Action Learning / Research, Mode Two and Web 2.0

"This is the time ... the time for action" - Secret Affair

I think that action learning and action research are natural partners to web 2.0. I have also found action learning/research to be really useful for mode two knowledge production in higher education. So here is a small introduction for people who have not come across the terms.

Action learning is a radical style of collaborative learning defined by The International Foundation for Action Learning as follows:

“Action learning involves working on real problems, focusing on learning and actually implementing solutions. It is a form of learning by doing that provides a well-tried method of accelerating learning to enable people to handle difficult situations more effectively.”[http://www.ifal.org.uk/nutshell.html.]

While that definition describes the technical side of action learning, its inventor Professor Revans interwove philosophical/religious threads into the practice. The following quote from an interview with Revans illustrates some of these threads:

“Though it runs against conventional educational wisdom, action learning's ancestry is ancient. Revans peppers his papers and conversation with an array of inspirations - from Buddhism to the bible. He can trace his advocacy of action learning to the sinking of the Titanic when he was nearing his fifth birthday. His father was a navel architect who was on the enquiry into disaster. ‘He said to me years later that what the enquiry proved was that we must train people in such a way that they understand the difference between cleverness and wisdom’[http://www.tafe.sa.edu.au/institutes/para/ftf/facnet/Article%202.doc]”.

The group or the society rather than the individual, one can argue, is the appropriate yardstick for wisdom. Hence a social practice like action learning encourages the individual to accommodate and respond to the group’s wisdom. And vice versa.

Wadsworth has a nice definition of Participatory Action Research, which can be found on Wikipedia: "Essentially Participatory Action Research (PAR) is research which involves all relevant parties in actively examining together current action (which they experience as problematic) in order to change and improve it. They do this by critically reflecting on the historical, political, cultural, economic, geographic and other contexts which make sense of it. … Participatory action research is not just research which is hoped will be followed by action. It is action which is researched, changed and re-researched, within the research process by participants. Nor is it simply an exotic variant of consultation. Instead, it aims to be active co-research, by and for those to be helped. Nor can it be used by one group of people to get another group of people to do what is thought best for them - whether that is to implement a central policy or an organisational or service change. Instead it tries to be a genuinely democratic or non-coercive process whereby those to be helped, determine the purposes and outcomes of their own inquiry." (Wadsworth, 1998).

Gibbons et al (1995) have described a new way in which research is being conducted in the global economy and dubbed this ‘mode two’. Mode two research carries the following hallmarks: “it is trans-disciplinary, problem-oriented, application-based, team-driven, multi-site, partnership-based, socially useful, heterogeneous, quality controlled, reflective and responsive, and less hierarchical than disciplinary knowledge of the kind produced in universities” (Jansen, 2000 p113). Mode two can be contrasted to mode one, which is the traditional approach that universities—and other academies—have taken to research.

In mode one, problems are set and solved in a context governed by the interests of a largely academic community. The primary customers are the researcher herself and her community of practice. Other customers may come to use the research for their own purposes e.g. industry, government or society generally.

In mode two, research is carried out within the wider community. It is intended to be useful to someone other than the practitioner and his or her community of practice. Likely customers include industry, government or society in general.

Mode two knowledge production has been widely embraced as a burning issue for academic debate and an ingredient for policy makers (c.f. Clark 1998, Kraak 2000, Starkey 2001). Some major foreseeable consequences of this dash for mode two should include:

• The set of venues where ‘kosher’ research can be conducted should change and expand e.g. science parks
• The ‘kosher’ ways that research results can be disseminated should also change and expand e.g. internet-mediated corporate white papers
• The multidisciplinary approach characterized mode two should blur the boundaries between disciplines and institutions. This will likely have profound consequences for the power and constitution of what Beacher and Trowler (2001) call ‘academic tribes and territories’
• New reward and recognition structures for academics and researchers should emerge e.g. well-paid industrial sabbaticals.
  

I am impressed by the Australian government's attitude that research needs to be meaningful to the community and disseminated in formats other than academic journals. Of course some research must remain ‘pure’ and mode one and should be published in refereed journals. I just like the idea of a bit of biodiversity in what constitutes research.

Asher Rospigliosi and I used action learning and action research in a blended mode 2 environment when we taught courses in 'digital entrepreneurship' at City University (Shurville, Rospigliosi and Scott, 2005). These courses applied action learning and research to authentic work-based e-business projects. They were accredited by and delivered from City University’s Department of Continuing Professional Development and built upon previous undergraduate level courses developed and externally examined by the authors. Bernard Scott was the external examiner.

To compete in increasingly hostile climates, entrepreneurs need to implement innovative yet realistic solutions that maximize productivity, broaden reach, manage customer relationships and control costs. In larger firms such competitive advantage is often won by incorporating Information Systems (IS) for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Knowledge Management (KM). Our recent experience of intervening with entrepreneurs in SMEs indicates that, given appropriate support and training, implementing such technologies is becoming feasible for SMEs. For example, one learner recently use the course to upgraded a Chamber of Law’s web site from an information source to an IS with full CRM capability. Another transformed an office leasing company into a provider of virtual office services by introducing call centre services using voice over IP integrated with an online KM system.

Personal development was core curriculum throughout the courses. The curriculum also included a range of businesses topics, such as change and innovation management, as well as traditional IT related topics, such as rapid prototyping and project management. Formative assessment was via a sequence of mini-project reports, presentations and peer critiquing. Summative assessment was via a substantial report on a work-based project where evidence of critical thinking and reflection were key assessment criteria.

During each module, work-based reflective learning was assured because the learners authored personal development plans, learning journals, project plans and other artifacts. These were peer-critiqued by members of the action learning sets and checked by the tutors to provide business-focused reality-checks. The assessment was a mixture of radical ‘critique and be critiqued’ and traditional ‘submit and mark’. Learners first delivered a presentation on their progress for each module. Next they placed this presentation online where it was peer critiqued.

Passing a module required writing a minimum of two substantial peer critiques. Each assessment had broad guidelines about appropriateness and format with the details being negotiated between tutor and learner. Learners received formative feedback on each assignment before the assignments were resubmitted together in the form of a plan or research report. In the summative assessment the tutors utilized academic and business expertise to formally accredit the learners’ construction of knowledge and their personal development.

The Certificate and Diploma have provided around a hundred entrepreneurs with access to education and training in both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills associated with embedding IS in SMEs. The outcomes indicate that taking work experience into account to provide relatively open access to blended learning supported M-level courses is rewarded by ample evidence of critical thinking, personal reflection and business transformation. In our experience, entrepreneurs can be highly motivated by an M-level qualification and will often produce reports of genuine work-based projects that surpass our assessment criteria.

When we taught these courses we were 'faking' web 2.0 using an institutional virtual learning environment. I think we might have engaged the learners more with social networking software like Elgg. Asher is busy editing a special issue of Campus-Wide Information Systems on long term use of Elgg at the University of Brighton. Always more to do and more to be done ...

References

• Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines. Open University Press.
• Bruffee, K.A. (1999) Collaborative Learning. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
• Clark, B. (1998) Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Oxford: Pergamon/Elsevier Science.
• Eijkman, H. and Clarke, B. (2007) How you can start using participative Web 2.0 social
  technologies today for powerful and sustainable assessments for real world
  learning and performance. In the proceedings of the 7th International Conference of Information and Communications Technologies in Education, Crete, Greece.
• Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. (1995) The New Production of Knowledge. Sage, London.
• Jansen, J. (2000) Knowledge and Institutional Life: Taking Gibbons on a walk Through a South African University. In Kraak (2000).
• Kraak, A. (2000) Changing Modes: New Knowledge Production and its Implications for Higher Education in SA. HSRC Publishers.
• Shurville, S., Rospigliosi, A. and Scott, B. (2005). Innovative courses in E-Business Information Systems for SMEs. In Méndez-Vilas, A. , González-Pereira, B., J. Mesa González, J., and Mesa González, J.A. (eds.) Recent Research Developments in Learning Technologies. Published by FORMATEX, Badajoz, Spain, pp 160-164.
• Starkey, K. (2001) In Defence of Modes One, Two and Three: A Response. British Journal of Management Volume 12 Issue s1 Page S77.
• Wadsworth, Yolanda. 1998. What is Participatory Action Research? Action Research International, Paper 2.

Henk Eijkman added the following, which I agree with completely (so much so that I expanded the original post):

I really like the Action Learning dimension but in the extension to our ICICTE 2007 paper (Eijkman & Clarke) I'm proposing what is in effect an extension of this idea as well as another dimension linked to the pedagogy 2.0 concept. First, in keeping with the participatory ideal of Web 2.0 I use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach. I have in fact used this to teach a unit in UNE's Grad Cert. in Higher Education last semester. PAR predates action learning (in fact one could apply nearly the same definition) is widely used in a range of community and educational settings. it takes action learning further by specifically focusing on the participative dimension - a key design feature of Web 2.0.

Personally I think PAR is Mode Two knowledge production per excellence.Also, and again following the ICICTE 2007 paper (Eijkman & Clarke) I would argue that Web 2.0 invites a social constructionist reframing of learning in which academics are no longer the guardians of second order (abstracted) knowledges.

Web 2.0 takes us irrevocably into transcultural learning because it enables individuals anywhere to easily form rich and decentralised social networks based on common interests and to collaboratively create, distribute, share and recreate content from multiple sources. While this does not mean that we ignore psychological theories of learning, it does mean that we are invited to come to grips with a decidely social theory of learning to challenge the hegemony of eurocentric psychologism in educational thinking and practice.

To fully utilize the educational potential of Web 2.0 we need a new paradigm one that takes us beyond individual atomistic theories of learning and even beyond social constructivism. The key point is that social constructionism is based on a non-foundational epistemology which enables us to recognise and negotiate more equitably with multiple knowledge systems. The latter are ignored or overwhelmed by the dominant Western take in international higher education while our student base, and others using Web 2.0 increasingly come from culturally and linguistically diverse social groups. For instance it questions the traditional notion that academics are the arbiters of true and tested (usually meaning Western, urbanised white, middle/upper class) knowledges.

See Bruffee, K.A. (1999) Collaborative Learning. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press for an interesting introduction to social constructionism, or my PhD thesis University of Canberra (but I wouldn't inflict that lengthy tome on anyone). {co-incidentally this one of my all time favorite books - Simon}