SHARING PRACTICE FOR COMPUTING EDUCATORS

SHARING PRACTICE FOR COMPUTING EDUCATORS Janet Finlay Leeds Metropolitan University Old School Board Calverley Street, Leeds, LS1 3ED j.finlay@leedsmet.ac.uk http://leedsmet.academia.edu/janetfinlay Sally Fincher University of Kent Canterbury Kent, CT2 7NZ s.a.fincher@cs.kent.ac.uk http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/saf/index.html ABSTRACT Appropriate sharing of practice is essential both for educators to improve their own practices and for teaching and learning projects to disseminate their outcomes effectively, but traditional dissemination is not well suited to such sharing. This paper reports on a two-year process through which the Centre of Excellence in Learning and Teaching Active Learning in Computing sought to capture and represent their practice in order to share it effectively with the wider community. Two representations, patterns and bundles, are considered and the team s experience of using them is explored. Key findings are that the representation used must be adapted to the community using it and that narrative is an essential element in the process of sharing practice. Keywords Sharing practice, representations, patterns, bundles, computing education, narrative 1. INTRODUCTION Appropriate sharing of practice is essential both for educators to improve their own practices and for teaching and learning projects to disseminate their outcomes effectively. However effective transfer of practice is recognised as a complex process in higher education [3], which requires representations that will allow educators to share practice across time and space. Disseminating practice solely through conference and journal publications is not enough: this representation is suited to presenting objective findings but loses the direct, experiential, lived elements that are critical to enabling other practitioners to adopt new practices [5]. Several projects (e.g. [3, 6, 7]) have explored what might make a useful representation for sharing teaching practice but the question is still very much open. The Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning Active Learning in Computing (CETL ALiC), the only computing CETL in the UK, completed its funded work in 2010. Since 2005, CETL ALiC has been exploring a range of areas of assessment, learning and teaching in Computing, including collaborative work, synoptic assessment, using podcasting and web 2.0 technologies, peer support and problem-based learning. This work has been presented through traditional means, such as conference and journal papers, but while these are valuable as a means of disseminating the outcomes of the project, they do not offer an effective way to allow other educators to evaluate and adapt practices developed by the project for their own context. The project team therefore actively explored different means of representing such practice. This paper reports on the processes undertaken by CETL ALiC to capture and represent the successful practices developed over the five years of the project. In the next section we situate this work in ALiCʼs overall philosophy of sharing practice. We then introduce the two representations, patterns and bundles, that have been explored, before discussing the process undertaken by the ALiC team and its outcomes. We conclude with some observations and recommendations on the process of representing practice and how effective sharing can be facilitated, based on our experience. 2. SHARING PRACTICE IN ALIC Effective sharing of practice has been central to CETL ALiCʼs philosophy throughout. In the initial phases of the CETL this focused on transfer of practice between the four collaborating sites: the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Newcastle and Leeds Metropolitan University. Specific cross-site activities, through which practice at one site has been adopted at another, have been successfully implemented, focusing on project work and synoptic assessment (e.g. [2, 8]). However, in order to share practice beyond the consortium, where it was possible to work closely and share teaching experiences directly, ALiC needed to take a different Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. 2011 Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences

approach. From the outset, it was recognized that transfer of practice is a complex process and that traditional dissemination methods, while valuable for sharing some outputs, were not the most appropriate means of enabling transformation and tailoring of practice between practitioners. However, deriving appropriate and effective representations of practice is not easy. Practitioners find it difficult to identify and articulate the processes through which they actually assimilate new practice into their work. Even where a piece of practice can be identified as successful and worth sharing, it is not trivial to identify the essential elements of that practice that make it successful and valuable in a different context [6, 7]. ALiC therefore initiated a work package, which ran over two years, with two key aims: to evaluate a number of representations of practice and to establish a process through which practice could shared appropriately beyond the consortium. ALiC fellows worked together to represent their practice using two different approaches. In each case fellows were asked to feedback on their experiences through a questionnaire and focus groups. 3. REPRESENTATIONS OF PRACTICE In seeking a representation appropriate for sharing its practice, ALiC identified a number of initial requirements. Firstly, the representation needed to be aimed at educators and be easy both to produce and to use in practice. More formal representations, such as Learning Designs, were therefore not selected as they are recognised as being complex to use [3]. Secondly, the representation needed to be succinct and accessible at a glance, focusing on a single piece of practice. For this reason, portfolio-based representations were also rejected. Considering these constraints the ALiC team focused on two representations for sharing its practice: patterns [1] and bundles [6]. Each of these uses a structured natural language format, is short and concise and focuses on one piece of practice. 3.1 Patterns The pattern representation was developed by architect Christopher Alexander in an attempt to describe good practice in architectural design [1]. It has since been used in a number of other disciplines including education. A pattern is a structured, natural language representation that describes an effective solution to a recurrent problem embedded in a specific context and is characterised by being drawn from successful practice rather than based on theory. A pattern is generally considered to be such if there are at least three distinct examples of practice where the given solution is successfully applied to the identified problem, the so-called rule of three [7]. The pattern itself abstracts the invariant properties of those distinct solutions to provide a generally applicable representation of the essence of the practice. The form is concise and intuitive to understand. An example of a pattern form can be seen at http://www.patternlanguagenetwork.org. 3.2 Bundles Bundles were influenced by patterns [4, 6] but recognise that there are certain things that teachers need to know in making the decision to take on a new practice. They need to know what the practice is, why it works and what pitfalls there may be in its implementation. They also need to know that the practice has worked successfully elsewhere. Bundles therefore include a specific narrative of a particular piece of practice rather than an abstraction across several examples. The bundle representation consciously excludes information that may be less useful to practitioners. The EPCoS project [6] found that teachers do not need details of the original context because they adapt practice rather than adopting it unaltered [5]. Bundles also assume that ideas do not need to be packaged and labelled in order to be reused: practitioners know their own context and what will work there and do not need the originator of the practice to second guess this for them. An example of the bundle form can be seen at http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/national/epcos/bundles/bundles.html. 4. THE PROCESS OF SHARING Bundles were the initial representation of practice considered by CETL ALiC in the early part of the project. However, at the point at which we began to working on representing practice, we had the opportunity to work with the JISC-funded Planet project team, who were developing a community-based process for capturing patterns, so we began by exploring the use of patterns as a representation for ALiC practice. 4.1 Patterns and the Planet methodology ALiC fellows from all four collaborating sites began to meet monthly to explore the details of their practice and to consider how this could be represented to make it amenable to reuse. A process developed by the Planet

project was adopted, which used structured narrative stories to seed the process of exploring and capturing practice. A series of workshops was held monthly for about a year to share stories of practice and to try to identify patterns. These workshops followed Planetʼs Participatory Workshop methodology [7], which includes the following iterative stages: Pre-workshop activity: participants submit a case story of their practice to the Planet wiki, using a structure narrative template, the STARR template. STARR includes the following sections: Situation (context), Task (what needed to be done), Action (what was done), Results (what happened), Reflection (what was learned from it). Using a structured narrative has a number of advantages: it encourages a common level of granularity in the stories, it allows comparison across several stories and it focuses on the reality of practice rather than abstracted lessons. Workshop 1: participants share, question, elaborate and compare their narratives of practice, with a view to identifying common elements which might be abstracted as patterns. Candidate patterns are identified and entered into the Planet wiki. Inter-workshop activity: the Planet team reviews the narratives and candidate patterns to identify any commonalities between these and those already in the wiki. Workshop 2: participants consider the candidate patterns from the previous workshop, and any additional ones proposed by the Planet team, and use structured templates and prompts to refine them, in particular focusing on identifying the necessary evidence for the candidate pattern to fulfil the rule of three. Workshop 3: participants review the patterns and attempt to apply them to new problem scenarios around the design and delivery of learning experiences. This helps to evaluate and validate the patterns. The ALiC team primarily iterated around workshops 1 and 2, with some attempts to apply the patterns in practice (workshop 3). However most of the workshop activity was around pattern production, so this will be the focus here. The structured storytelling activity was particularly successful. Participants reported that they had learned more about the detail of each otherʼs work through this activity than they had through more traditional dissemination approaches over the previous years of the project. Preparing narratives of practice and discussing these helped to clarify the nature of that practice, including elements of significance and areas of commonality. All participants rated these discussions as the key essential elements of the process. One participant summarized it as follows: Talking about particular case-studies or practices (sometimes my own and sometimes others) was really helpful in teasing out the similarities (or conversely, the lack of any similarities). the value was really in the discussion as it helped me to focus on the significant factors (CETL ALiC workshop participant). However the process of abstracting from these stories of practice to propose patterns proved to be much more difficult. Participants found the process of abstraction challenging and unfamiliar and some felt the pattern structure was difficult to understand: I found the concept of patterns quite difficult to grasp, I just didnʼt ʻget itʼ (CETL ALiC workshop participant). Also, it became clear over time that the nature of the practice being described meant that there were often only one or two instances of the practice within the project, making it very difficult to fulfil the rule of three and develop full patterns. This became frustrating for the team so we decided to switch to the bundle representation to see if it could address these issues. 4.2 Bundles The bundle representation focuses more directly on practice than patterns and requires only a single example of practice. As such it was felt that it might help the team to address the issues of complexity of abstraction and of having limited examples of practice. The team continued with the Planet process, retaining the structured narrative element but using the bundle representational form rather than patterns. This produced a surprising paradox. Even though one of the main issues with patterns had been the difficulty of abstraction, when working with bundles, which are intended to reflect the detail of real practice, the team found themselves over-abstracting. They did not initially relate naturally to the structure or fully appreciate the purpose of each part of the bundle. They had become focused on abstraction and generality, more than their stated purpose of communicating to an audience of practitioners. They believed that the more generic their description, the more easily their practice could be transferred, and consequently omitted details that were

critical for sharing to be useful: I think we got this feeling we had to make it as generic as possible so as many people as possible would use it (CETL ALiC workshop participant). In one case, there was no actual practice at the heart of the representation, just a description of a simulation that had been created. Pay it Forward ALiC keywords project work, knowledge transfer Students learn invaluable lessons that are then lost from one cohort to the next. o0o0o The level three undergraduate students undertaking the Project Management module are tasked with managing a level two undergraduate team engaged in the Software Engineering team project. The level three students will have experienced the team project in the previous year. The project managers combine their past experience of team work together with their current study in project management to support the level two students in their team project. As part of the on going summative assessment of the level three students they must record the problems they have encountered when managing the level two team, the solutions they applied, and the results of their efforts. The information is captured in a pattern i.e. in a formal structure used to capture a solution to a common problem within a specific domain. Collectively the patterns from all level three students currently enrolled in Project Management are then shared with their peers. The first year that this is done a pattern language for team project management begins to emerge. The collection of patterns are then stored and then shared with the following year s Project Management cohort. This next cohort are then tasked with enhancing the collection of patterns: by provided more examples to existing patterns; fine tuning existing patterns; and adding new patterns. The pattern language is refined and increased each year thereby passing on lessons learned. Lecturers are able to take patterns developed by students and integrate them into the course of lectures, which helps student to see the value of their work as well how to improve it. The mechanism we put in place to facilitate the capture and sharing of patterns was a blog, which was restricted to the level three Project Management students and associated staff. However, we believe a wiki or asynchronous discussion forum would be equally effective. It only works if the patterns are reviewed to ensure the anonymity of contributors and filtered for wrong or inappropriate content. It doesn t work if the captured knowledge is unstructured, voluminous and messy. It works better if there is a process for refinement and structure when passing the patterns to the next cohort. It works better if the tool provided to capture lessons learned is intuitive and accessible. o0o0o So if you want students to share knowledge across cohorts create a mechanism that will allow them to share, refine, and increase the knowledge from one cohort to the next. See also: Hatch A., Burd L., Ashurst C., and Jessop A., (2007) Project management Patterns and the Research Teaching Nexus, 8th Annual Conference of the Subject Centre for Information and Computer Science, University of Southampton, 28th 30th August 2007 Figure 1: An example of an ALiC Bundle using the new form

To address this issue the bundle form was revised in participation with the ALiC team to reflect their language and understanding (see Figure 1 for an example of a bundle in the final form). Retaining the essential elements of the original form, the new representation provided additional, contextualised guidance on what should be included. The problem and solution statements were replaced by terms emergent from ALiC practice: rationale and essence. The body of the bundle explicitly asked for description, making it clear that this was the narrative of actual practice, rather than an abstraction away from it. This participatory process of developing the form led the team to a new recognition of the importance of the particular rather than the general in dissemination. 5. RESULTS The new bundle form proved to be much more effective in supporting the team in representing their practice, providing a representation that was meaningful to them: writing the bundles helped me to capture what worked and what didnʼt in a much more succinct (and useful) manner (CETL ALiC workshop participant). A collection of around 30 bundles has been produced and will be published as a project output. The experience of the team illustrates the need for representations to be meaningful to the community using them and suggests that local adaptation can reap benefits. The initial bundles have been shared with a second Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, the Institute for Enterprise at Leeds Met (http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/enterprise), who were immediately able to understand the practice being shared and, as a result, are investigating adopting the form to represent their own practice. This is promising but further work is still needed to assess whether the bundles produced by the ALiC team will prove to be meaningful and useful to practitioners beyond the consortium. 6. LESSONS LEARNED The process undertaken by ALiC in order to share their practice has been informative and a number of conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, it is important to avoid too much abstraction and generalisation in representing practice. The detail of the practice is an important element in ensuring that the representation remains meaningful. Secondly, representations should reflect the community that will use them and cannot be imposed. It is important to be flexible in the form and language that is used, rather than insisting on a specific representational approach. It may be that forms will need to be adapted to different disciplinary contexts, an area that will be investigated further in our work with the Institute for Enterprise. Finally, sharing narratives of practice proved to be a very effective way of transferring practice: story is important in understanding practice and its significance should not be underestimated. It was this that was considered to be the most useful part of the sharing process in ALiC and this was the element that made the bundle representation meaningful. Indeed it could be argued that it is this narrative, an element that is often missing from formal dissemination, which is the essence of effective sharing of practice. 7. REFERENCES [1] Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King, I., & Angel, S. (1977) A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction, New York: Oxford University Press. [2] Devlin, M., Drummond, S. & Hatch, A. (2009) Using Collaborative Technology in CS Education to facilitate Cross-Site Software Development Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol.6, No.6, pp 1-6. [3] Falconer, I., Beetham, H., Oliver, R., Lockyer, L., and Littlejohn, A. (2007) Mod4L Final Report: Representing Learning Designs, available at http://mod4l.com/tiki-download_file.php?fileid=7 [4] Fincher, S. (1999), ʻAnalysis of Design: an Exploration of Patterns and Pattern Languages for Pedagogy,ʼ Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, Vol.18, No. 3, pp.331-346. [5] Fincher, S. (2000) From transfer to transformation: towards a framework for successful dissemination of engineering education, in 30th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. [6] Fincher, S., Petre, M. and Clark, M. (2001), Computer science project work: Principles and pragmatics, London: SpringerVerlag. [7] Finlay, J., Gray, J., Falconer, I., Hensman, J., Mor, Y., and Warburton, S. (2009) Planet: pattern language for web2.0 in learning, JISC project final report, available at http://www.patternlanguagenetwork.org [8] Gorra A, J. Sheridan-Ross, P. Kyaw (2008). Synoptic Learning and Assessment: Case Studies and Experiences. Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of the Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences, Liverpool Hope University, Higher Education Academy, 26th to 28th of August 2008.