Open Professional Development as a Sociotechnical Design Challenge

ABSTRACT

It is increasingly common for individuals to seek to enter into and advance in a technical profession by acquiring knowledge and skills through open and independent online learning. Missing from the ecosystem of tools and platforms to provision free or low-cost learning opportunities at scale is an infrastructure to support the kinds of learning, development, and acculturation into a field of practice that are commonly afforded by participation in the social context of a profession; i.e., a professional community. This note introduces and conceptualizes Open Professional Development: A sociotechnical concept model for coupling open, online learning practices with acculturation into a field of practice through participation in a professional community. Challenges to the implementation of this vision are discussed, and a prototype model is presented for capturing participation data using trace data extracted from advertised descriptions of meetup.com events.

References

1. Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. 2011. Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings. In Handbook of Labor Economics, David Card and Orley Ashenfelter (ed.). Elsevier, 1043--1171. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0169--7218(11)02410--5
2. Mark S. Ackerman. 2000. The intellectual challenge of CSCW: The gap between social requirements and technical feasibility. Human--Computer Interaction 15, 2--3: 179--203. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci1523_5
3. Mark S. Ackerman, Volkmar Pipek, and Volker Wulf. 2003. Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1524/icom.4.1.65.61678
4. Adrian Adermon and Magnus Gustavsson. 2015. Job Polarization and Task-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from Sweden, 1975--2005. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117, 3: 878-- 917. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12109
5. Abram Anders. 2015. Theories and Applications of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)?: The Case for Hybrid Design. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 16, 6. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v16i6.2185
6. David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney. 2008. Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists. Review of Economics and Statistics 90, 2: 300--323. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.90.2.300
7. David H. Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane. 2003. The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, 4: https://doi.org/10.1162/003355303322552801
8. Lisl Klein. 2014. What do we actually mean by "sociotechnical"? On values, boundaries and the problems of language. Applied Ergonomics 45, 2, Part A: 137--142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.027
9. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [England]; New York. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511815355
10. Douglas S. Massey and Deborah S. Hirst. 1998. From Escalator to Hourglass: Changes in the U.S. Occupational Wage Structure 1949--1989. Social Science Research 27, 1: 51--71. https://doi.org/10.1006/ssre.1997.0612
11. Donald A. Norman and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2015. DesignX: Complex Sociotechnical Systems. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 1, 2: 83--106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2016.01.002
12. Karen F. Osterman. 1990. Reflective Practice: A New Agenda for Education. Education and Urban Society 22, 2: 133--152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124590022002002
13. Laura Pappano. 2012. Massive Open Online Courses Are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace. The New York Times. Retrieved December 30, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/e dlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplyingat-a-rapid-pace.html
14. Katie Shilton, Jes A. Koepfler, and Kenneth R. Fleischmann. 2013. Charting Sociotechnical Dimensions of Values for Design Research. The Information Society 29, 5: 259--271. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2013.825357
15. National Information Standards Organization (US) and others. 2005. Guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies. NISO Press. http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download. php/12591/z39--19--2005r2010.pdf
16. Etienne Wenger, Richard A. McDermott, and William Snyder. 2002. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Harvard Business Review Press. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2002.17015bae.001
17. Hans-Georg Wolff and Klaus Moser. 2009. Effects of networking on career success: A longitudinal study. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 1: 196-- 206. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013350
18. Erik Olin Wright and Rachel E. Dwyer. 2003. The patterns of job expansions in the USA: a comparison of the 1960s and 1990s. SocioEconomic Review 1, 3: 289--325. https://doi.org/10.1093/soceco/1.3.289
19. 2014. adlnet/xAPI-Spec. GitHub. Retrieved January 16, 2016 from https://github.com/adlnet/xAPISpec
20. 2016. Higher Education Quality: Why Documenting Learning Matters. A Policy Statement from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. eric.ed.gov/?id=ED567116
21. mozilla/openbadges-specification. GitHub. https://github.com/mozilla/openbadgesspecification

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Education