Interesting project is developing

Hi everyone,

I am half way through my presentations at Colorado Technical University. On Saturday I presented to doctor of management students and this coming Thursday I will present to the doctor of education students. An interesting project is developing that I would like to invite all who read this to consider:

Proposed Participatory Action Research Doctoral Team:

A group of doctoral students searching out whether and to what extent ideas of distributed education are interesting and/or successful in increasing ________(interest in, skill sets during, - professional development, further education, etc) across a variety of learning situations.

PREMISE(s):

1. Education is knowledge of basic skills, academics, technical, discipline, and citizenship that we use to help us in learning. Our paradigms are changing due to technology – no one knows where it is going but some suggest that we are evolving to a world without classes.

2. High quality distributed content exists across a variety of easily attainable web based resources thus diminishing the need to constantly reinvent ways to distribute content to learners.

3. Learners prefer to go find their own resources anyway.

4. These premises come together in the theory of Connectivism

5. The purposes of schools and teachers in this new world is evolving, but I suspect that:

a. Institutions, businesses and non profits will hold the keys to certification that knowledge has been learned through developing standards of output or assessment

b. Teachers increase the speed (and quality?) of learning through being conduits of:

1. i. new skills
2. ii. provocative ideas
3. iii. modulation of emotional stress.

The Project as I see it (April 11, 2008):

“Non Course” content (moving us out of the old paradigm while staying connected to its parts) to be discussed and derived by doctoral students in a variety of contexts would include:

1) Content (taken care of by independently studying the above resources),

2) Links between content and discussion (taken care of through sharing resources and participatory group Wiki work),

3) Developing relationships and networks (Twitter? – other social networking tools)

4) Reality based projects (in this case the dissertation process for the participants building and studying their own distributed education projects in the field –linking knowledge to the group – modeling PAR as a tool for development of new models within complex situations

5) Other things??????

Doctoral students interested in these ideas work as a participatory group to use the dissertation process to study, invent, research and write about projects that implement distributed education across the variety inherent in their local contexts. The group as a whole is facilitated and researched (using mixed methods) with participants by Dr. E. Alana James. As we go we publish what we are doing across a distributed group of contexts – consciously building a digital footprint of the larger project, linking the output and explicitly sharing group learning. We publish in traditional settings (peer reviewed journals and books) as appropriate. We become in essence a network of participants and participatory research projects over diverse settings, exploring linked ideas and using linked output to help move the world of education the next step.

For more information contact:

E. Alana James, Ed.D.

www.doctoratelife.blogspot.com

james.alana@gmail.com