Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 54 seconds
So I am doing something that I don’t think anyone has done before, and I have reasons, and I’d love for you to join me in this process.
So just before the pandemic, I wanted to submit an article about AI in education for a special issue in a journal, and I wanted to focus on the perspectives of teacher or educational developers on it, rather than some distant perspective on its usefulness. Something really annoying happened, and I got my ethics approval REALLY REALLY late, because it was summer, and I was also traveling in South Africa at the time… so I ended up with only 10 days to do it all. Do the interviews (with South African and Egyptian educational developers). And I pressured myself and I did it. I really enjoyed the interviews, honestly, and I was happy with it. I was proud of myself, and I even blogged about what I had done here. Thing is, it was done in 10 days, it was too long, it was rejected. Some of the reasons made sense, but I felt like it was salvageable, but probably the timeline of the journal would not have allowed me to address all the comments properly and still make it into the special issue. My friend Aras suggested to me to try publishing it somewhere else sometime later… this was late 2019 or early 2020 … then a pandemic happened. You know the one? So I forgot about it completely… until sometime last week or something when I remembered it and thought about how I could integrate it into other work I’m doing now, but it is so outdated… and Nicola Pallitt suggested to me that maybe I can do new interviews now that people have been through the pandemic, and publish a comparison “then and now”. That was SUCH a fantastic idea, and I considered it, but was not sure how to fit it into my writing schedule.
And then a miracle happened. I was asking a colleague how her masters is going and what she might do her thesis on, and she said she was interested in AI in education, and I was like “I’ve researched AI in education!” and she asked me to send her my paper, and we wondered if it might be possible for her research to build on mine and then for us to publish together… and she talked to her supervisor, and … BAM, this might actually happen. She may take a direction slightly different than what I would have taken and that’s completely fine (her ideas were actually broader and more creative than I first thought of doing myself, so I’m happy!).
The only glitch is, my paper is “unpublished” and so I thought I’d make her life easier, help her find a way to “reference” my paper, by publishing it somewhere. Well I was not gonna manage to publish it in a JOURNAL that quickly, so I thought I’d do this.
I will publish a series of installments of the chapter on my blog, one per day, and invite people to also react to each post in the comments on my blog, if they want. It will take something like 10-11 posts or so. My next post will be the first in the series, and it will have the abstract and references.
I’ve renamed the article because one useful reviewer comment is that the title was inaccurate.
Ready to join me for the ride?
Featured image from Pixabay
This is such a creative solution. It helps your friend while at the same time, it lets the rest of us benefit from reading your unpublished insights into this often-ignored corner of the AI-in-education discussion. Looking forward to reading the instalments – and commenting where I have something to contribute.
I wish I had this yesterday to illustrate open scholarship for my intro to open Ed week discussion with colleagues. Hopefully a few will join your keynote at open oregon next week.
Awwww cool. I hope I get to see you and some of your colleagues. Am also keynoting OTESSA22… but Oregon is closer (and free) of course!
This is such a cool idea, and such a great way to create a paper trail!
Would you ever want to interview again and chart the evolution?