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Patrick Carmichael (CARET, University of Cambridge)
Sanna Rimpiläinen (AERC, University of Strathclyde)
Richard
Procter (TLRP, Institute of Education, University of London)
The range of
electronic resources and tools available to researchers has increased far
beyond even what early enthusiasts such as Howard Rheingold envisaged when they
described how the internet would put the catalogues and contents of the world's
libraries on one's desktop (Rheingold, 1993; 90-91). Research projects are
increasingly using network technologies to improve communication between
project members, to safeguard data, and to engage with the ‘users’ of their
research. This has led to the emergence of models of "e-Research"
which are perhaps best developed in the context of international scientific
collaborations in fields such as particle physics and astronomy, and specific
projects such as the Human Genome Project. At the same time, other,
domain-specific versions of "e-Research" are developing, with different
foci and characteristic patterns of collaboration.
In educational
research, even small-scale publicly-funded research projects are already
expected to publish electronically their findings and other research outputs
and have a responsibility to archive their original data. But with an eye to
the future, there have been calls for an increased role for electronic
networking for communication, collaboration and dissemination as part of a
commitment to sector-wide capacity building. McIntyre and McIntyre (1999) and
Dyson and Desforges (2002) suggest both that expertise needs to be both shared
between established researchers and that development opportunities need to be
provided for practitioners and new researchers. Training for individuals needs
to be complemented by strategies which foster institutional and sector-wide
capacity to conduct research, undertake analysis, engage with users and develop
innovative approaches.
In this article
we will describe Sakai, a novel electronic collaboration environment designed
to support e-Research, and will reflect on some of the issues which have arisen
from the first year of our using this platform in our own work and to support
other collaborative and distributed research projects in the UK.
As Wenger states
in his review of ‘community-building’ technologies, “ideal systems emerge from
combinations and convergence” (Wenger, 2001; 5). Sakai responds to the demand
by offering a modular architecture in which various ‘tools’, services and
resources can be combined within a single, access-controlled framework (Fraser,
2005). The system is web-based and users require no special software other than
an up-to-date web browser.
Sakai emerged
from the world of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and as such can be
configured to support e-Learning and Distance Learning, with (for example)
schedule, syllabus, assignment and gradebook tools. Alternatively, it can be
set up to work primarily as a personal information management (PIM) system for
secure online access to a personal file store and other productivity
tools. Our interest, however, has
primarily been in its configuration as a Virtual Research Environment (VRE), in
which tools for collaboration within and between groups of researchers take
precedence over other functions. Our experience has been gained in three
arenas: the Applied Educational Research Scheme (AERS) of Scotland; in our work
with a number of pilot projects at the University of Cambridge; and in an
evaluation of SAKAI being undertaken as part of the Joint Information Services
Committee (JISC) Virtual Research Environment Programme. This programme
involves a range of UK Universities in development and evaluation activities
across different disciplines: Social Sciences; Arts and Humanities; Medicine;
Technology and Science. Within the JISC evaluation, our participatingusers are
members of ten projects from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme
(TLRP).
The key unit
within Sakai is the ‘worksite’ – a group of tools and resources with a specific
membership. Individual users can be ‘subscribed’ to any number of worksites,
each of which may have different sets of tools and within which they may play
different roles. An individual may be the ‘maintainer’ of one worksite, meaning
that they manage membership requests, moderate discussions and email lists and
make announcements to the group, while simultaneously being a member or other
worksites in which they are simply contributors to discussions and readers of
others’ work. They can also be an 'accessor' with much more limited access to
tools and resources. However, it is possible to adjust the permissions of both
maintainers and accessors to reflect the needs and purposes of the group using
the site. Looking across the range of Sakai users with whom we work, we see
everything from open-access groups with hundreds of members to small, temporary
teams of two or three researchers working on specific and private tasks such as
writing or analysis.
When configured
as a VRE, we characteristically see groups of researchers (who can configure
their ‘worksites’ to match their needs) using a a range of tools offering
project planning and management (Schedule) synchronous and asynchronous
communication (Chat, Discussion, Email Archive, Announcements) to document
sharing and storage (File Store, Email archive, Web content tool) to
co-authoring and analysing documents and data (Wiki). Figure 1 shows a typical
Sakai worksite with multiple tools.
Figure 1: A
Sakai 'Worksite' showing multiple collaboration tools. Visible are 'panes' with
worksite information, recent announcements, discussions and chat. The left menu
contains links to other tools and shows which members of the worksite are
currently logged in.
Provided that the
research team makes the VRE one of their major loci of interaction (Wenger
2001), the environment helps to create a continuum for collaborative work and
communication between face-to-face meetings, and generates a record of
communications for future reference. By providing a distinctive, common
workspace for the team, the VRE can also reinforce the group’s identity by
shared ownership of the worksite and its contents. In our experience, not all research groups
make this qualitative change to their working practice; for some, the
availabilty of a specific tool within an access-controlled environment is
sufficient reason to use Sakai. In other cases, project members who already use
specific electronic tools are cautious about making the VRE their sole locus of
interaction, and may continue using tools such as email lists, instant
messenger or local file stores alongside the new environment. At its most
prosaic level, the VRE has been seen by as a convenient way of addressing the
requirements of funders to have a presence on the World Wide Web, a
'communication strategy' and a means of archiving project data and
documentation.
In some cases, individuals
who have limited time have been happy to support deployment of the VRE but have
been only peripherally involved in online activities, or have delegated others
to play more active roles. We have found that the most pragmatic approach to
adopt is to support those individuals and projects which see the VRE a way of
addressing specific needs and demands, while at the same time encouraging those
who might use the VRE as their main locus of interaction or to develop novel
patterns of work and collaboration.
In this section
we will describe how three research groups have configured and used the SAKAI
platform in support of their research activities. These are drawn from amongst
the projects of the UK’s ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme (who
participate in the evaluation programme mentioned above) and the Applied
Educational Research Scheme.
Project A: The
first example is a research project which involves researchers from four
geographically-distributed universities who are collecting survey data from a
large population and additionally developing detailed biographical case studies
of a smaller number of respondents. For this project, it was important that
reseachers had opportunities to ‘iterate’ between quantitative and qualitative
data in the analysis process, so a priority was the development of a structured
archive of research data accessible from all the research sites. At the same
time, it was essential that data remained confidential and that access to data
was carefully monitored. What emerged was a configuration of the VRE in which
only a limited set of the tools – those concerned with data storage and project
news - were used to any great extent and membership was restricted to project
researchers.
Project B: In
this second example a research project geographically distibuted across two
universities and four further education colleges is using the VRE as their
communications ‘hub’. The project uses the chat tool for regular project team
research meetings; these occur at the same time on Monday mornings with project
members logging in from where ever they are, to deal with management or
theoretical issues. These chat interactions are permanently archived by the
VRE, the research team then uses the discussion tool to further extend these
synchronous discussions. The wiki tool is used for initial abstract and article
writing, the advantage of which is that the most up to date version of the
document is the one that is presented to the user. The wiki tool also keeps a
history of changes so that authors can compare previous versions to the current
one and see what changes or edit have been made. The file store tool is then
used for storing both qualitative and quantative research data and for copies
of published papers. The project also uses the file store for powerpoint
presentations which are then available to all project members for future use.
Project C: Our
third
example is a research project based at a single UK university but involved in a
set of related research activities. This project began using the VRE from the
outset, and as a result much of the early activity involved project management,
the development of research instruments, and the negotiation of access to research
sites. As such, a wider range of VRE tools were used: document storage was
important as research instruments were developed and literature reviewed; but
at the same time synchronous and asynchronous communication was important, with
‘chat’ playing an important role both as a means of maintaining contact between
project members and producing a record of decisions taken. This project was
quick to see the potential of the VRE for engaging users with the work of the
project, and set up multiple worksites for public access, the project ‘advisory
group’ and each of the subgroups within the project.
Project D: Our fourth example is of a large scale research consultation that will be carried out through the VRE in Scotland. The exercise will involve hundreds of pupil, teacher and parent representatives from different schools in the 32 local authorities. The local authorities will be divided into smaller subgroups, each of which will be assigned their own discussion area on a site. There will be three sites in all: one for the teacher/parent representatives, another for the pupil representatives and one common site. The idea is to ask the research questions through a discussion forum, and to get all the different stakeholders to communicate and discuss with one another and talk about their views for the benefit of the consultation. Having separate discussion areas on a site will allow people to go in and see what other people’s views are. Yet at the same time school based user IDs will allow a degree of anonymity in the procedure. A further step in the openness in the enquiry is to set up reciprocal read-only rights between the two consultation sites, so that pupils will get an access to the adults’ opinions and vice versa.
Project
E: A final example is
rather different in that it uses worksites specifically developed to support
research communities whose members include researchers in Higher Education,
policymakers, teachers in schools, and school students. These owe much to the
concept of the ‘Community of Practice’ (Wenger, 1998) in which a community of
people engages in shared activities and practice and have a ‘shared repertoire
of resources’ which develops over time. With their emphasis on developing
knowledge rather than the preservation of practice, they have much in common
with the ‘Innovative Knowledge Communities’ described by Hakkarainen et al (2004).
These communities
use the VRE in ways designed to strengthen community identity, encourage
discussion, and co-construct and share knowledge. When members come from
different backgrounds and have varying degrees of expertise in the area of
enquiry, they bring new perspectives and themselves to the group and have to
accommodate those of others. A collaborative process may then evolve in which
participants have changing roles within the work of the group depending on the
phase the project is at. In our experience to date the work of the group has
been governed both by the individuals' expertise that they have been able to
bring to that particular phase of the work and crucially by other factors which
have determined by the capacity and ability (most importantly time constraints)
to participate, which the VRE has significantly increased.
The VRE worksites
are characterised by a high and sustained use of discussion tools;
collaboration around writing tasks and use of the file store tool to maintain a
record of developing knowledge. Another characteristic is that members of these
worksites have 'permissions' set so as to encourage the discussion and
contribution - rather than having a small number of 'maintainers' and a larger
number of 'accessers' (as explained earlier), roles are shared and
responsibilities distributed across the membership.
Sakai is not only
a comparatively new software environment, but is also a 'community development'
project involving teams of developers spread across a large number of
institutions. As with many developing pieces of software, there have ‘teething
problems’, exacerbated by the fact that the projects we describe here were all
‘early adopters’ working with versions of the platform which lacked the full
functionality of what is now (July 2006) a better developed and more stable
environment. In some cases, users with
experience of other software (Virtual Learning Environments, discussion tools
and digital archives, for example) found the feature sets and ‘affordances’ of
specific tools disappointing; for others with less experience, it was the
apparent complexity of the web based environment which provided the greatest
challenges.
Other issues,
some of which are now resolved, have been related to the community development
process: there are some differences between tools developed by different teams
(for example, some have integrated search facilities while others do not) and
some combinations of tools 'play together' better than others. In addition, there have been times when the
priorities of the developer community have seemed not to align with the needs
of specific projects - for example, when developer priorities to develop the
underlying infrastructure of the platform has taken priority over the
development of specific tools. At the
same time, the community development model does allow groups of users to
'lobby' for the inclusion of new tools and the development of new features in a
way which would be much more difficult if Sakai was a 'closed' proprietary
product. This has led to user
suggestions being taken onboard by the developer teams when possible and are
being addressed in major upgrades of the software, which come out approximately
every six months.
The greatest
challenge for the maintainers of the research sites, then, has proved to the
activation and motivation of users, encouraging them to see past individual or
localised problems and make an informed assessment as to what Bereiter and
Scardamalia (1993:133-152) call the ‘promisingness’ of the VRE as a strategic
development. The embedding of project worksites within a broader Sakai
community with many users and groups allows the identification of opportunities
to deploy tools in support of their research activity. This means that
another important role for
administrators is to set up 'sandbox' and demonstration worksites so that existing
and potential users can see what others have done with the Sakai 'toolkit' and
consider how it might impact upon their own practice.
A good example
both of the responsiveness of the developer community and of the means by which
new tools are disseminated is the uptake of the 'wiki' writing tool. The
development of this tool was informed by a need for a collaborative writing
environment (in most cases, as a replacement for project members sending
documents with 'tracked changes' to each other by email). Once the wiki tool
was made available and its existence publicised, individuals and project teams
were quick to identify ways in which they might employ it; not just for
collaborative writing of abstracts, papers and reports, but also in
collaborative analysis, in biographical research and for the compilation of
glossaries, bibliographies and literature reviews.
Figure 2: The
Wiki Tool within Sakai. A wiki allows members of a worksite to work together
on a document, editing and elaborating it through a standard web browser; any
user can see the ‘history’ of the document including which edits have been made
by different users.
We asked
researchers in the projects described above to reflect on their characteristic
and shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998), ‘ways of thinking and practising’
(Entwistle et al. 2002; Meyer and Land, 2003) and barriers to collaboration. We
also encouraged researchers to identify in what ways they were or were not
supported by existing electronic tools and platforms. This process frequently
brought to light issues which were not necessarily spelt out in project designs
and publications, but emerged as a result of collaborative and collective
elicitation of participant ‘tacit knowledge’ within a structured activity, the
value of which is highlighted by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and Engeström
(1999). Even at this early stage in our
work, the potentially transformative impact of the VRE was becoming apparent.
The examples we
have drawn on in our descriptions are all from educational research projects,
and so reflect some of the specific concerns and characteristic approaches of
that domain. However, what McAteer, Crook, Macleod, Tolmie & Musselbrook
(2002) call the 'issues to manage' in the context of online communities
transcend disciplinary boundaries. The key issues and associated questions and
decisions with which the TLRP and AERS projects have engaged will face
researchers in many contexts. Indeed, in the deployment of SAKAI to diverse
groups at the University of Cambridge, we have found that the following
issues have meaning and relevance across
disciplinary boundaries.
The first issue
was what we came to refer to as the 'focus' of collaboration, the key
activities or points in the 'workflow' of the project where collaboration was
most evident, or was an important or essential element of a broader process. In
some of the projects much of the collaboration was focussed on elaborating
project designs, developing research instruments and reviewing literature in
order to develop research questions and working hypotheses. But we also saw
collaboration once projects began to collect and analyse data, and we found
that this collaboration manifested itself differently in different contexts.
Some projects had a clear commitment to expose their entire data set to a wide
audience while others restricted access to some data, citing reasons which
ranged from issues of respondent anonymity to purely pragmatic questions of
workload and lack of time. We found it
useful (given the educational context of our study) to relate this back to
Stenhouse's (1978) distinction between case data, the case record, case
studies, and analysis. While in some projects this focus was indeed the 'raw'
case data, in others, collaboration was focussed on data selected by an individual
or group within the project, or even on cross-case analyses, with researchers
not revisiting original data at all.
The second issue
is that of participant roles and responsibilities and the expectations that
participants have of each other. We found a range of organisational and
management structures within projects and widely varying roles for research
participants. Several of the projects with whom we are working are now
considering how the VRE can support distinctive elements of their research
designs including extended relationships with respondents in longitudinal
studies, participants who themselves are generating reflective accounts or
'action research' projects, and those which are concerned with the expression
of 'student voice'.
A third issue is
how the group relates to larger groups and particularly to those to which they
report or have other responsibilities. Altrichter (2005; 22) describes how much
educational research takes place in 'small collegial groups' protected by
'special conditions of confidence' and in which it is possible to test and
develop arguments and prepare for a 'public' that is one step 'bigger'. Several
of the groups who are using the VRE have responded to this need to address
‘graded publics’ by developing multiple worksites with different memberships,
together with workflow processes by which resources are transferred from one
area to another. This, of course, presents another dilemma - whether to engage
with graded publics through a process of inviting them 'in' to the VRE or to
use the VRE as a base from which to address them - what McQuail (2000; 129-132)
characterises as 'consulation' and 'conversation' as opposed to 'allocution' or
'broadcasting'.
A fourth
significant issue relates to the nature of the research group itself. The educational programmes to which we have
deployed the SAKAI VRE are large and complex organisations. While they are both
involved in the coordinate research activities, they are organised in slightly
different ways; the TLRP is a 'coordinated research programme' within which
there are projects of varying sizes, thematic groups and seminar series and a
small number of research fellowships held by individuals. AERS is organised
into 'thematic networks' within which are projects and individual research
fellows. Both the TLRP and AERS are also keen to support the development of
individual and institutional capacity across the wider educational research
community beyond the networks they facilitate and the projects they fund. When
we came to design VRE worksites as the 'virtual' manifestations of these
various groupings, however, we became aware that the notion of the 'project' in
particular conceals a very wide range of organisational and collaborative
configurations. Many of the projects represent temporary coalitions of
individuals based in different institutions.
In some cases these individuals have a previous history of working
together, but in others ‘the project’ represents a first attempt at collaborative
activity. Even then, ‘project’
organisation varies widely. Some projects only convene meetings attended by all
members once or twice each year, or arrange these to coincide with other events
such as conferences. Others invest considerable time (and money) in maintaining
a regular ‘cycle’ of meetings every month, or even more frequently. Another area in which there is a wide
variation is the extent to which the project is centrally managed; some have an
established ‘management group’ which oversees activity in participating
institutions and research sites, while others have looser ‘federated’
structures with minimal central coordination.
Any successful
deployment of an application as the VRE, then, needs to consider the
organisational form of the group to be supported. While we have talked about ‘communities’ in
the broad sense, most of the projects we currently support are in fact similar
to what Swaak, Verwijs, & Mulder (2000) describe as ‘task groups’, with
external funding and reporting responsibilities and (to a greater or lesser extent)
an externally defined research agenda to address. As the VRE platform has becomes more
established and users more confident, we have noted that there has been a
tendency for groups to establish worksites for specified purposes rather than
to provide an online ‘home’ for an entire project. Small groups set up worksites to analyse
data, engage with specific users and to write documents, apparently without any
expectation that these will continue to exist beyond the life of the activities
concerned. These self-directed,
temporary groupings seem to correspond more to the ‘knotworks’ described by
Engeström, Engeström & Vähäaho (1999).
Individuals and groups may need to work together to identify what
organisational and network forms are best ‘fit for purpose’ for their intended
research activities; deployment of the VRE may represent an opportunity to
‘leverage’ discussions to this end. A challenge at programme and institutional
level then, as Swaak, Verwijs, & Mulder (2000) suggest, is how to embed
knowledge and useful practices, introduced developed within these task-oriented
groups within a broader, long-lived and self-regulating community.
We have been
promoting and supporting the use of Virtual Research Environments for some time
now. Looking back over the past year (2005-2006) what we now find is that
individuals and groups do not simply identify those tools and services which
address specific and predefined project 'needs'. Increasingly, we also find
them discussing the potential of new tools to qualitatively change their ways
of working; their relationships with research participants; and role of the VRE
in ensuring the sustainability of their research activities. Our longer-term
interest is in exploring to what extent use of appropriate technologies can not
only support established 'ways of thinking and practising', but how they can
support different kinds of research activity and new relationships between
researchers and research participants.
The deployment of
the VRE across a number of projects has shown us that different projects will
use the VRE in different ways. Projects tend to mirror the structure and the
needs of their research within the VRE. The use of the VRE by projects shows
that we may have changed the research process within the projects, but we can
not say whether we have changed the research outcomes of the projects. The real
goal will be to say that the use of a VRE will improved the quality of the
project’s research.
The authors
themselves have made progressively more use of the VRE. This article was
written collaboratively in a specially-configured VRE worksite using the 'wiki'
tool, with two author based in Cambridge and the other in Strathclyde. For this
reason amongst many we would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Sakai
developer team at CARET in Cambridge who were responsible for building that
particular tool. We would also like to thank members of the SAKAI community and
the participants in the TLRP and AERS research programmes who have participated
in the development and evaluation of the Sakai VRE as a whole. Of these, we
would especially like to acknowledge the contribution of the Learners, Learning
and Teaching Network of AERS in the creation of innovative ways of using the
Sakai VRE.
AERS is jointly
funded by SEED and SHEFC. Research into the TLRP projects’ use of the VRE has
been funded by the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) under its
Virtual Research Environment Programme
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This document was added to the Education-Line database on 20 December 2006