March+2014

March 32nd, 2014.
Ok, so there is no March 32nd. I do find it funny that my watch stopped in the early morning hours of March 31st. I'm thinking that it needs a battery or something, but it is a strange and whimsical coincidence for my watch to stop on the day before April Fool's Day. Pre-emptive chrono-trickery of some sort.

In Winnipeg March roared in like a lion, and roared out like one too. So much for folk wisdom and anecdotal weather prognostication. Winnipeg is experiencing the second coldest winter since human beings started keeping records of Winnipeg weather, and while we are now well past the vernal equinox it seems like we are in the land that Spring forgot. [|About 2000 properties in Winnipeg have frozen water pipes this year], the Mayor is pushing to have it classified as a disaster to help get funding from other levels of government. The pipes will stay frozen until May. Or June. Nobody knows for sure.

Fortunately our water is fine, and the heat stayed on all winter, and we've enjoyed the comforts and amenities of home. However, enough about that. I usually reserve this bit of e-space for a few words about Dakota Collegiate, our BYOD initiative, ed tech and learning in general as well.

So, on with it. I was happy to be involved in a BYOD panel sponsored by the [|Manitoba School Library Association] in March. It is exciting to see BYOD uptake in Manitoba; the panel included speakers from the St. James-Assiniboia SD, Pembina Trails SD, St. John's-Ravenscourt, and myself, from the Louis Riel SD. There were good stories to tell all around about the opportunities and challenges that come with adoption ANY version of BYOD. Generally speaking, the Librarians who were listening in are positive and receptive to the on-going digital revolution/renaissance in schools, but they do worry about being swept aside as libraries are replaced with [|learning commons] and [|makerspaces]. I know that there is a future for school libraries and teacher-librarians as well, but I also think that their work will transform even more completely than the work of classroom teachers. Forward thinking and adaptive library types like [|Shannon Miller] come to mind. Seeing more school divisions planning to implement BYOD in one form or another has been fun, and I am glad that (so far) there has been a fair bit of knowledge sharing about what is working, and what is not.

While it is always fun to share about success, many of us involved in trying to make BYOD work in the middle schools and high schools of Manitoba have been frank in sharing where things went off of the rails, and I think that we are learning together. Trying to design solutions and plans for learning brings to mind the little (ha!) course that I am taking with the [|University of Calgary Werklund School of Education] with [|Dr. Michele Jacobsen]. We are learning about Design Based Research in Education (EDR). [|Here is a decent link to a "first-impressions" sort of wiki-page about EDR.]

Since I have been writing a fair bit for the EDR course, I thought I'd share one of the forum posts that I've written. It is a bit of a reflection on the iterative nature of EDR, and on the idea that everything old is new, that new designs borrow from old designs, and that sooner or later, Spring will come to Winnipeg. The EDR course has been rigorous and challenging. We have two weeks to go before it wraps up in mid-April, and then other learning challenges will arise to take it's place. So, in life there is always a learning curve, but I'm o.k. with that, since curves are far more interesting than straight lines.

By the way, for those who might look through here for an [|Easter Egg] since I am writing on March 32nd, you certainly will not find anything intentional. No hidden flight simulator or anything like that. But, just a word on that...[|April First used to ring in the New Year]. Appropriate if you think about it- the beginning of new life, all of that good stuff, Spring, fecundity, hope. So I'm writing to you on the first day of another grand iteration. May all your micro, meso, and macro-cycles be merry and bright.

Everything that follows here was posted by me on March 31 for the course EDER 701.07 L01 (Winter 2014) - Design-based Research. It could really constitute another post, but hey, we're here. Happy April to all!

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...And Start All Over Again.
=== Last summer in Calgary a bunch of us were in a course with Dr. Brent Davis, and he had us each write and present a précis so that we could figure out how to concentrate the ideas of an author into a compact form, then work at presenting those ideas without editorializing. It was a valuable process, and your fifth synthesis paper brought it to mind since you've done a great job of concentrating the ideas from the readings and then presenting them in tandem with a reflection on your discussion. ===

=== I noted your discussion with some interest as David and Janice posted comments about DBR as life, and finding the ontological tension and harmony within the sciences and humanities. It was a gentle echo (iteration?) of the paradigm wars that reverberated through the social sciences generally and education research specifically in the 80's and 90's (Gage, 1989). The idea that teaching and learning were the domain of Skinner's behavioral science (Rachlin) and that James Popham's view (Scott, 2008) of curriculum based upon empiricism pretty much died. Since then, a renewed interest in phenomenology, ethnography, and creativity within Educational research opened the door to the very old idea that teaching is an art. Ok, maybe a science too, but only maybe. ===

=== Mixed methods approaches started to sprout and gain credibility within the academy. The idea that the researcher/research and subject/object dichotomies that implied impartiality were really false. Education research took a post-modern turn, allowed researchers and human subjects to learn and create together, and this prepared the way for the development of credible and rigorous models of education design based research like those we've studied in this course. ===

=== Even the presence of metaphor and literary allusion within your discussions (and in every one of the other groups as well) shows the ascendancy of narrative within our collective scholarly discourse. I'm all for narrative, and I think that it is one of our most ancient ways of knowing and transmitting knowledge. Even so, I wonder about whether or not there is a meta-narrative that we can all hang on to as we swap and compare stories. Almost everybody in academia rejects the notion of authoritative meta-narratives. I know that Wilber's (2007) Integral theory poses a grand meta-narrative. So do those who staunchly hold to the objectivity of empiricism, as do those who believe in God and who practice their beliefs according to the traditions of a shared system of faith. Anyways, if we can't agree on a big story, it casts some suspicion on the validity of all of our little stories (context-based narratives) as well. Maybe that's why EDR finds its roots in Pragmatism, with a focus on what works, and what is, but with less focus on why or how. Also, maybe all of our little stories together contribute to a big story, similar to the way that EDR holds to the importance of contributing to theory. ===

=== I don't want to get too loopy (pun intended), but I do wonder if it will all loop back at some point in the future. Will we ever see a return to empiricism in Education research? I think we could, given the rise of the field of learning analytics, and the rise of machine learning as well. A dominant empirical approach to teaching and learning might make sense as we see computer intelligences growing that will dwarf our own within the next couple of decades. Certainly Dr. George Siemens and SOLAR are looking at empiric methods to learn and teach about teaching and learning using massive data sets and incredibly powerful algorithms and computers. If you have the money to go to Spain in June, here is an opportunity to learn more about all of that. ===

=== I really wanted this post to be all about iteration in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, in The Matrix movies, and in the print-making genius of Edvard Munch. I really wanted to write about Gutenberg, and how the movable type press really got us off the ground in terms of mechanical reproduction and the iteration of ideas in the form of text. Anyways, all of that will have to wait for another time, another course, another forum. This post is all about how Education Design Research is complex, is exactly like life, and about how all of that is reflected in your fifth synthesis paper. Good job, group four. Things are wrapping up in this course, but we can take what we've learned, apply it to our understanding, and start all over again. ===

References
===Gage, N.L. (1989). The Paradigm Wars and Their Aftermath: A "Historical" Sketch of Research on Teaching since 1989. Educational Researcher, Vol. 18, No. 7 (Oct., 1989), pp. 4-10 American Educational Research Association. Retrieved March 31, 2014 from @http://www.jstor.org/stable/1177163 ===

===Rachlin, H. "Burrhus Frederic Skinner" National Academies Press. Retrieved March 31, 2014 from @http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/bskinner.html ===