ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble project initially arose from a collaboration between members of two of projects funded under Phase I of the ESRC/EPSRC TEL project. These were:

• Transforming Perspectives: Technology to Support the Teaching and Learning of Threshold Concepts (RES-139-25-0361: directed at the University of Cambridge by Patrick Carmichael)
• Personalisation of Learning: constructing an interdisciplinary research space ( RES-139-25-0368: directed at City University London by Nicky Solomon)

Members of these projects were joined by others (from UEA, Stirling and Essex) to make up the core of the  project team which wrote the proposal for the ‘Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning’ project which is now ‘Ensemble’.

Both development projects allowed the development of approaches to interdisciplinary working; the discussion of theoretical frameworks; and the scoping of the technological bases of TEL systems. Most importantly in this case, they provided a basis for synergies between the two projects to be recognised and offered space for discussion about what was to become a much larger and more expansive project.

Both projects were assessed as ‘Good’ by ESRC evaluation panels.

Conceptualising Interdisciplinarity: Perspectives from the Personalisation of Learning Project

The ‘Personalisation of Learning’ project found evidence that TEL ideas and research methods did cross over disciplines and were taken up in unpredictable ways. Interdisciplinary research generates new knowledge that comes from new learning and takes place through multiple reciprocal communications such as conversations, writing and joint activities which include researchers from different disciplines and TEL practices, as well as users, who are committed to work together.

TEL interdisciplinarity is about working with disciplinary differences rather than battling though them. Previous work in the Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has characterised Interdisciplinary research in terms of consensus, integration and synthesis. The project found that the enactment of differences, between and within TEL disciplines, shows that epistemological differences cannot be collapsed or merged. The differences are not trivial or irrelevant. In TEL research, claims about integration or synthesis may hide the powerful dominance of established research paradigms exerting authority to claim ‘interdisciplinarity’.

Disciplines are ‘disciplining’ and researcher identities are located within particular discourses, histories and social structures which give rise to particular kinds of research questions and research practices. Interdisciplinary research entails making choices about the significance and relevance of differences and strategies to work with uncomfortable partial consensus; therefore quality of the relationships, social dynamics and interpersonal skills are integral to success. Interdisciplinary working neccessitates a careful engagement with taken-for-granted research methodologies, research practices, abstractions, and representations.

Conceptualising Interdisciplinarity: Perspectives from the Transforming Perspectives Project

Two seminar series were organised by the project: one focusing on the identification of threshold concepts across a range of disciplines and the other introducing interdisciplinary perspectives on ‘the concept of threshold concepts’. A further seminar explored postgraduate perspectives on the ideas of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. Participants in the first seminar series developed case studies of potential threshold concepts; these involved staff and student interviews, documentary analysis, focus groups and practical activities.

Participants conceptualised their involvement in different ways; while for some it provided a means of initiating changes in practice at faculty, department or course level, others couched their involvement in terms of their own professional development or intellectual curiosity. The most important outcome of this process was a recognition that research approaches and methods emerge as part of the conceptualisation of the problem and through discourse around these points of focus -in this case, the specific threshold concepts and the idea of threshold concepts in general. This points to the importance of technology enhanced learning tools and environments that engage teachers and learners in enquiry and reflection as an essential element of practice – both disciplinary and pedagogical.

Like the ‘Personalisation of Learning’ project, the activities of ‘Transforming Perspectives’ highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary discourses as a means of reflecting on existing, emergent and potential future practices within disciplines, as well as for notions of interdisciplinary intergration or synthesis.

Selected Documents from the Development Projects

• Transforming Perspectives:  Website – including project final report, literature review and case studies
• Transforming Perspectives:  Project Summary

• Personalisation of Learning: Project Final Report
• Personalisation of Learning: Project Summary