Learning, Teaching and Leadership

This week in one of my courses, I’m working with doctoral students to help them understand and figure out how to develop a Knowledge Mobilization Plan (KMP) for their research projects. The KMP is a required element of their project this term.

Here are some resources I shared to help them understand what KMPs are and how to build one:

https://research.usask.ca/documents/Knowledge_Mobilization.pdf

http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/research/UserFiles/File/Amanda%20Cooper%20Building%20KM%20Plans%20UT%20Final%20Post%20Version.pdf

https://www.edu.uwo.ca/research/documents/Thinking_About_Knowledge_Mobilization_Plans.pdf

http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/policies-politiques/knowledge_mobilisation-mobilisation_des_connaissances-eng.aspx

http://www.slideshare.net/sreibling/how-to-write-a-knowledge-mobilization-plan

https://www.mta.ca/uploadedFiles/Community/Research_and_creative/Research_Office/Mount_Allison_Connects/Institute_events/Building%20a%20Knowledge%20Mobilization%20Strategy.pdf

I also shared my approach to knowledge mobilization for my own research. I use a multi-dimensional approach that includes four different audiences:

1. Academic – Academic (peer-reviewed) articles, academic conferences
2. Professional – Professional journal articles (edited); Professional reports; professional conferences (e.g. teachers’ conventions); professional development workshops
3. Social media – My blog Twitter (@DrSarahEaton); LinkedIn; Research Gate & Academia.edu. (Note: Those last two are are like LinkedIn, but directed towards those working in research).
4.  Community – This can include public presentations or workshops. The key is to tailor these to a broad general audience.

I am to get my work out to as many different audiences as possible and to create a digital footprint for the work, so that if someone comes across it years down the road and they are interested long after I have moved on to new projects, they can still find out about the project.

I also look for ways to link the “products” or “outputs” of my projects. For example, I just led a project on signature pedagogies for e-learning in Higher education. I had the report archived on the University’s digital repository, so the citation looks like this:

Eaton, S. E., Brown, B., Schroeder, M., Lock, J. & Jacobsen, M. (2017). Signature pedagogies for e-learning in higher education and beyond. Calgary: University of Calgary. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1880/51848

I then blogged about the report on this blog: Signature pedagogies for e-learning in higher education and beyond http://wp.me/pNAh3-1MP

I then Tweeted about the report, which then got Re-tweeted:

I also posted or submitted a copy of the report at:

• Research Gate:
• Academia.edu
• LinkedIn.
• ERIC (When there is a full report available).

Basically, I try to get the word out in any many ways as possible.

All this, by the way, took less than two hours to do. I have had these accounts set up for some years now and this has been a fairly consistent process for me when I want to mobilize knowledge about a project.

Here is an infographic I created to help you visualize how you might develop your own KMP. Not all the elements I talked about in this post fit onto the infographic, so don’t think of the visual as exhaustive:

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Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.