Purpose driven research for students

Purpose driven research for students

Projects like this have great potential to harness one of the really big untapped resources in practice, the potential of undergrad and graduate students to carry out real world research into key issues facing any given profession. But it has to be handled very carefully to ensure that the various stakeholders and participants in this process all buy into the value of the work that is being done.

There is a danger that the professional community will not see the research as valid as it is carried out by ‘students’, not recognising that these ‘students’ will soon become ‘professionals’ (at least we hope that some of them will); but also that the institution itself will not validate the research done by people who are not far enough up the academic research ‘food chain’ I think this is where Mike Wesch’s work is very interesting, by creating real world artefacts (videos, wikis, rss aggregators etc) that achieve an impact beyond the relatively small world of the university he has found a way to bridge the gap between practice and theory, and between the academic world and the lay world.

We thought a lot about this with OPEN-I, we were very concerned that the whole project didn’t come across to the practice community as a cheap way of the universities getting guest lectures from established professionals; so that is one reason why we haven’t branded the community with any university logo’s etc. Also our initial ‘core membership’ was all either established figures or academic/practitioners; we waited until the membership hit around 50 professionals before we invited any ‘students’ to join (although most of the ‘students’ are professionals anyway, as we were drawing them mostly from masters level courses etc where many of them are already well established as professionals, they just want to enhance their practice)

So an approach where the professional community might initially define the territory of the research, and then the ‘students’ would carry it out could be a good way forward. The other way though is for the students and their tutors to look critically at the practice domain and try to ask some tough questions of it about what it is not dealing with or thinking about, or what key resources it might be lacking, then carry out a project to fill those gaps. I would also suggest starting quite small with a specific topic that can be researched in some depth, and thus claim a certain ‘ownership ‘ of, in order to buy ‘competency’ in the community. (We are currently doing a similar thing with our students, they are all working on a research project on the rise of citizen journalism/photojournalism, each one doing their own small self contained piece of research which we will then present in an edited form as a public facing wiki next year, we are running this with 3 consecutive groups of students so will have about 50 pieces of research by the end.)

I think that using the various concepts around boundary objects and brokership from CoP theory could be a very good way to try to unpack some of these possibilities.

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