Group Admins
Description
This paper addresses an area of concern documented by the ALT 2014 conference call for a critical assessment of the ‘missing middle’ between research experiment and full scale deployment. This is an under theorised area of study, falling between business models of scaling innovation, education models of scaling innovation and efforts in ‘health/biological’ to scale innovation.
The EU’s 7th Framework Programme project LearningLayers (www.learninglayers.eu) has as a goal the ‘scaling up technologies for informal learning in SME Clusters’. For example, the ‘Help Seeking Tool’ scaffolds the construction of Personal Learning Networks and is currently being embedded within GP practices in the North of England. The tool is designed to assist GP Practice based nurses and professionals with networking for problem solving, sharing information and drawing upon the expertise of what Vygotsky calls the ‘more capable peer’. The tool draws in a social semantic recommendation service (i.e. algorithms that give context sensitive help) and has been developed over the last 18 months using an preliminary ‘Design Research framework for scaling’ (Cook and Santos, 2014). Design Research produces both theories and practical educational interventions as its outcomes; it is a modern approach suitable for addressing complex problems in educational practice for which no clear guidelines or solutions are available. However, an external review of our early ‘Design Research framework for scaling’ has highlighted that the approach is too linear and may rely too heavily on 1960s notions of the diffusion of innovation proposed by Roger’s, which are now somewhat dated.
This presentation will briefly present the initial ‘Design Research framework for scaling’, and go on to map it to other relevant frameworks (e.g. Coburn, 2003; Dede, 2007; Greenhalgh, et al., 2004). We will go on to suggest that the typical measure of success ‘by number’ needs a more nuanced analysis. Furthermore, we will propose that the emerging/new framework provides enable the orchestration of team discourse about theory, the production of artefacts as tools for design discourse, the identification of scalable systemic pain points; thus throwing light on the ‘missing middle’.
This topic will be of interest to conference participants seeking to implement large scale technological innovation internally within the organisation/ institution or externally cross-organisational, in Public and/or Private domains.
References:
Coburn, C (2003). Rethinking Scale: Moving beyond numbers to deep and lasting change. Educational Researcher 32, 6 (3-12) available onlinehttp://vocserve.berkeley.edu/faculty/CECoburn/coburnscale.pdf
Cook, J. and Santos, P. (2014). Social Network Innovation in the Internet’s Global Coffeehouses: Designing a Mobile Help Seeking Tool in Learning Layers. Proceedings of the International Mobile Learning Festival 2014: Integrating Technology, Social Media and Learning Design, June 2-4, 2014, Bali, Indonesia
Dede, C (2007). Scaling Up: Evolving Innovations beyond Ideal Settings to Challenging Contexts of Practice. available online http://tinyurl.com/n78bdhd [accessed 8/04/2014]
Greenhalgh, T; Robert, G; MacFarlane, F; Bate, P and Kyriakidou, O. (2004). Diffusion of Innovations in Service Organizations: Systematic Review and Recommendations. The Milbank Quarterly, Vol 82, No 4 (pp.581-629) London:Blackwell available online http://tinyurl.com/mwfyzhj [accessed 8/04/2014]
Scaling up Technologies for Informal Learning in SME Clusters (LearningLayers) (www.learninglayers.eu)
Authors
| Name | Debbie Holley |
| URL | http://drdebbieholley.com |
| Affiliation | Anglia Ruskin University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
