Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The central role in educational change and innovation is typically attributed to
leading teachers who innovate in their everyday practices. Foray and Hargreaves
(2003), however, identify two broad issues in the structure and dynamics of the pro-
fessional knowledge base that impede the efficiency of innovations in classrooms.
Firstly, linkages and feedback between formal research and practices are weak; and
professional researchers rarely draw upon the practical knowledge of innovative
practitioners. Practitioners' capacity and willingness to conduct educational experi-
ments are also limited. Secondly, most of teacher practical knowledge remains tacit.
Lack of knowledge codification impedes the accumulation of “know-how” and, as
a result, information spillovers and dissemination are weak. Over the last decades,
there has been an obvious growth in volume and interest in practitioner inquiry in
education, e.g., action research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Dana & Silva, 2003).
The outputs, however, vary greatly in quality and significance. Insufficient concep-
tual and methodological rigor, low generalizability of practice-oriented and heavily
contextualized outputs, and lack of clear connection of practitioner research goals
to larger social and political agendas are some typical areas of critique of teacher
research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999).
Despite this, teachers' capacity to innovate is probably the most unexploited
source for educational development. This capacity could be dramatically enhanced
by improving links in the educators' professional knowledge base between scientific
and practical knowledge and between tacit (implicit) practical knowledge and cod-
ified (explicit) abstract knowledge. This argument is in line with the ideas of other
scholars who have advocated preparing teachers-researchers (Foray & Hargreaves,
2003) and creating the “hybrid culture” of research and practice (Bereiter, 2002b,
p. 417).
There are a number of examples of less and more successful technology-
enhanced research collaboration practices in education evidencing a range of
different ways in which similar collaboration tools could support more distributed
educational research (Borgman, 2006; Carmichael, 2007; Christie, et al., 2007;
Laterza, Carmichael, & Procter, 2007; Procter, 2007; Strijbos & Fischer, 2007;
Wilson, et al., 2007), but there are few examples and visions of how technologies
could support the whole R&D chain.
From a technological point of view, research environments can provide impor-
tant affordances and supports for creating, managing, and reusing information and
knowledge. Special innovation systems and e-inquiry platforms can enhance in var-
ious ways individual, collaborative and systems' innovation capacities. Innovation
and knowledge building in collaborative technology-supported environments have,
however, a sociotechnical overhead, and it is challenging to achieve an alignment
between technical and distributed human information systems (Ure, Procter, Lin,
Hartswood, & Ho, 2007). For example, in order to make designs and data reusable,
teachers need to describe their digital objects using metadata and shared domain
ontologies and other annotations that could help others to understand, interpret, and
repurpose their contributions in different contexts. Further, in our previous work
we analyzed some social, cognitive, and technical aspects of teacher knowledge,
collaborative work, and inquiry in digital environments and argued that research
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