SMART10 - publish

It’s been a while.

My report for assessment has been submitted and I expected to put this to one side for a while. Because of the questionaire data, I posted the link to ultrastudents and this had two effects. One student wanted to be anonymised, so I converted from opt-out to opt-in, and Nancy White wrote to me wanting to blog my report saying “Andy, this report is a GREAT read! Is it ok to share this URL publically? I’d like to blog it.”

So my plan to write a seperate findings report and post it to onfac and comprac as part of my ILM2 got kind of pre-empted except that it didn’t happen yet. I decided that didn’t matter but now it’s a bit of a mess.

Anyway, I posted the link to the Ultraversity Firstclass community as well, for what its worth, and nobody is interested there, so it’s back to plan A, I suppose.

When I get back from holiday I’ll write an “Independent Learning Module” plan for writing up the findings and taking it further. The expected Learning Outcomes will have to be unspecified in order to allow for the unexpected.

Problems of success?

The introduction of the wiki has gone much better than I’d dared to hope. There’s been no resistance whatsoever, no complaints, misunderstandings or anything negative at all really. The revised introduction method ran smoothly, there’s a steady flow of useful edits being made and now the COP members are talking amongst themselves about how to make best use of it, what to do with innaccurate information, how to identify themselves there. In other words they have comfortably adopted the space as their own, which is exactly the intention. So I can now take on the role less as facilitator and more as an ordinary contributer whilst also making observations about the relationship between wiki and COP.

So that’s a very nice situation to be in, for once. What do I do with it?

Help! I don’t have any problems to reflect on!

Going back to Bob Dick’s hotseat, he said of my early proposal – “I hope you find some way of publishing the eventual outcomes. I think many people will be interested in your experience.” So now I am starting to think about how I can publish my little success story so that I can pass on the positive lessons learned and perhaps help others to adapt some of the findings to their own situation if it has any parallels.

I’m not sure that the assessment product is going to be the best vehicle to do this with, although the intention of the AE tool is probably that it should enable publication of findings. It occurs to me that meeting the assessment criteria and publishing clear findings are two very different writing tasks, although there should be some overlap. Is there any previous experience of undergraduate research publication?