The book Wikinomics has really got me thinking about how collaboration happens in our society. One of the area where I think massive collaboration would be really useful, but where it is underutilized is in the area of educational research. Imagine the power of collaboration that we could have if hundreds of educators collaborated to run a research study. I've written about this before, but I have a new perspective since reading Tapscott and Williams.
Let's look at some of the benefits of being involved in such an undertaking.
First, each educator would have their name attached to a valuable piece of educational research. So much research in education is done with tiny sample sizes that tend to invalidate the purpose of the research. A large sample size does not guarantee that the research is valid, it still needs to be done with care, but it does tend to reduce things like selection bias, small sample size effect, etc...
Second, we could do research on a wide variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds, different parts of the world, and be able to analyze our data from many different perspectives. We might even have enough data to spawn multiple educational research papers on our chosen topic. We could release our data under a Creative Commons license, and let other educators remix and look at the date in different ways.
Finally, the amount of work each educator would have to do would be a lot less. Designing a study, collecting data, researching sources, analyzing data, and writing an educational research paper are all time-consuming tasks. Dividing up these tasks over a larger group, even with the additional overhead of maintaining coherence in the research, would greatly reduce how much work each educator would have to do.
If you are interested in participating in such a research study, please sign up at this form. There is no specific topic or agenda set yet, just an initial examining of the interest from the educational community.
David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.
