Re: RE: so i'm a pessimist

From: Martin Owen (mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 05:28:43 PDT


xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>At which point, lets cancel MCA. What would be the point if it is just
>repeating
>what everyone is doing? Seems like a lot of trouble to simply be
>repetitive.
>Since Harry Daniels and Anne Edwards are about to take on a good part of
>this
>burden we should hurry up and warn them off, as a simple matter of
>humanity!

You get six of one and half dozen of the other. From my Finance Office
point of view I do OK. For five years I have turned in a 6 figure turnover
in grants ( pounds Sterling). This year is in excess of 500,OOO dollars
grant capture from which and my institution takes a 40% overhead. This is
very applied work. Current activity involves developing practice with
primary school teachers in using digital cameras in the development of
numeracy and secondly we are developing technology that supports the
concept of a "course memory" to support portfolio and activity based
assessment in on-line course as well as tools for sharing amongst course
members. The work is conceived and planned and interpreted through a CHAT
inspired framework: however there are real practical problems that you do
not get in small scale or lab experiments. This kind of money comes with
real hiccups because it is given in highly Political (capital "P") ways.
Sometimes it is money left in a budget in the Ministry at the end of a
fiscal year. Therefore you do a lot of stuff which is unsound in a
classical research sense. You have to start intervening before you have
established base lines for instance. Your funders may want outcome
measures that might also be unsound.

Over time you do build interesting pictures of innovative practice but may
lack the "soundness" of data you might have got if you worked with 5
subjects in lab conditions or even 5 classrooms instead of 350 classrooms.
 You get the ability to provide a narrative that is born from experience
however it is not backed by any pre or post tests, or their qualitative
equivalents. Instead I think quality comes from acting within an
acknowledged and explicit theoretical framework of analysis and building
and interpreting a theory from one's practice.

One the one hand you get the advantage of doing in in a way that really
counts at the chalkface, on the other hand it does not help your academic
publishing record. I write a lot of reports to funding bodies and a lot of
stuff for teachers to read. However this is not the kind of publication
that will get me the title "Professor" and the pension to match. If I got
a few small scale ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) grants, I
personally would be much better off, and my academic masters (as opposed
to my financial masters) would be happier.

Herein lies a paradox. By trying to satisfy my need to be "practical" I
also satisfy the financial needs of my institution, however I end up
having a low score on scholarship which is the route to progression in the
academic community.

But there is a the half-dozen. In the UK all research in Universities is
nationally reviewed on a five year cycle. Departments are graded and
their level of centrally provided research funds(as a opposed to
competitive and /or contract) are based on the grade. Subsequent funding
is given out on a pro-rata basis for research active staff. The grades are
based on a number of measures including quality journal publication ( you
can only offer four) and Research Council grant capture. However the
grades are awarded by review teams. The Education review team has five
members. Two of the five are "paid-up" members of the Research Council's
"Sociocultural approaches to issues in education seminar series" including
Harry Daniels. So , to be fair, it would seem that there is a level
playing field for judging the quality of educational research in the UK.
However speaking from a small institution which has only strengths in two
fields: bilingualism and ICT in education, you do get a feeling that "to
them that hath shall be given". Somehow I do not see us ever getting the
same rating as Cambridge, nor will I see the working conditions of such an
institution.

Martin Owen

"Why don't you just come out and say what you want instead of trying to
engage my enthusiasm. I just don't have one."
Marvin the android, as reported by D.N.Adams (1952-2001)



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