Laura @ CET

Here in CET the last week has been dominated by the wretched performance appraisal reviews, written to the standard institutional form. It is an opportunity to record and gasp in amazement at the work achieved over the past year, and to have a reflective conversation about where one is at and where one might be going. Hopefully there is a moment of that, and for a person to considers in disbelief what has been done in only one year And yet it is vexed and difficult. Why is this? Is it always like this in every part of the university? Or is just, or mostly our field? A big part of the problem is that the work we do does not fit neatly into the standard format of teaching, social responsiveness and research. Added to that is that there is a whole lot of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing that happens which does not express itself neatly in the form of ISI listed journal output. So if it is not in the form of an ISI listed output does that mean that knowledge creation and knowledge sharing did not happen? Of course not.

Take the Sakai conference I recently attended. It is a place of developers and users and designers in higher education who are at the fore front (avoiding that tired term, the cutting edge, but perhaps it really is the cutting edge) of understanding of new technologies, new social practices, changing educational practices, changing possibilities for different institutional practices, alternative ways of working together (and not the kind that gets you brownie points on the forms, but why not when collaboration is one of the key words of the day), and above all it is the space for the fusion and muddle between all of these aspects of a changing higher education sector and its overlap with society in general. How does one capture the knowledge production that happens in this space? Is it through the “products”, is it only through  the products? How does one capture and share the design knowledge that is generated? And how does one transmit that to a form?

It seems to me that the field of educational technology is one where practice and professional knowledge and design and tacit knowledge are often ahead of research and more formalised knowledge forms and outputs. Bang goes the research informs practice assumption that is the foundation of university work. Where does this leave one with the performance review process? Surely this is an opportunity to do more than the workload/are you justifying your salary thing? Is this not an opportunity to capture and make explicit that very real and very slippery process of making and share new knowledge and new practices in a context that is fast moving and so transient and so emergent?