— S e b l o g g i n g

In September 2018 I am starting as a Professor for Digital Transformation (in German: “Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelt”) at the HfWU Nürtingen-Geislingen University (of Applied Science). HfWU is located in the wider Stuttgart area. It runs one campus in Nürtingen and another campus in Geislingen (Steige).

My position is attached to the Business and International Finance Faculty (FBF – Fakultät Betriebswirtschaft und Internationale Finanzen) in Nürtingen. However, I will teach cross-disciplinary modules on both campuses.

I am really looking forward to getting started in this new position.

…

Søren S. E. Bengtsen (Aarhus University, DK) and Ron Barnett (University College London, UK) have just announced all the contributions that were selected for the special issue of Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education (PTIHE) on “Imagining the Future University”.

1. Bruce Macfarlane (United Kingdom): “Values in higher education: re-imagining a future based on student academic freedom”
2. Barbara M. Grant (New Zealand): “A thousand tiny universities”
3. Krystian Szadkowski & Jakub Krzeski (Poland): ‘Political Ontologies of the Future University: Individual, Social, Communal”
4. Merete Wiberg (Denmark): “Academic understanding and listening in future universities”
5. David S. Owen (United States): “The Vanguard University”
6. Rikke Toft Nørgård & Janus Holst Aaen (Denmark): “University of the body: Academic existence between disgust and desire”
7. Sebastian Fiedler (Germany): “Digital instrumentation in higher education: deliberations on complacency and resistance”
8. Nuraan Davids & Yusef Waghid (South Africa): “Higher education in South Africa: A future so muddy, it cannot be left to stand (with respect to Lao Tzu’s “Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.”)”
9. Jan McArthur (United Kingdom): “A university dedicated to the “vicissitudes of human fate”: a vision for the future drawn from Horkheimer”
10. Finn Thorbjørn Hansen (Denmark): “From Wicked to Delicate Problems in Higher Education: Why existential wonder can be a practice in meaning-driven innovation teaching in higher education”
11. Wesley Shumar (United States) & Sarah Robinson (Denmark): “Agency, identity & risk-taking in entrepreneurship education”

It sure looks like this will be an interesting collection of papers.

The abstract that I proposed for the special issue “Imagining the Future University” in the journal Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education (PTIHE) made it through the review. The issue is edited by Søren S. E. Bengtsen (Aarhus University, DK) and Ron Barnett (University College London, UK).

The working title of my proposed contribution is “Digital instrumentation in higher education: deliberations on complacency and resistance”. I am looking forward to working on this piece…

A happy, healthy and peaceful new year to all the good folks out there! Hope you had a good start.

We have just published Article 09 as part of Issue 2 of EDeR – Educational Design Research (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.2).
Adi Kidron and Yael Kali from the University of Haifa, Israel, are the authors of “Extending the applicability of design-based research through research-practice partnerships”:

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.2.1157

Here is the fulll abstract of their text:

“This research explored the implementation of a technology-enhanced instructional model for interdisciplinary learning. The model was developed in a previous phase of this research via DBR in the context of higher-education. Our aim in the current phase was to extend the applicability of the model and refine its underlying design principles based on their implementation in three secondary schools. For this purpose, a research-practice partnership was established, which included researchers, practitioners from an educational non-governmental organization, school principals, and teachers. Three practitioner-teams, facilitated by one of the researchers, collaboratively designed their own technology-enhanced interdisciplinary learning environments, in which they adapted the instructional model. This paper presents a new type of principled practical knowledge (PPK) —enhanced principled instructional model— which was obtained by comparison between the practitioners’ designs and the original, higher-education context design. The PPK broadened the partnership’s understanding of ways to promote interdisciplinary learning. Furthermore, it has raised new perspectives that were not considered during the development of the model, thereby allowing deeper understanding of the notion of interdisciplinary learning. Thus, this study illustrates how the establishment of productive research-practice partnerships can serve as a powerful strategy for implementing and scaling educational innovations beyond the original DBR context.”

We have just published the first Article of Issue 2 of EDeR (DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.2) This is also the first contribution to EDeR written in German that we publish.
EDeR generally accepts articles in English and German.

Dirk Jahn’s (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) text is titled “Entwicklungsforschung aus einer handlungs-theoretischen Perspektive: Was Design Based Research von Hannah Arendt lernen könnte” and can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.2.1144

Here is the English abstract for this contribution:

“This contribution analyses the design based research (DBR) process from perspective of action theory and discusses its epistemological and methodological consequences. For this purpose the concept of action is scrutinised, following a particular line of thinking proposed by the philosopher Hanna Arendt (1996). The overall aim of the text is to outline a potential and possibly important perspective on design based research, to strengthen DBR as a distinct and adequate research approach, and to bring to mind its original and pragmatic concern: novelty, usefulness and sustainable innovation.”

Issue 1 of EDeR – Educational Design Research is finally online.

The Journal is published in collaboration with Hamburg University Press… and this is where we met our final bottleneck to get things online. Hamburg Uni Press is hosting the OJS Server on which we run EDeR. However, due to some unfortunate staffing situation there (somebody had left, somebody else was sick for multiple weeks, and so forth), we had to wait a good while until some significant irks and quirks of this OJS installation got worked out.

Nevertheless, we now have the first visible product of our collective effort online. Six Academic Articles authored by scholars from Australia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Switzerland. All issues and problems that we had to struggle with aside… I personally think that we are off to a rather decent start. It is going to be very interesting if we can build and maintain the necessary momentum to turn this project into an ongoing success.

Offering regular updates on the project via Researchgate has worked surprisingly well to built up a small following of interested researchers. I hope we can convert this initial attention into various levels of engagement and participation over time.

Things are actually looking quite promising in this regard. I have already seen a draft of the first Discussion Article in reply to Dieter Euler’s “Design principles as bridge between scientific knowledge production and practice design” in Issue 1. I know of another Discussion Article in the making.
Futhermore, I have already received a submission for Issue 2. And tonight I have been promised another submission of an Academic Article. Keep them coming… ! :-)

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing to EDER in one way or another. Your continuous support and engagement is highly appreciated!

Oh… and this is the DOI of EDeR Issue 1: http://dx.doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.1

Issue 1 of EDeR – Educational Design Research is finally taking shape. We have 5 contributions in the pipeline that have successful passed phase 1 (text mentoring) and phase 2 (blind peer review) of our workflow model and have been revised according to reviewers’ feedback. These will definitely make it into Issue 1.

We are still working with two additional, somewhat controversial, contributions. However, these might have to be pushed over to Issue 2. Our Editorial Board will make final decisions on these texts by next week.

This week we have kicked off our reformed Master of Higher Education (MoHE) programme.

The last day of the introduction week features a “project conference” in which a variety of research projects on aspects of teaching and learning in higher education are presented.

Over time, the project conference is meant to bring different cohorts of programme participants together. Those who are about to finish off their own research projects will present their work to the new incoming participants.

I am particularly happy that for this first project conference we were able to integrate a presentation of Emanuele Bardone from the Educational Science department of the University of Tartu, Estonia. I hope this will help to set the stage for a more international outlook within our MoHE programme and invite our participants to look beyond the confines and particularities of our system of higher education.