Situated shared practice, curriculum design and academic development

Am currently reading Faegri et al (2010) as part of developing the justificatory knowledge for the final ISDT for e-learning that is meant to be the contribution of the thesis. The principle from the ISDT that this paper connects with is the idea of a “Multi-skilled, integrated development and support team” (the name is a work in progress). The following is simply a placeholder for a quote from the paper and a brief connection with the ISDT and what I think it means for curriculum design and academic development.

The quote

The paper itself is talking about an action research project where job rotation was introduced into a software development firm with the aim of increasing the quality of the knowledge held by software developers. The basic finding was that in this case, there were some benefits, however, the problems outweighed them. I haven’t read all the way through, I’m currently working through the literature review. The following quote is from the review.

Key enabling factors for knowledge creation is knowledge sharing
and integration [36,54]. Research in organizational learning has emphasized the value of practice; people acquire and share knowledge in socially situated work. Learning in the organization occurs in the interplay between tacit and explicit knowledge while it crosses boundaries of groups, departments, and organizations as people participate in work [17,54]. The process should be situated in shared practice with a joint, collective purpose [12,14,15].

Another related quote

The following is from a bit more related reading, in particular Seely Brown & Duguid (1991) – emphasis added

The source of the oppositions perceived between working, learning, and innovating lies primarily in the gulf between precepts and practice. Formal descriptions of work (e.g., “office procedures”) and of learning (e.g., “subject matter”) are abstracted from actual practice. They inevitably and intentionally omit the details. In a society that attaches particular value to “abstract knowledge,” the details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped. Thus education, training, and technology design generally focus on abstract representations to the detriment, if not exclusion of actual practice. We, by contrast, suggest that practice is central to understanding work. Abstractions detached from practice distort or obscure intricacies of that practice. Without a clear understanding of those intricacies and the role they play, the practice itself cannot be well understood, engendered (through training), or enhanced (through innovation).

Relevance?

I see this as highly relevant to the question of how to improve learning and teaching in universities, especially in terms of the practice of e-learning, curriculum design and academic development. It’s my suggestion that the common approaches to these tasks in most universities ignore the key enabling factors mentioned in the above quote.

For example, the e-learning designers/developers, curriculum designers and academic developers are generally not directly involved with the everyday practice of learning and teaching within the institution. As a result the teaching academics and these other support staff don’t get the benefit of shared practice.

A further impediment to shared practice is the divisions between e-learning support staff, curriculum designers and academic developers that are introduced by organisational hierarchies. At one stage, I worked at a university where the e-learning support people reported to the IT division, the academic staff developers reported to the HR division, the curriculum designers reported to the library, and teaching academics were organised into faculties. There wasn’t a common shared practice amongst these folk.

Instead, any sharing that did occur was either at high level project or management boards and committees, or in design projects prior to implementation. The separation reduce the ability to combine, share and create new knowledge about what was possible.

The resulting problem

The following quote is from Seely Brown and Duiguid (1991)

Because this corporation’s training programs follow a similar downskilling approach, the reps regard them as generally unhelpful. As a result, a wedge is driven between the corporation and its reps: the corporation assumes the reps are untrainable, uncooperative, and unskilled; whereas the reps view the overly simplistic training programs as a reflection of the corporation’s low estimation of their worth and skills. In fact, their valuation is a testament to the depth of the rep’s insight. They recognize the superficiality of the training because they are conscious of the full complexity of the technology and what it takes to keep it running. The corporation, on the other hand, blinkered by its implicit faith in formal training and canonical practice and its misinterpretation of the rep’s behavior, is unable to appreciate either aspect of their insight.

It resonates strongly with some recent experience of mine at an institution rolling out a new LMS. The training programs around the new LMS, the view of management, and the subsequent response from the academics showed some very strong resemblances to the situation described above.

An alternative

One alternative, is what I’m proposing in the ISDT for e-learning. The following is an initial description of the roles/purpose of the “Multi-skilled, integrated development and support team”. Without too much effort you could probably translate this into broader learning and teaching, not just e-learning. Heaven forbid, you could even use it for “blended learning”.

An emergent university e-learning information system should have a team of people that:

• is responsible for performing the necessary training, development, helpdesk, and other support tasks required by system use within the institution;
• contains an appropriate combination of technical, training, media design and production, institutional, and learning and teaching skills and knowledge;
• through the performance of its allocated tasks the team is integrated into the everyday practice of learning and teaching within the institution and cultivates relationships with system users, especially teaching staff;
• is integrated into the one organisational unit, and as much as possible, co-located;
• can perform small scale changes to the system in response to problems, observations, and lessons learned during system support and training tasks rapidly without needing formal governance approval;
• actively examines and reflects on system use and non-use – with a particular emphasis on identifying and examining what early innovators – to identify areas for system improvement and extension;
• is able to identify and to raise the need for large scale changes to the system with an appropriate governance process; and
• is trusted by organisational leadership to translate organisational goals into changes within the system, its support and use.

References

Faegri, T. E., Dyba, T., & Dingsoyr, T. (2010). Introducing knowledge redundancy practice in software development: Experiences with job rotation in support work. Information and Software Technology, 52(10), 1118-1132.

Seely Brown, J., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57.