Friday, October 04, 2013

Impact-Driven Inquiry (IDI)

Last week I attended a mini-conference on designed-based research (DBR) in Athena Georgia, sponsored by AERA. The event was very capably hosted by UGA faculty and doctoral students, led by TJ Kopcha. About thirty researchers gathered from all parts to share ways to make our research more relevant and "impactful" to practitioners' concerns. We are each charged now with finishing a paper and supporting efforts to raise the profile of DBR generally, and within educational technology in particular.
I am working on a framework I'm calling "Impact-Driven Inquiry" or IDI for short. I just did a Google search on the term and nothing came up directly - so I'm claiming it in this post!
I see IDI very much related to DBR. I will also draw on Aristotle's constructs of phronesis and techne as alternatives to episteme, the usual way of knowing that academic research relies on. A book by Bent Flyvbjerg presents pronesis as a means of making social science research more successful:
Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter: Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again (S. Sampson, Trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
I'm excited about this - hence this quick post. I'll put up something more formal soon, when I have developed the construct more fully.