Twenty-first-century educational practice: research, evidence and knowledge management - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 186

Widespread internet
access

Rapid dissemination, low
cost updating, ease of knowledge
building through online communities
across institutions/cultures,
'extended professionalism'.

Informal electronic
networking and
sharing.

Evidence-based
policy and practice,
research led teaching:
online collaboration
and peer challenge

Increased codification of knowledge

Historical oral tradition
limited print 19 th C to
mid 20 th C

Better coherence in R&D

Isolated practice
'restricted professionalism'.

Slow print dissemination,
limited publishing opportunities.

Pre-internet

Figure 10.1 Increased codification of knowledge - moving from 19 th C to 21 st C professional prac-

tice.

and teacher education, and the knowledge and training of teacher educators and the
ways that knowledge transfer takes place, are taken as unproblematic. However, in a
number of countries policy documents set out an expectation that practice and policy
will be evidence-based (OECD 2007b, 2007c). There are of course many websites and
documents giving teaching tips and advice to teachers (though few giving advice to
teacher educators). However, a scrutiny of such advice as often as not reveals a lack of
citation of any evidence.
Detailed examination of how research is generated in education in the UK con-
text shows that there is little investment in subject-specialist research in pedagogy
(TDA 2002), that government funding is principally spent in evaluating policy, and
that much research is undertaken on a small-scale basis and is unfunded except
through an individual staff member's time. This is hardly a recipe for the production
of research of such quality and depth that it could impact on national and interna-
tional policy and practice.
Figure 10.1 (from Leask and White 2004) illustrates how rapidly the context in
which research is generated and published has moved on, from a situation in the
1980s where publication was costly, slow and based on individual endeavour, to one
where publication is rapid using online resources and can be collaborative. Twenty-
first-century Web 2.0 tools support online publication and low-cost updating of pub-
lications, year on year as more research and evidence becomes available, but brings
the problem of volume and quality.
Arguably, effective e-support for these new ways of working and updating the
evidence base requires a national and international e-infrastructure if maximum
benefit is to be gained by utilizing existing resources in the system. There are sev-
eral emerging models which illustrate these points and the potential for new ways
of working to be adopted, which will improve research quality, relevance and time-
liness.