Academic papers and articles from practitioners April 11, 2010

Hi Daniel

Thanks for your email encouraging me to respond for the call for papers on Peer-to-Peer Collaboration and Networked Learning.  I am glad that you think my practical work is relevant for sharing with the academic readership of your journal. However I have some concerns about the practicalities of someone like me trying to cross the cultural gap between academia and practice. May I share my current thoughts with you?

I  have highlighted below the bits of the call for papers that seem most relevant to me.

Ref -

I know about knowledge flows and how they are changing through years of online practical experience. From a personal perspective I have been involved in online networking (especially, but not exclusively, between UK and Nigeria) for almost ten years. Increasingly I became  an information hub - which soon meant that I was an information bottleneck. There were other issues as well, and the outcome has been the ongoing development of an online "home" for me and my network. These are some of the issues:

• I saw information that would be useful to other people that I knew - but didn't always have time to email them about it.
  
• I met people who I felt would benefit from knowing other people that I knew - but didn't always have time to introduce them and explain how it could be to their mutual benefit to know each other better.  
  
• I repeatedly explained similar background information to different people, and had nowhere to place that information for easy future reference and sharing.
• I was involved in various online communities and discussion groups - but did not have a way to pull them together. 
• I was convinced that what we (i.e. people in the dadamac community) were doing was relevant to "outsiders" and so I needed an online space where these outsiders could come - either to be shown around or just to rummage around, "listen in", shadow people who are already active in the community etc
  

For these reasons, and more, I started to create www.dadamac.net, and a related "dadamac moodle", and more recently a dadamac posterous (where I can post some of my my letters - like this one - as open letters for future reference). In my mind these complementary online spaces are the future "online home" of the people who are in the dadamac core community, and its wider network (including people who are "just visiting" and potential collaborators who may, or may not, choose to become more closely involved with us).

At present www.dadamc.net simply looks like a (somewhat amateur) website (and one  with too many words and not enough pictures). But it isn't that simple. Dadamac.net and dadamac moodle are still very much an experiment in capturing and enabling the information flows within dadamac.  As we develop them a lot of analysis (and re-ordering) is taking place regarding the different relationships that different people have with the information (and with each other, and with the Internet), and how this can best be expressed and enabled through our online presence. I will avoid the temptation of going into it all in more detail at this point. I just mention it to let you know that we are thinking deeply about the issues of flows of knowledge and we are exploring them in very practical (but not yet fully visible) ways.

Ref

As I mentioned in my earlier email to Michel, I can think of lots of examples related to non-formal learning (and not just the ones I mentioned to him). In fact we had another, somewhat different, example this week when Andy in the UK was teaching Vijay in Delhi about twitter, at a "Second Thursday" session in the worknets chatroom. See Vijay's blog post Learning Twitter Lessons in a Chat Room

Ref

I've highlighted some key words that seem relevant to what I know - but I'm not sure that I really fit under any of those headings (and I'm not sure if any of the words have an academic meaning that is more tightly defined than my practitioner understanding of the words). I think, in the context of this particular journal, my work is probably to do with "Internet enabled non-formal learning".

Ref

This is where I think we come to the stumbling block - the "paper". At one point you asked me for "an article" - but in fact it seems we are definitely talking about a paper. I could write you "an article" as in "a feature" about "Peer-to-Peer Collaboration and Networked Learning". I guess if you wanted me to look at "issues and concerns" (related to your academic readership) I could slant the article to consider how these "bottom up" developments in non-formal learning relate to developments in formal-learning and thence to the "formal-learning community" ie academic researchers and other people in traditional institutes of learning. (Though to be honest I don't know if I fancy getting into that level of analysis - I might just jump on my soap box and ask those in the formal system to be more aware of those of us in the non-formal system.)

However the issue at this point is not so much the subject matter of the article - but the type of article - and it says "paper". I have checked about papers to your journal. It says they are peer-reviewed (ie reviewed by "your peers"  - the academics - not "my peers" ). Academics, understandably,  judge by academic standards. My expectation is that any "not-my-peer" reviewer will expect my article to 'tick the boxes" as an academic paper, i.e. to be carefully framed according to this theory and that theory, properly embedded in "the literature", quoting references etc. (the only references I'm likely to refer to are pages on the Internet written by dadamac people - especially me!) If I am right about the academic peer-review process then I would be wasting my time writing the article and wasting your time and the reviewers' in reading it.

What do you think? Am I on the "wrong side" of an uncrossable cultural chasm between academia and practice - or can we find some way to go forward together? I hope we can.

Pamela