Professor Patrick Carmichael

My article, “Tribes,Territories and Threshold Concepts: Educational materialisms at work in higher education” has been published online by Educational Philosophy and Theory as part of a special issue on “Materialising Practices in Education” edited by Dr. David Cole from UTS, Sydney. This article makes the link between my prior work on ‘threshold concepts’ and ‘troublesome knowledge’ with the work and ideas of Gilles Deleuze, and explores how the idea of threshold concepts was differently understood and operationalised across the different disciplines that participated in the ESRC TEL ‘Transforming Perspectives’ project.

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.

I will be speaking at the ‘Deleuzian Futures’ conference hosted at the Porter Institute at the University of Tel-Aviv on 22-24th May, where I will be presenting a paper entitled: Deleuze and Time: Habit, Innovation and Change in Computer Software Design. Here’s the abstract:

“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.

My research monograph ‘Networking Research – new directions in educational enquiry’ which will be published in June 2011 by Continuum Books has gone ‘into production’ which is good news indeed!

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’.

Two recent publications related to my ESRC projects are now available:

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

Following my visit to the UAE in the spring of 2010, a version of the paper which I presented at Zayed University has now been published in the journal Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives. This also includes some reflections and contributions from the participants in the seminar that I ran, which raised the interesting idea that ‘learning’ itself was a significant threshold concept. The article ‘Threshold concepts, disciplinary differences and cross-disciplinary discourse’ is online and its abstract is as follows:

“‘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.”