Tom Reeves and Andy Gibbons on the Current State and Future of Design-based Research (2013)
Channel: DesignBasedResearch
Date: 2014-02-08

This video interview was recorded at the 2013 Design-based Research at the Crossroads Conference in Athens, GA (http://dbrxroads.coe.uga.edu/). The following questions were asked:

1.) What are you doing currently with design-based research
2.) Where is DBR currently, and where do we go from here, and
3.) What advice do you have for burgeoning design-based researchers.

In this video, Tom and Andy make the following points:

1. Tom's major motivation for this interest in DBR or educational design research, or research and development is this notion that as a field, the field of educational technology, needs to have more impact. Really make a difference in the lives of students, and teachers, and parents, and citizens, at all kinds of levels. Impact for Tom, is really where it's at. He wants to see educational technology, move more toward what he calls Impact Inspired Inquiry 

2. Tom does not really think of DBR really as a discipline, or a field.  He sees it more as a genre of research, just like how you can talk about a musical genre, or a dance genre. Within a genre, there's all kinds of variations, and I think within the genre of educational design research, there are many different things that can be done and we have a lot to learn from other areas like classical research and development, or newly emerging movements like what David Wiley calls Lean Entrepreneurial Thinking (http://www.lean.org/).

3. Tom hopes it's growing, he hopes that students as they come into graduate programs will be involved in DBR in some form or another from the time they walk in. "Get outside your college of education and your faculty of education and get involved in your local school system, get involved in your local technical schools, or community college, get involved in industry, training and so forth. Go out and work with real world problems. Pre-school education is another area where enormous amount of work can be done. So the samples of convenience that we relied upon with teacher education students, just aren't valid anymore. You need to get outside and work with people that own the problems."

4. Andy sees DBR as very young at the moment. But design based research is the educator's version of something that's been going on since the industrial revolution--research and development. He sees DBR as a way to help students find their niche and take a broader look at research, adding to the idea of Tom's response on "impact"

5. Andy maintains we are in an increasingly entrepreneurial education world--redefining a business plan. We need to prepare students to take their place in world that becomes more commercial. We need to know what they are going to be able to contribute and where they stand in this world

6. Andy gives the following advice for scholars entering the field: (a) get outside of the literature of our field, (b) be familiar with the literature of the field but don't confined by it (c) learn how things work in the schools and how they are managed, but (d) also learn how you can make things happen in the real world--find real answers.

Thomas C. Reeves is Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology & Instructional Technology, College of Education at the University of Georgia. He is 66 years old and Lives in Athens, Georgia. He is currently involved in three DBR projects, one with the World Health Organization in which an online course was developed for public health officials to focus on better quality management of vaccines, a second one involving teacher training in India, and a third involving DBR applied to the judicial system, prisons and transformational leadership for wardens. Tom coined the term "Impact Inspired Inquiry", regarding DBR. Learn more about Tom here: http://treeves.coe.uga.edu/

Andy Gibbons is a teacher as well as a researcher who focuses on design based research and other areas. When he mentions projects he does with his students, he implies a desire to benefit education and the way in which students interact with their schools and educational interfaces and databases. Learn more about Andy here: http://education.byu.edu/directory/view/andrew-gibbons