Towards a scholarship of engagement

Posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

Ideas about a scholarship of engagement are increasingly generating interest among academics, across the higher education sector, and within stakeholder groups and user communities. New challenges and opportunities are being addressed as academics work with peers, and sometimes also with user communities, to envisage, theorise and instantiate new places, spaces and methods for public engagement.

In so doing, scholars are connecting with the engagement agenda as they work to identify, and increasingly to assess, more effective ways of generating, representing, circulating and debating knowledge in the public sphere.

In exploring this changing culture colleagues and I at the Open University organised an Engaging Research seminar series (for further details, see below). You can view the archived recordings of the 12 seminars in this series at the following location: http://weblab.open.ac.uk/catalyst/per-seminars

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Science communication for development

Posted on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 by Clare Kemp

Clare Kemp, The Open University.

I joined the Open University in October 2015 as a postgraduate researcher. Based in The Institute of Educational Technology my doctoral research is supervised by Richard Holliman, Eileen Scanlon and Patricia Murphy. My aim is to specialize in science communications for development.

To this end, I have been a science communications consultant across Africa and Asia, North America and the UK for many years, developing knowledge, skills and expertise that I’m planning to integrate into my postgraduate research.

Clare Kemp (far left), with a film crew, working with a scientist, extension workers and farmers.

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Children’s Science Television: Then And Now

Posted on Monday, 5 October 2015 by Sai Pathmanathan

Sai Pathmanathan. Photo: Huw James.

We all watched children’s television growing up, and many of us still do (for ‘research’ purposes!). Some of us watched children’s science and technology programmes, and can attribute particular shows or presenters as the reason for why we pursued a science (or STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics) career.

But these days, how effective is children’s science television? Back in the early ‘80s, children would come home from school, put down their lunchbox and sit in front of the television to watch one of four channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV or Channel 4) as part of children’s tea time programming. Now, audiences are much more fragmented – there are hundreds of television channels, everyone’s viewing via different devices and ‘on demand’ services. So, is television still the best method to get science to young audiences?

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Monsoon evolution

Posted on Tuesday, 22 September 2015 by Jenika Patel

Jenika Patel

This summer I took part in the Nuffield Research Bursary scheme at the Open University where I participated in a four week project researching the Indian monsoon. My main aim was to see how terrestrial proxies (pollen and charcoal) could be used to understand the evolution of the monsoon from 3.5 million years ago.

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The battle for engaged research

Posted on Monday, 7 September 2015 by Richard Holliman

Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.

I’ve long admired the work of my colleague Professor Martin Weller. Studies conducted in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), in particular research exploring the practices of digital scholarship, were central to the development of the Open University’s proposal to RCUK to become one of eight Public Engagement with Research Catalyst universities. Since that earlier work Martin has further explored ideas about openness in higher education, culminating in his latest book, The battle for open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like Victory.

We’ve recently completed the work of the OU’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, An Open Research University, publishing our final report (Holliman, et al. 2015). As such, members of the OU’s PER Catalyst project team and I have spent recent months consolidating the learning from our project with the aim of sharing lessons learned and resources with other universities, including the RCUK Catalyst Seed Funded universities.

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Juxtalearn: Evaluating ways of capturing engagement processes

Posted on Tuesday, 7 July 2015 by Gill Clough

Liz Hartnett, Gill Clough and Anne Adams, The Open University

This blog post was jointly authored by Liz Hartnett, Gill Clough and Anne Adams. The authors worked together on a European Union-funded project called Juxtalearn. Anne Adams was also one of the Co-Investigators on the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme with a particular interest in the generation and collection of evidence of the social impacts from research.

Project Summary
The Juxtalearn project was setup to help identify barriers to understanding by focusing on creative performance, provoking student curiosity through video making activities that contrast with the standard teaching activities.

We aimed to use the Public Engagement with Research Catalyst seed funding to develop and evaluate a variety of engagement data collection tools, with regard to their richness in informing us about engagement and its effects for teachers, students and researchers.

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The impact of key working for families and children with special educational needs

Posted on Friday, 3 July 2015 by John Oates

John Oates, The Open University; Silvana Mengoni, University of Hertfordshire; and Janet Bardsley, The Open University

This blog post was jointly authored by John Oates, Silvana Mengoni and Janet Bardsley. The authors applied to the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme to explore the impact of their research into ‘key working’.

Project summary
Key working is a way of supporting families of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), which enables the implementation of the Children and Families Act and Code of Practice (September 2014).

The ‘Developing Key Working’ booklet (the Guide) was produced as the primary output from a research project funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and commissioned through the National Children’s Bureau. This commission included providing the Guide as a print-ready file to be printed and distributed by the Council for Disabled Children.

Our seed funded project was based on the Council for Disabled Children widely disseminating the Guide, with an emphasis on exploring its uptake among potential users who might not have been sufficiently aware previously of approaches to key working in relation to the new legislative frameworks.

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Collecting evidence from research-informed practices: the case of Floodplain Meadows

Posted on Friday, 3 July 2015 by Emma Rothero

Emma Rothero, Gareth Davies and Jim McGinlay, The Open University

This post was jointly authored by Emma Rothero, Gareth Davies and Jim McGinlay

We applied to the OU’s Engaging Research Seed Funding Scheme based, in part, on the track record of engagement built up over a number of years through the Floodplain Meadows Partnership. In participating in this scheme as part of the OU’s Public Engagement with Research Catalyst we wanted to share some of our experiences in generating evidence of the impacts from engaged research. Of course, we also wanted to learn from other researchers trying to achieve the same ends.

Project aims
The aims of our study were to understand:

the role of site-specific advice provided by the Floodplain Meadows Partnership, in the process of translating scheme goals to practical actions;
the extent to which the government funded HLS agri-environment schemes benefit species-rich floodplain meadows;
the effectiveness of these schemes in creating new species-rich floodplain meadows.

Cricklade Floodplain Meadow. Credit: Mike Dodd and Emma Rothero

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Download and play the snakes and ladders of social media

Posted on Tuesday, 2 June 2015 by Ann Grand

Scroll down to the end of this post to download your copy of the snakes and ladders of social media.

Dr Ann Grand, The Open University

In May 2014, I began work with Helen Donelan and Clem Herman (Faculty of Mathematics, Communication & Technology) to create a workshop for the Open University’s 3rd Annual eSTEeM Conference.

Helen and I work in complementary areas: Helen in enhancing professional networking and engagement by exploring the activities of academics using social media; and me, as part of the Public Engagement with Research (PER) Catalyst, exploring researchers’ understanding of engaged research and how it is mediated through digital technologies.

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Engaging Environmental Research: developing productive partnerships with end-users

Posted on Wednesday, 6 May 2015 by Richard Holliman

Dr Richard Holliman, The Open University

In Spring 2015 we offered up to 30 NERC-funded postgraduate researchers (through the CENTA DTP), supervisors, and early-career researchers the opportunity to work on developing productive partnerships with the end-users of their environmental research, and to communicate the economic and social significance of their work.

Over the five days of this course NERC-funded researchers worked with me and Dr Clare Warren to explore conceptual issues, including: who are the end-users for your research, who could they be, and how do you best present your work in the public sphere to encourage end-users to work with you?

The researchers also developed and practiced new skills under the supervision of Dr Janet Sumner, Gerard Giorgi-Coll and Thomas Ryan, such as working with recording equipment, producing pieces-to-camera & editing footage.

What follows is a description of the first of three five-day workshops, which took place in January 2015. The post has been authored by Clare Lawson, Jonathan Moles, Bethan Parkes, Alan Radbourne and Kerry Reid. The post includes links to some of the videos the researchers produced. If you’d like to view the other videos you’ll find the all here.

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