fluency, knowledge work and actionable knowledge can be applied in designing better assessment tasks.

Leave a comment

Posted in Extensions and reflections, presentations, Uncategorized