Professor Patrick Carmichael

I’ve been exploring ways of using various digital tools to present the ideas, interactions and activities buzzing around the ProPEL conference which is taking place at Stirling.  While I am not a great fan of Twitter I can see the value in reporting on events like this – particularly where papers and presentations are online and people not at the event in person can get a sense of the audience response and discussions around things they would otherwise have to read or view out of context.

The practice of feeding Twitter streams to ‘Wordle‘ (are the results ‘Tweedles’?) has been used at several conferences so I thought this might be interesting to try at ProPEL 2012.  I also had access to all the conference abstracts, so had a play with those too.  So here are some of the results.

Handle with care – these don’t necessarily represent the ‘zeitgeist’ of anything – rather, what the Twitter users at the conference reported (in 140 characters) from the sessions they attended.  So don’t be offended if you don’t feature (or, indeed, if you do!).  Interesting, thought-provoking and fun  -  but I won’t be ditching Atlas-TI just yet!

So here are the abstracts – common words removed. Some ‘features’ … ‘Papers’ is a common word because so many abstracts begin ‘In this paper …’ (or words to that effect).  But you get an idea of what ProPEL conferences are all about …
Before the conference, people were tweeting about their expectations, the location, registering and the contents of their conference bag.
By Thursday morning, parallel sessions were being reported and themes were starting to emerge. Latour’s ‘factishes’ made an appearance …
John Urry’s keynote gathered all the ProPEL twitterati into one place and this is reflected in the state of the twitter stream as his presentation, which began with Tolstoy and ended with an image from ‘Mad Max’, came to a close.
Thursday afternoon’s sessions were clearly not only interesting but troubling …
Friday morning’s crop reflected Hilary Sommerlad’s keynote on precarity in the legal profession and a range of parallel sessions, as well as reflections on the themes of the conference as a whole.

I’m also playing around with the abstracts and other project information using the Exhibit toolkit from MIT, which we used and extended as part of the Ensemble project – these will appear on the ProPEL website in due course.

As of May 1st 2012 I am Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Stirling, where, among other things, I will be continuing my work on the applications and implications of new technologies for teaching, learning and work.

The School of Education at Stirling is home to a number of research programmes, all of which relate to my work in some respect:

• Educational Theory, supported through the Laboratory for Educational Theory
• Professional Education and Learning, which is supported through the ProPEL Network
• Curriculum and Learning

My address and contact details, have, therefore changed, and I can now be found here:

Prof. Patrick Carmichael, Room A39, School of Education, Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA.

Email: patrick.carmichael (at) stir.ac.uk

The collected edition ‘Surviving Economic Crises through Education’, edited by David Cole, has been published, and has a range of contributions from international authors.  The book is described as:

“[coming] at a time of increasing anxiety about the repercussions of financial instability and the probability of widespread market volatility. The educators and researchers whose work is collected here have considered these factors deeply when constructing their responses to prevailing financial conditions. These views guide the reader through economic crises as a mode of survival and as a means to deploying education at its most meaningful and intense. The approach aligns practice with theory and takes the empirical evidence from these studies as a means to determining the economic influence on education.”

It includes a chapter authored by myself and my colleague Dr. Kate Litherland (LJMU) which draws on Guattari’s notion of ‘transversality’ as a framing for the development, design and use of learning technologies at a time when they are seen as part of all-too-simple ‘solutions’ to the provision of mass higher education in financially constrained institutions and systems.

It begins from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) assertion that:

“If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy and commercial professional training, only the second can prevent us falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third.”

It argues for the centrality of pedagogical discourses in thinking about learning technologies, and for the value of ‘transverse’ explorations involving teachers, students, designers and developers, and draws on some of our work at Liverpool John Moores University, in particular our projects in which we undertook technological and curricular ‘co-design’ with teachers and students.

The publisher’s Website is here http://www.peterlang.com or you can buy the book at Amazon

One of the most significant papers to date from the ESRC Ensemble Project is now out for ‘Early View’. This paper, co-authored by myself and Dr. Michael Tscholl, is entitled ‘Cases, simulacra, and Semantic Web technologies’ and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

This paper describes the work of authors including Baudrillard and Deleuze has provided an alternative framework for understanding the relationships between cases and the realities with which they are purportedly associated. We discuss how the idea of the ‘simulacrum’ has influenced our understanding of learning environments, has informed design and development practices, and has led to a shift in our understandings of the potential affordances of Semantic Web technologies in educational settings.

The full paper is available for download at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00459.x/pdf

My article on the role of semantic technologies in enabling digital repositories to support research capacity building in education has been published in the British Journal of Educational Studies:

Carmichael, P. (2011) Research Capacity Building in Education: The Role of Digital Archives British Journal of Educational Studies 58(3), pp.323-339

The abstract is as follows:

Accounts of how research capacity in education can be developed often make reference to electronic networks and online resources. This paper presents a theoretically driven analysis of the role of one such resource, an online archive of educational research studies that includes not only digitised collections of original documents but also videos of contextual interviews with the original researchers, linked and presented using emerging ‘semantic web’ technologies. An exploration with a group of early career researchers in education of how the archive might be used to support their own research activities is reported: this suggests that thinking about such online resources as elements of heterogeneous ‘assemblages’ may be useful in their design and in understanding their role in research training and research networks more generally.

The article is online here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00071005.2011.599788

The archive that features in the article is itself at: http://www.ensemble.ac.uk/projects/edeval/