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.

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

“[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

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

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/

The abstract states:

“The idea of transformative and troublesome ‘threshold concepts’ has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the ‘concept of thresholds’ in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted through established materialising discourses in different disciplinary settings and enacted through pedagogical practice, technology and assessment.This has implications for professional development and pedagogical practice and endeavours to create ‘self-organising classrooms’ along Deleuzian lines.”

The paper version and complete online issue will appear later in the year.

“How can computer software applications be designed for use in an uncertain future, to support pedagogical, social and professional practices that are themselves emergent? The relevance of the work of Deleuze and Guattari for information systems and computer software has been explored, but to date this has been largely confined to ‘geophilosophical’ studies of existing technologies. Despite interest in Deleuzian perspectives on design, including computer aided design, in other fields, such explorations of how computer software itself is designed are largely absent. This paper will explore Deleuzian ideas about time, experience, habit and change, in relation to the design and development of computer software applications.
Much software design is conventionally couched in terms of understanding the working practices of potential users, and as such attempts to determine and generalize workflows, patterns and characteristics of users themselves; at the same time, the accompanying rhetoric is often of enhancement, transformation or innovation. Deleuzian theories of time provide a means of theorizing and synthesizing these apparent contradictions
The paper will draw on accounts of design activities in which teachers, students and technology designers, all of whom draw on past experiences, current discourses and practices, and imagined futures in the context of a research and development research project to explore the potential applications of emerging ‘semantic web’ technologies in a range of higher education and early professional settings. In these accounts, engagement in participatory design processes not only surfaces tacit knowledge and current practice, but also folds diverse pasts and imagined futures into complex and sometimes contested temporalities.”

This promises to be an interesting, interdisciplinary conference, offering opportunities to explore some of the broader ideas about design that have emerged from the Ensemble project.

The educational world is increasingly dominated by ‘network rhetoric’; not only are teachers and learners seen as participants in networks, the availability of low-cost electronic devices, collaborative environments and new forms of data ‘born digital’ have changed the nature of education research.How can researchers and research-informed practitioners best engage in and with networks and develop effective networking practices? How might networks and networking be conceptualized in order to frame and support their work in and on networks? How do networks relate to existing organizational forms and how might new networking practices emerge?

This book draws on extensive research into educational research networks in schools, colleges and informal education settings to explore these questions. Combining theoretical insights into networks from different disciplinary backgrounds and awareness of technological developments with the accounts of teachers, researchers, and technologists it considers how educational research as a field is changing, how individual and collective research capacities might develop, identifies new research approaches and discusses the emerging role of the ‘researcher-networker’.

The first is about the ethical issues of undertaking interdisciplinary and participatory TEL research:

Tracy, F. and Carmichael, P. (2010) ‘Research Ethics and Participatory Research in an Interdisciplinary Technology-Enhanced Learning Project’ International Journal of Research and Method in Education 33(3) pp.245–257
Download Here: http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/1743727X.2010.511716

The other is also about participatory research and discusses how design workshops can inform not only better software, but also contributes to understanding the research practices and capacity building needs of research students:

Carmichael, P. and Burchmore, H. (2010) ‘Social Software and Academic Practice: Postgraduate Students as Co-Designers of Web 2.0 Tools’ The Internet and Higher Education 14(3) pp.233-241
Download Here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2010.05.002

“‘Threshold concepts’ have proved a useful framing for enquiry into teaching and learning in higher education and early professional learning. Most studies have, however, been concerned with the nature and role of threshold concepts in specific disciplines. This paper discusses how they can also be used as a means of initiating cross-disciplinary discourse. In so doing, they challenge teachers to consider what is distinctive about their own disciplinary ‘ways of thinking and practicing’ and invite reflection: not simply on teaching and learning ‘in the disciplines’, but also on the potential for working across disciplinary boundaries. This also raises important issues about the recruitment, induction and orientation of students as they make transitions into higher education in the Gulf context, as elsewhere.”