Activity 1: Set up your Action Research Journal/Blog
Throughout the program, you will be keeping an action research journal. This is very important as it tracks your thinking which may change over time. You can use it as one of the many forms of data. You might later to be able to track themes that appear in different ways. Over the year, you will be refining your personal theory of learning and teaching. Your action research journal is a good place to reflect on this process and collect the things that you learn in other classes that you will want to use in your final report. It is your a place to reflect on the building of the final written report. The more regularly you write in your journal, the more written work you will have to pull from when you are ready to write your final report. Chose a day and plan to write something each week.
You will keep your journal online in a password protected area on myomet. This means that you can write notes that others in your workplace or on the internet cannot read. However, those with a password on myomet, pepperdine students present and past and all program faculty will have access. There are good exercises to help you keep your blog in Coghlan and Brannick's book (third edition). "Keeping a Journal" and "Developing Inquiry Skills" exercises (pages 33-34), and the "Learning Window" exercise is at the end of chapter 6 (page 90).
You can feel free to copy text from your own forum message or from others with permission and then reflect on the relationships to your action research. You can also copy in parts of a (synchronous class) session you want to save. This is your personal note taking section. It is public in the sense that others can read it but there is no requirement for other students to read your blogs. We will check to see you are recording your ideas and we will read them and even respond from time to time. But you should not assume that you are talking to the class when writing in your blog. If you should write something and realize that you want to share it with the cadre, just copy it into the SAKAI forums. We will read everything in the forums in SAKAI.
Activity 2: Rich Description of your Workplace or Site of Your Action Research
This is your time to really develop your description skills. What do you see, not what do you think. Tell us what you see taking place in your workepaces. Avoid words like "I think" or this person feels. Tell us what you see taking place. Try to remove your assumptions. You can describe the way a meeting takes place or a a period.
Activity 3: Ethical Issues and Service, Purpose and Leadership at Pepperdine
The Online Master of Arts in Educational Technology program strongly supports and advances the mission of Pepperdine University by further strengthening students for lives of purpose, service and leadership. These objectives are inherent throughout the Master of Arts in Educational Technology curriculum. Faith, spirituality, honesty and integrity should be evidenced in the actions you take as leaders in modeling the appropriate uses of educational technology during the cycles in their action research projects. The goal is to develop your skill as a reflective practitioner. You are encouraged to open discuss all ethical issues while maintaining a spirit of respect for diversity of ideas throughout the program.
Required Tutorials
1) National Cancer Institute -IRB Tutorial
http://cme.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/learning/humanparticipant-protections.asp
Here is the direct link to the signup page
http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/register.php
2) University of Minnesota Informed Consent Tutorial:
http://www.research.umn.edu/consent/
You pick the social sciences model -- again here is the direct link
http://www.research.umn.edu/consent/menu_soc.html
We will be reading and discussion ethical issues in research. Please read Chapter 5, P. 73-85 in Mcniff, Lomax & Whitehead (version 3) on eithics. Keep in mind that you do not want to ask permission for anything that is part of your everyday work or teaching as may not want to let participants opt out. Also read the ethics chapter in Doing Research in your Organization, entitled managing organizational politics and eithics (in the second edition).
Ethical behavior means more than not place people in a risk without their consent. It means work effectively with your partners and get informed consent when needed. This does not mean that you have to disclose everything you plan to so to everybody-this could be politically naive and may not serve your purpose of experimentation. If you tell people what you hope they will do, they often will do it to please or help you. The task is to assess any situation that might place someone in harm and then to make sure that they are aware of the risks. And to be clear with those who are in positions of authority so they are aware of your plans. In this case of action research, your cadre madre/padre serve as your advisors. Check with us before you schedule meetings with people who will need to approve your work. Also check with us before you send letters to parents or co-workers or students. Research is a word that scares people and many people are not aware of action research. You can often describe your actions in an ethical way without using the term research or action research.
Activity 4: Identify a Field of Action and Compute your Force Field Analysis and Logic Model
Force Fields
For many of you this will be your place of work. But you can chose to locate your action research outside of work in some other arena that is important for you. For example you might consider action research in your church or in a community based activity that you are involved in. This is a short description of the field you will use for your action research. In all settings there are ethical issues. We will be doing the exercise listed at the end of the ethics chapter...Force Field Analysis in Doing action research in your organization.
There are number of resources on the web for doing the analysis--search on Kurt Lewin and Force Field Analysis...
Here is a possible worksheet but you can also use a tool like gliffy (a shared drawing tool) to create a diagram of the forces.
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/worksheets/ForceFieldAnalysisWorksheet.pdf
Here are some links to help you think about the force field analysis...you can use graphs or words--which ever serves you better in your task to understand your workplace. I think you can add pictures to forum messages.
This first link is a pdf the second is html for the same content
http://www.mftrou.com/support-files/lewins-force-field-analysis.pdf
http://www.mftrou.com/Lewins-force-field-analysis.html
http://www.accel-team.com/techniques/force_field_analysis.html
http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_lewin_force_field_analysis.html
Your force field analysis should be shared in the forums. You do no have to post it online on your action research site. It is your choice but since it is about the power relationships at work your might not feel comfortable posting it.
Logic Models
You will also be doing a logic model as a way to plan your action research. The tools for doing this are on the Interact side of CCAR. There are lots of template online for doing logic models. We will be posting the logic models in a voice threads and you will be narrating them as you do for the professional protraits. But this time the gallery walk will be virtual and we will be able to respond to the logic models. And I hope we will use the convention of having our comments include, at the minimum, one postivie and one critical commment.