Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode five of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the fifteen future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com. The conversation that you're about to hear is part of over an hour of discussion that occurred in Montreal on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at Concordia University. Dr. Abrami's insights into knowledge exchange are very important to learning how to learn from each other – mutual dialogue, ongoing exchange, and the willingness to change and adapt. His emphasis on doing with rather than doing to, I think is the key to moving knowledge exchange forward. I was struck by the intelligence of his comments on sustainability and scalability – two of my personal areas of inquiry. The questions he raises about bridging communities, making the right investments, and the changes needed in scholarship to include the mobilization of findings are inspiring and daunting at the same time.
This conversation went on for almost twice as long as I include here – the hardest part was choosing what to edit out. Please pardon the construction noise in the background; it is however an appropriate metaphor for what is going on in knowledge exchange right now.
Phil Abrami – My name is Philip Abrami. I'm a university research chair and full professor of education at Concordia University and I'm also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, which is a provincially funded research Centre of Excellence that does multi-disciplinary work in the area of learning and performance. We have a lot of thematic groups associated with the Centre. Some of those themes are related to the uses of technology for learning. Others of those themes are related to the synthesis of knowledge via the use of systematic reviews. The bulk of the work that we've done of late has been in realization of the fact that we have been historically, like most of the academy, excellent at knowledge generation, but not as effective as…at knowledge mobilization, transfer, exchange, as we would like to be. So for the last ten years of our existence we've increasingly turned our attention to the scholarship of knowledge mobilization and continue to work towards the challenges of understanding that process, so that we can affect change. Peter - At CCL, knowledge exchange is often described as bringing people and evidence together to change behavior. How do you react to that definition?
Phil Abrami - Well, I like the part that says change behavior, I'd say in the good cognitivist tradition we'd have to say change thinking as well as change behavior. I fear that the attempts at knowledge exchange to date have focused on dissemination, which is a starting point for the process of knowledge exchange but just the starting point. True behavioral change, true changes in thinking, requires much more than just awareness.
Peter – Okay so if dissemination is a starting point, then where to you go from dissemination?
Phil Abrami – Well maybe I actually mis-spoke. Maybe dissemination isn't the starting point because you need, even before the dissemination, you need the willingness of both the…of all of the parties – let's not just make it just simply two parties, but all of the parties to engage in the process of exchange. Exchange is an interesting word because it implies a co-participation in the process. It implies that it is not one-to-other but other-to-other in a mutual collaborative dialogue - not a monologue but a dialogue or a trialogue or a multilogue. And I think that one of the ways we've tried to realize that in the work that we do, is to talk about a knowledge generators' role, a academicians' role as providing a degree of scholarly expertise but the policy maker and the practitioner providing practical wisdom to the dialogue and that the idea of knowledge exchange is that you learn from each other. And we've tried to embody those ideas of exchange – of valuing equally everyone's expertise. Peter – Can you give and example?
Phil Abrami – Well I think the best example of that is in the way we develop educational software. We try to work very hard with the…the community of end users and the conceptualization - the design of the tools. We… Peter – So who are some of the end-users? Phil Abrami – Well the end users are clearly going to be people like information technology consultants at school boards, administrators, school board directors. Sometimes higher up in the Ministry of Education, IT consultants, language arts consultants, teachers themselves, students as well in that we do what are called needs assessments and Alpha-testing alike. So we like to give…I guess the motto that we…or the slogan that we live by is “do with rather than do to”.
So don't impose but collaborate. So software design is a very good example where we blend what the literature says are best practices. For example in the development of our literacy tools, we took what the evidence has to say about the importance of alphabetics, fluency, and comprehension and design tools around that. But we also listen to what the community had to say about things like usability, flexibility, modularity; the kind of delivery systems that we had to use. So we continue to take in the design, development, and evaluation of the tools to actively seek input from the community and as we develop and launch the tools, we hope to find a ready, willing and able audience because they have the sense of ownership in the development.
Peter – And how important is that sense of ownership? I've heard that from other people that having the users or those that are ultimately the end user of something to own the process. How important is that?
Phil Abrami – Well, I think ownership has a lot to do with valuing… Peter – Ok. Phil Abrami – So I think if they….if they value what the knowledge, the tool, the evidence, the…whatever it is; that's important. I think the other thing that we've realized – and actually have some research on this, we took a fairly classic theory of human motivation called ‘expectancy' theory and tried to apply it to the process of innovation and the expectancy theory formula for innovation has three prongs to it. One of those prongs is about valuing, “do you value the innovation, and the potential consequences that it might have?” The 2nd prong is about the costs; are the costs of undertaking the innovation manageable or do the costs substantially out-weigh the value? That, wherever to be the case, your going to have a problem right? Cost is greater than value. But it turns out in the research that we've done so far, that while those two prongs are important, the most important prong is expectation of success. That to undertake an innovation, yes, you have to value it and yes, the costs to you personally and psychologically can't be too great. But you really have to believe that if you undertake this, that you will be successful at it. And I think part of the resistance we see all of the time and why a lot of the work that we do with educators focuses so much, not only on tool development, but on professional development in servicing, is getting them to believe that if they change; they can be successful at the change.
Peter – Right.
Phil Abrami - Not only that the change is good, but “can I do it? Can I make this change and will it have the impact that it is supposed to have”.
So what we've learned is that - it's interesting to draw comparisons between the culture in the health sciences and the culture in the social sciences. I go to conferences and we'll talk about the process of systematic reviews and the health scientists will start to get really worried when the data are messy. “I don't know what to do with all the variability and the data”. And we always look at them like “are you kidding? This is the only kind of data we ever, ever have to deal with”. It's always messy and complicated and I think part of the challenge within, broadly in the social sciences is that nothing is ever simple and clean; it's always complicated. So those issues about “can I do it? Can I succeed”? – are always there. You can make it work here, but can I make it work in my context? And you know, there are many, many examples of innovations that have tried and we haven't sustained them or they haven't been scalable. And part of the problem with the social science research enterprise is that we have not…we've investigated a small aspect of the question of effectiveness. But sustainability and suscalability have, especially in Canada, not been in the research landscape in the social sciences. You know, we do these small little studies, qualitative or quantitative, I don't care. But by in large we do these small little intervention studies and we never take the next step. So we generate a science of small scale - we need to start generating a science of large scale. So sustainability, scalability – those aspects of mobilization – we need to turn our attentions towards, which is why I talk about the science of knowledge mobilization, which Peter, you are really sympathetic to.
But it has so many different facets, and that's one of them and it's very unfortunate that, by in large in Canada, we don't have these…enough pan-Canadian networks. We don't have the infrastructure and the resources to bring promising practices to scale. And in fact, one of the areas in which I work, which is educational technology, distance learning, e-learning; it's interesting how, in the last few years, we've dismantled the infrastructure that we once had. We were once one of the world leaders in E-learning. We had Canarie and Canarie projects. We still have Canarie but its role and mandate and scope have been diminished. We had Industry Canada and the Multi-media Learning Group. We had a fairly strong federal presence in E-learning and standard setting in broad pan-Canadian initiatives - we had Schoolnet – including aboriginal Schoolnet. We've dismantled those things. Peter – So why have we dismantled that?
Phil Abrami – You know if I knew the answer to that, I don't think I'd be sitting here. I don't know. In fact one of the things that we are working on right now – with CCL – is to try and get an understanding of why in hell these policy changes have come about. But the social sciences in particular, has a lot to say about. CCL; state of learning in Canada, Statistics Canada, Conference Board of Canada, the Conference Board in collaboration with SSHRC; they're all talking about health and wellbeing, and education, and literacy, and numeracy and what we need as a society to be successful in the knowledge age. How we are as a society - as a country, going to be competitive in the knowledge age? And a lot of those things are things that we have a lot of expertise but we haven't developed enough of a collective infrastructure and will to make a concerted effort towards dealing with it. Peter - So maybe you could talk a little bit about …I mean CCL's emphasis is on life-long learning… Phil Abrami – Right. Peter – …and life-long learning in a whole range of things. But can you make the link between the need for infrastructure and life-long learning? Because isn't life-long learning an individual thing? Don't people as individuals make a decision that life-long learning is going to be part of their life? And hence they engage in it and the Government really doesn't have much of a role to play in that? Phil Abrami – Well, I think life-long learning is an attitude and life-long learning is a set of skills and dispositions and abilities, as well. So if you want to take life-long learning to be in part - knowing how to know, then how do we provide learners with the strategies for knowing how to know? How do we, for example, deal with the fact that over the last decade, the Internet has exploded as a source of information? Yet, if you look at school and university curricula, there is a shocking absence of evidence in the curricula - that we are teaching information literacy skills, so that children and adults don't know how to access information well. They don't know how to evaluate information well. And, if you take the February 16th cover story of Maclean's to heart, they don't know how to cite information properly. So Maclean's spin on all of that is, that cheating is rampant at universities. And I would agree that the incidence of cheating have gone up dramatically but you have to ask yourself – “is that intentional or unintentional”?
As a university professor, my experience says that the vast majority is unintentional because there is such an explosion in these new forms of information, that we're not teaching people the skills of citation…anyway, to go back….so retrieval skills, judgment skills, citation skills, we haven't armed the population with those set of skills. So yeah, life-long learning - but there's a skill to be able to be a life-long learner. If you take the psychological construct of self-regulation, as the fundamental aspect of what we mean by life-long learning; how are we teaching children and adults to be self-regulated learners - to be aware, to monitor their learning? So these are a set of very sophisticated learning strategies and orientations that we have to imbue in people. There are other kinds of skills, like information literacy skills, that we have to imbue in people. We're not doing that.
