Note: These are the unedited notes from workshop discussions.
Jeanne Narum and Robert Beichner were asked to summarize the day’s discussions.
- Definitions, approaches
- What works
- Suggestions/recommendations for NSF
- Next step questions to ask
Thoughts:
- Use the theories of learing as we develop theories of change
- Dissemination takes longer than the innovation itself takes.
- Recognize that a lot of things do work, what has been demonstrated to work, how do they adapt, what changes are necessary to fit an individual’s needs
- Theory of Positive Deviance, http://www.positivedeviance.org (Marian Zeitlin, Tufts University)
- Capitalize on peer-to-peer networking
- (Jeanne) If deans and presidents knew the cost of lost students (either that leave, or that don’t apply and register), they would care a lot more about trying innovations especially those that
- What can be done to demonstrate the urgency of the need–not just to faculty, but administrators, the public, congresspeople
- How can current techniques of social networking impact everything we’re talking about?
What one thing has worked?:
- If there are central repositories, what are the incentives for sending it to those repositories. Have a referreed process, peer review repository. (David McConnell)
- (Elaine Seymour)
- Workshops, thinking outside of the box, virtual and online
- Identifying things that the community really wants, something with lots of pull (David Yaron)
- Target leaders, and provide resources (Nancy Paelez)
- Meeting has shifted to embrace diffusion as a dispersed responsibility, it’s not just at the PI level. (Elaine Seymour)
Recommendations to NSF:
- Name change in program gives an opportunity, make sure you go far enough (?)
- “Transforming” is an interesting word, assumes you know what’s there and you understand what educational research has existed
- “Broader Impact” doesn’t really cover the types of things that faculty really should be thinking about and doing
- We sort of know “what’s out there”, but we don’t know what to do with it! Faculty are poised to do something, but not sure how.
- Start with small steps…(refer to how people learn)
- Don’t only fund new stuff, but also fund taking materials from location and bringing it to your location
- Reinforce to proposal writers that they are agents of change, include this idea
- Be sure reviewers understand the value and need for this activity–diffusion, dissemination, sustainability
- Commercialization is “ok”, it’s not a bad word.
- Connection between DUE/EHR and the disciplinary directorates (Kelly Gull’s comment)
- Kudos to central resource project
- DUE should get an internal grant from CISE to build and support cyber-enhanced communities of change.
- NSF should fund workshops for disseminations–it’s included in CCLI Central Resource
- Interactive workshops with proposal writing, broader impact, evaluation–typically had a face-to-face workshop; have transitioned to webinar with local facilitation. –> NSF willing to talk about this with respect to dissemination.
- Institutional culture matters.
- Use orientation session of CCLI review panels, to train reviewers with dissemination.
- Arrange meeting of CCLI PIs at national meetings at professional societies; semi-organized or informal; PIs sharing with each others (so peer-to-peer)
- What do we know and what do we need to know? Who are our audience? Who are the partners?
- Encourage people to submit grants to test whether specific innovations could be demonstrated to be cost effective. (Previous Pew grant program via Carol Twigg, that showed innovation was showing money.) Economic benefit of innovation. Linda Slakey from NSF was particularly intrigued by this idea.