Sleepers AwakeSeptember 21, 1998 12:26:42 PMConference Draft Version
Educational Research and the Internet: Sleepers Awake!
Rosemary Wake, The Scottish Council for Research in Education
Sam Saunders, University of Leeds
Paper presented at the European Conference for Educational Research, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia September 17th to 20th 1998
Introduction
WWW sites offer immediate global access for the dissemination and retrieval of research papers in education. This has the potential to enhance working practices among all types of education professional. At the same time, traditional bases in disciplines, nations, and areas of professional activity are challenged by increased availability of information from all quarters. New questions are raised about authority, quality and purpose.There is no sense yet of how we might know about the capacity of the amorphous, unregulated, apparently boundless, electronically accessible body of information to transform human discourse.
The purpose of this paper is to consider where educational researchers stand in relation to use of the Internet as an information medium. We would argue that it appears, from the little evidence that is available, that the potential of the Internet has not yet reached, or is only just starting to reach, the collective consciousness of the educational research community. In the course of preparing this paper we have found evidence that individual educational researchers appear ready to adopt new practices and some are already using them. Beyond this, there is little to suggest a readiness by the community as a whole to discuss the implications of the Internet for their work, or to support their community in developing effective ways of using it, or moulding the new resources to their own ends. On-line publication and desktop access to bibliographic tools are increasing. The academic library, in its physical form, is in decline as the central access point for information. At the same time it is being remade in new electronically mediated forms, through programmes such as the United Kingdom’s Electronic Libraries Programme. (eLib 1998).Scholarly publishers in education are all either on the Internet already or have plans that are well advanced. We suggest that educational researchers can no longer afford to ignore these trends. We believe that exchanging ideas and experience among themselves and across professional and international boundaries will help researchers resolve some of the challenges which currently face them and which are likely to become more pressing if not addressed.
We would like to emphasise that in referring to Ôeducational researchersÕ in this paper we are talking only on the basis of evidence from the United Kingdom. Changes and initiatives are charted within that national context and we are not suggesting that what we say necessarily applies elsewhere. However we invite you, regardless of your home country, to reflect on how what we have to say relates to your own experience. We must all consider the extent to which aspects identified as important in local situations apply elsewhere. This is particularly interesting in relation to a world wide phenomenon like the Internet.
This presentation is in three parts. The first part considers wider aspects of internet use, in particular for the exchange of ideas and for scholarly discourse. It explores four themes in particular, asking questions of openness, immediacy, technical enrichment and authority. The second part is framed by reality (or at least the reflection of it in research studies). It is, in the main, concerned with information seeking and retrieval and concludes with some scraps of evidence about European diversity in relation to information seeking. The final section builds on the preceding ones in raising question to support an agenda for action through which the educational research community can take on issues such as quality assurance, openness to new ways of working, and the design of collaborative tools that match the needs of the educational researchers to exploit the still unknown potential of the Internet.
Part One: The Exchange of Scholarly Ideas
In papers presented earlier this year (Wake 1998 and Saunders & Sheffield 1998) we have set out some of the underlying assumptions and concerns that inform the present paper. From the perspective of two quite different projects we have come to share some anxieties about the sense of urgency and purpose within the educational research community. Measured against the prophecies of some commentators, and judged against the critical observations of others, it seems that some real opportunities to take an active role in shaping a new and transformative medium may be being missed.
One aspect of the Internet which gives great potential for transforming traditional ways of shaping knowledge is the ease with which it is possible for individuals and professional groups to dip into ideas and developments current in other disciplines and professional areas and to engage in dialogue and collaboration across boundaries. This technical facility applies also to national and continental boundaries. How is the educational research community placed to participate in creative engagement? Scholars and their colleagues in the related professions may be being driven by more immediate local pressures to neglect the transformations that have already overtaken the commercial and industrial sectors. In a tentative and friendly spirit we would like to draw some evidence from our own contexts to set against some of the predictions and challenges that have been made over a number of years.
As its title indicates, this paper hints at a need for action. Bodies of knowledge and mechanisms for information transfer can be, and in the past often have been, commented on, refined, discussed and developed in the abstract, without much reference to the people who create them or to those who use, or do not use, them. We are concerned here with information use and information creation in context. The focus is on the two interconnected ends of the information process: publishing via the Internet, thus adding to the knowledge base available to others; and use of the Internet to seek out information in the course of the research process. To put it more broadly, we are talking about change in the processes of knowledge creation. Historically, in the Ôadvancement of knowledgeÕ, there has been a reliance on publication, particularly in peer-refereed print journals. However this reliance hascome into question, certainly in the sciences, in part due to the increased availability of information and communications technology which brings with it relatively fast desktop access to using and creating electronic-based information sources.
We make no claims for this paper beyond exploration and speculation. We do not go in depth into all the areas relevant to electronic information and publication. Our aim is to make a contribution to what might be developed.
The New Intellectual Infrastructure
With business schools in mind, but with strong resonance for schools and departments of education Ives and Jarvenpaa (1996) have written about the possibilities for teaching and research offered by recent developments in digital information networks. Turning from an analysis of likely changes in teaching and learning (which they report as already having happened in commerce and industry) they apply their insights to research and scholarship:
"The new intellectual infrastructure will also transform how we create and publish original knowledge and how we evaluate researchers." (Ives and Jarvenpaa, 1996 pp 37-38)
It is interesting that three aspects of knowledge management are covered in this one statement. Research, its dissemination and the careers of researchers are equally implicated.
In similar vein, Nicholas Burbules has observed that these forces might apply more pointedly to educational researchers than to some others:
"As a fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavour, educational scholarship will be strongly affected by these changes." Burbules (1998) p 121
Michael Eraut (1995) was not writing about the Internet, but his observations about the extent to which professional practitioners have been able to contribute to the wider body of prepositional knowledge seems to generate its own challenge to researchersÕ use of networked information media:
Ò...the knowledge development potential of practitioners is under-exploited. .... Much of their knowledge creation is particularistic, transferred from one case to another only by associative or interpretative generalisation. Further reflection and discussion can enhance the knowledge derived from case experience and organise it in ways that encourage its further development. But there is no tradition of engaging in such behaviour in most professional work contexts; and knowledge development receives little attention in an action-oriented environment. Moreover, communication between practitioners is such that only a small proportion of newly created knowledge gets diffused or disseminated. There is no cumulative development of knowledge over time: the wheel is reinvented many times over.Ó (Eraut, p 56)
These writers and many others have described practical possibilities suggested by the potential of electronically networked knowledge. Drawing on work by Burbules (1998), by Stevan Harnad (1990; 1997) and by Ives and Jarvenpaa (1996) we would like to ask some questions about the extent to which educational researchers in the UK are building this potential into their work. We do this under four headings. These headings reflect issues identified in the work of the three authors. They range across the research process itself, the dissemination of results into scholarship and practice, and the development of research careers. Some data from our own practice based research are offered to test our hypothesis that opportunities might be being missed. Wake (1998) has already reviewed the shortage of existing research that would help to answer the sorts of question we are raising here.
Trying to map the area through publications in the public domain leads to a feeling of moving in parallel worlds. On the one hand, that of the educational research community; on the other that of library and information studies. While the library world is immersed in the implications of many aspects of ICT, the Internet hardly figures in public deliberations within the educational research community. The exceptions tend to be among those researchers whose subject matter is the Internet. While the key professionals in the research community are keenly aware of many of the ways in which todayÕs accountability-related context has impacted on the Ôknowledge industryÕ, there seems to be a lack of awareness of the Internet as something immediately relevant to how they work, still less of how it might be used to advantage. There also seems to be little dialogue between researchers in the social sciences and those in that other part of the Ôknowledge industryÕ - those in library and information science. Somehow, possibly because of discrete publication channels or the importance of shoring up disciplinary boundaries, our impression is that there is little cross-over of ideas or collaborative action.
The complexity of these issues demands some simplification and some focus. Four themes derived from three key texts in the existing literature are taken up in this section. When these have been identified in ideal terms, we offer some empirical evidence to illustrate the discussion whose further development we are urging. The issues can be labelled openness, immediacy, enrichment and authority. Each one opens out a further range of questions and themes.
Increased openness of the process of knowledge creation, review and revision
Each of our three reference texts recognises the possibility that work in progress can be offered for protracted scrutiny by widely dispersed colleagues at low cost. Such peer involvement is promoted as likely to improve both the work under review, and the work of those who are able to see colleaguesÕ provisional results and analyses. Burbules refers to Ôthe ongoing revision and development of papers over timeÕ. Ives and Jarvenpaa predict that Ôthe review process will become more openÕ. Harnad has been particularly enthusiastic about the intellectual advantages that can be derived from adding Ôa globally interactive dimensionÕ. These are essentially arguments about quality. An implication is that that current refereeing processes could simply be substituted by ÔskywritingÕ (Harnad 1990).
More immediate and more productive peer review is only a part of the perceived advantage for the production of the research knowledge itself. The World Wide Web can allow different communities to communicate more easily than in the buildings and social structures of traditional scholarship. Cross fertilisation can occur between disciplines, between special interest groups and across institutional professional and national boundaries. The dynamic nature of digitally recorded knowledge means that there can be interaction over time as well. Burbules asserts that Ôon-line publishing will encourage ... interdisciplinary scholarshipÕ. Ives and Jarvenpaa suggest that the Ôlongitudinal, process-oriented research will replace much of today's point-in-time, outcome focused studiesÕ. ErautÕs point about practitioners and academic researchers could be extended to suggest that the Internet offers a means by which a new hybrid knowledge could be developed.
At the fundamental level, the Internet offers new opportunities for data gathering and for the re-analysis of existing data. It also constitutes a major new field of inquiry in its own right. Foertsch (1995), for example, has spelt out a series of research questions that have immediate relevance for the development of educational knowledge. In discussing the use of the Internet by educational researchers, we really have in mind the Internet as medium rather than as a subject in its own right.
The technical enrichment of research reports
Burbules is by no means the only author to draw our attention to the rich significance of a digital medium of scholarly work. He identifies three facets of this enrichment: the capability to include multimedia sources; an opportunity to present “ongoing commentary by the author”; and the. hypertext capability for encouraging “web-like conceptual organisations” Educational research, both in its practice and its presentation of illustrative results is unusually well-placed to capitalise on such potential. As discussed below, the closeness of research to practice in this field seems to cry out for the kinds of interactive and representational possibilities afforded by the Internet. Colour, sound, movement and spatial dimensions are simply waiting to be used in research reports and in collaborative research that seeks (for example) to analyse records of educational events at a distance.
The immediacy of dissemination
As a scholarly field embroiled with public policy, education is subject to changes that match policy makers’ time scales rather than those of research. From this perspective “the possibility of accelerating scholarly communication to something closer to the speed of thought” (Harnad, 1990) might be seen as a desirable feature of the Internet. Barry (1995) has described the dramatic impact that such a change of pace had on a rather different research community in high energy physics. Education-line’s own experience of publishing the Dearing Report(NCIHE 1997) is that there is an enormous academic demand for immediate access to information that has immediate relevance. Current debates about the impact of research on professional practice (Hillage et al 1998) further heighten the importance of the instantaneous capability of the Internet to have today’s findings available today.
Changes to the bases for scholarly authority and reputation
Rather than persisting with traditional measures of impact and bases for reputation, Ives and Jarvenpaa suggest that in an internet research community “citations will be challenged by direct access to the articles themselves” that “mechanisms and rewards will ensure that publications are updated or retired to archival status” and that “A researcher’s vita will be a public interface to living scholarship” (Ives and Jarvenpaa pp 36-37). In other words, scholars can see their colleagues’ work directly, can know how many others are calling it down for reference, and check on the most recent improvements and additions to it. The library becomes a workroom rather than an archive or Hall of Fame.
Burbules has a similar vision:
"The basic pattern, I believe, will be a shift from institutional, hierarchically sanctioned authorities to processes of distributed intelligence, where the judgements of communities of authors and readers - who is cited, how often they are cited, by whom they are cited, whose pages are linked to and from those of others - will provide the primary network of support that sustains certain works as credible or significant." (Burbules p 119)
The four themes taken together, openness, immediacy, enrichment and authority, have promised, if not demanded radical change in the conduct and fate of educational research. The question is whether such radical change is already visible.
The New Scholarly Practice?
In this paper we draw on a preliminary analysis of data from a small exploratory survey. The survey arose from the internal formative evaluation of an Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib 1998) funded project known as Education-line. Education-line is an on-line, searchable collection of full text papers in education and training. Its scope (broadly speaking) is pre-print and grey literature. It is managed by the British Education Index on behalf of the University of Leeds, and benefits from the adoption of the British Education Thesaurus (Marder and Sheffield 1991) to provide subject descriptors for each of the texts in the collection. The project is being run in partnership with a number of key research associations, including the British and Scottish Educational Research Associations. Much fuller accounts are accessible from Education-line’s own website (Education-line 1998) In anticipation of some of the changes detailed above, Education-line was designed from the outset with an on-line commentary facility and soon developed a fully searchable conference service. The whole collection is fully searchable and free of charge across the Internet through a simple web interface. At the start of December 1998 it had approximately 800 whole texts and 2,500 individual records of conference presentations in its principal databases. (See Education-line 1997 and 1998)
The Education-line survey
The survey was essentially a tool to derive feedback from authors who had papers in the Education-line collection. Pragmatic questions of attitudes and outcomes were pursued in the hope that early experience could inform the later development of the collection and be a concrete basis for advice to future contributors. To this extent, the ideal questions posed in our introduction were not operationalised. Our analysis for this paper is indirect, and opportunistic.