Sunday 5 July 2009

View of landscape after

I've honed my twittering skills, realising what twitter tags are. That's practical.

The learning is through reflection on what I do in my roles as Associate Lecturer or research student, arriving from earlier practices in teaching and computing.

The workshop on Landscapes of Practice has drawn my attention to the different practices of the different people on IT projects, the different practices in public and in private sector. They exist, but they're not always explicit. Boundaries aren't always visible, and you wonder what's stopping you, but you can't see what's stopping you.

There're boundaries between research students and supervisors. My supervisor was at the Landscape of workshop, where his group did a brilliant sketch on the different landscapes of teachers, parents and school children. At one point, as parent, he turned to his acting teenage daughter and said, "I'm always available." She exploded with complaints about him being available at 9.30 on a Sunday morning when she was recovering from a night out till after midnight. The funny thing is, that he's used that line to me, about him and fellow supervisor: "We're always available, at least electronically." There's an equally possible sketch about the different landscapes of research students and supervisors, the sort of thing that PhD comic is always getting at. As the PhD student participates at the periphery of the academic researcher's landscape, how does the supervisor enable the student to identify, and move centre of the landscape. That is the supervisor's job, isn't it?

Whose job is it to help the different people in a public sector IT project to cross the boundaries? Is crossing the boundaries how people transfer knowledge?

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