Knowledge Broker Diary: Day 167

The following is a guest blog posting from David Yetman, Manager of Knowledge Mobilization at the Leslie Harris Centre with Memorial University in St. Johns, NL. Visit their web site at www.mun.ca/harriscentre

I am a part-time PhD student and a full-time knowledge broker. And today I feel like Sisyphus. You never heard of him, hey? He was the poor Greek son of a… king who took pleasure in killing and was sentenced to a life’s struggle of pushing a boulder up a hill, only to reach the top with the curse of it falling down the hill again. Never (never!) to reach the top. Sounds a bit like positioning academic research to contribute to society. You think the change is happening… and then… before you know it, you are back to the base of the hill.

The graduate student gives me hope. I have no background in pedagogy or theories of learning. I have no need to fulfill tenure requirements. But I do have an inkling that graduate students could be the most important human resource in our modern society.

What makes graduate students so very different? Their post-modern view of the world? Their affinity for drinking copious amounts of European beer? (OK, different, but not unique) Not at all. Graduate students are unique human beings because they have a passion for knowledge and they want to share that knowledge for the betterment of the world around them. Is that unique you ask? Everyone carries knowledge and wants to change the world (existentialists exit here). But graduate students do it with a special thrilling insight into how knowledge can change society. And they have special knowledge.

I make no apologies for saying that, in my humble opinion, academic knowledge is the peak of the highest learning mountain. It is the supreme athlete of the learning arena.  The peer-to-peer battle over ideas gives knowledge its strength. Peers beat the pulp out of knowledge for a reason; so it can stand on its own merits. And graduate students take that torch with vigour. They are interested, focused and committed. At Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada this year, there is a record number of graduate students. 2758 full and part-timers. 2758. That’s ten times the amount of people than the small community I grew up in. That’s 250 times the size of the average municipal council in Newfoundland and Labrador. That’s a lot of changing power.

I was reading on old University Affairs article the other day and it said only 51% of graduate students will go on to be academics. The other 49% will work in the public sector, not-for-profits, or start their own businesses. I’m not great at math, but that’s half. Half of all graduate students will choose not to be academics. I was shocked at that statistic, and enthused.

Imagine. Half of graduate students will be future academic researchers, half of them policy-makers. For the knowledge broker (able to leap silos in a single bound) it’s a future match made in Heaven. It is an infiltration of like-minded people who believe in the power of research. Who want to change the evidence-free decision-making culture in our system. 2758 (to infinity) pushing the boulder simultaneously, with a passion to push it over the top.

ResearchImpact hosts a visit by Stockholm and Uppsala Universities in Sweden

On Friday, October 15, York University’s KM Unit hosted a day-long visit by a delegation of 11 researchers and administrators from Stockholm University and Uppsala University who were visiting Canada to learn more about successful Knowledge Transfer and Exchange (KTE) practices.

Presentations were made from Dr. Stephen Gaetz who leads Canada’s Homelessness Research Repository, Homeless Hub; Geoff Webb who is Senior Manager for York’s Experiential Education Program; Obadiah George and Deb Kitchener who work with York’s Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning Project (ABEL) and Michael Johnny with ResearchImpact.  The presentations provided our visitors with a range of activities and tools that York and its partners in KM are using to successfully support KM/KTE.

View the presentations:

Experiential Education and Knowledge Transfer: Bring Textbooks to Life

Making Research Matter: Mobilizing Homelessness Research in Canada

Knowledge Mobilization is Turning Research into Action

Most, but not all, of the delegates were working in industry liaison or technology commercialization operations but they has a particular interested in how to meet the needs to scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  In the words of Sara Jernberg from Uppsala University Innovation, it was “really exciting to hear how you are working. I got a lot of inspiration and good ideas.”   York VP Research & Innovation, Stan Shapson, and David Dewitt, Assoc. VP Research (Social Sciences & Humanities) joined the group for lunch.  One delegate expressed that they were impressed at the degree of engagement with the social sciences and humanities at York.

One online translation of ‘inspiration’ into Swedish gives the result “ingivelse, inandning, lyftning”.  So we wish all of us lots of “ingivelse, inandning, lyftning” as these are universal building blocks for innovation.  The international network for KM grew stronger because of our meeting and we were honoured to host our guests and look forward to ongoing communication in support of our mutual goals of KM/KTE.

These are the KM Daves I know I know

SSHRC KIS/Cluster meeting: Day 2 (October 23, 2009)

Recharged after a good nights sleep in the Albert @ Bay Hotel, the 34 knowledge brokers reassembled to continue the dialogue on KM, research and the services to support them both. One message we heard repeatedly on Day 1 was the need for institutional infrastructure to support KM and Day 2 added the need for infrastructure to support networking amongst an emerging KM community of practice.

Here are two KM Daves you may know who are here to help: David Phipps (York University) and “the younger and better looking” David Yetman (Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador) were repeatedly called on to comment, offer best (ok, good) KM practices, provide leadership for local and national KM and continually offer each other jovial one upmanship (enjoy the Perrier, Yetman!). York and MUN have made institutional investments in KM that, when combined with SSHRC grant funding, has allowed these two institutions to demonstrate national KM leadership such as yaffle and ResearchImpact. A number of KIS and Cluster projects wished their institution had a David. We can’t be cloned (which would be a breach of CIHR guidelines on human cloning) but we can be exemplars for other institutional knowledge brokers.

Yet here, a caution. David Yetman employs methods (such as yaffle) that could not have been developed at York. UVic runs grad courses in partnership with the BC Government that could not be replicated in Ontario. York has a portfolio approach that has allowed us to create over 150 partnerships, a track record UVic cannot replicate. KM is not a cookie cutter approach. There are basic underlying principles common to all our KM practices but the tools that work in St. John’s can inform decisions in other locations but should not be assumed to be the solution to all things KM. KM services need to respond to local opportunities and engage decision makers in contextually appropriate ways (see here). What we can learn from the Davids is reminiscent of a previous Mobilize This! blog post. By learning KM principles from the Davids and adapting them to your own local context you can create conditions where maybe knowledge can be mobilized – nothing is guaranteed.

A few other items of note from Day 2. Chad Gaffield spoke about the institutional and cultural barriers that need to come down to embrace a new paradigm of scholarship. He spoke of the need for institutions to invest in an institutional KM capacity for KM the way we invest in technology transfer, which, despite sustained investments has not been an innovation panacea. Kudos to SSHRC who unveiled their new program architecture – keep your dial on SSHRC for more information to come. And we spoke about other organizations who should partner in KM including CFI, Foundations and the for profit sector – it shouldn’t all be “mama SSHRC”. The Davids welcome this news.

There may be many Davids out there and each one is going to be and act a little different. But they’re all Davids. And that is a good thing.

more about “The Daves I Know Video by JonathanThe…“, posted with vodpod

 

Thirty four mobilizers walk into a bar…

SSHRC invited 34 knowledge mobilization projects from their Knowledge Impact in Society and SSHRC Clusters to a workshop in Ottawa October 22-23.

Day 1: Not being challenged by systemic introversion our mob of mobilizers (mostly academic leaders, some project coordinators and two lone staff leading institutional knowledge mobilization services at York and Memorial) had no problem mashing up in different combinations be it in their KIS or Cluster cohort or the sector of primary engagement. Most of the day was spent exploring “issues” around knowledge mobilization. The usual topics of incentives, barriers, metrics & evaluation were on the agenda. Refreshingly some new topics including an alleged research/KM dichotomy and social media were also discussed.

Research vs KM got a lot of play with opinions on both sides of and in between the hypotheses that research and KM are either on a spectrum of activities or they are two sides of a coin, related but separate. ResearchImpact works with researchers, their institutions and their non academic research collaborators to create space for basic research AND space for applied research linking to extra academic impact (thank you Clair Donovan) as well as a spectrum of activities and services in between. KM is a process intimately interwoven with research. It is not a discrete event that happens in isolation of the research. Measures of extra academic impact complement, they do not conflict, with measures of academic quality. A repeated theme was the desire for infrastructure (cash, expertise, systems) to support the spectrum between basic research and extra academic impact.

Also interesting was a breakout session on social media. ResearchImpact tweeted @researchimpact during this session resulting in a number of RTs and DMs – on the spot web 2.0 mobilization of knowledge about knowledge mobilization. SSHRC, our academic researchers and their non-academic research collaborators only need to look at their graduate students to see how social media will play an increasingly important role. You don’t have to lead the wave but if you don’t ride it, it will pass you by.

York is definitely leading the wave. With a total of 5 engaged research and knowledge mobilization projects York has by far the best representation of any Canadian university at this meeting. ResearchImpact was pleased to be joined by Canadian Homeless Research Network, Canadian Refugee Research Network, Canadian Business Ethics Research Network and the Toronto Employment Immigrant Data Initiative.

Reception done. Dinner done. Blog written. Beer being consumed thanks to Southern Cross Grill. Need to recharge before day 2 of this important workshop. Thank you SSHRC for creating this space where 34 mobilizers could walk into a bar and begin to network. Trouble was it was a cash bar and alcohol is not an eligible expense on a SSHRC grant even though it is a key success factor in networking and knowledge mobilization! Maybe we’ll make that a recommendation for future program development.

Married to a Mobilizer

As a York University graduate, a volunteer at York’s KM Unit, and the husband of the Director of the Office of Research Services & Knowledge Exchange at York, I have become quite familiar with the world of knowledge mobilization. David and I have been together for over fourteen years, and I’ve seen him grow personally and professionally from a post-doc research fellow to managing the business side of science, innovation and knowledge transfer at the university level.

More importantly, I’m proud and inspired to have witnessed the initiative of my husband in helping build the KM Unit at York (along with a great KM team), developing ResearchImpact – Canada’s knowledge mobilization network. David’s keen interest and involvement has taken KM from an early “pet project” of interest several years ago to participating and contributing today at both the national and international levels of knowledge brokering and policy making.

It was David’s initial, personal conversations we shared about KM that sparked my own interests in the variety of methods in which research and knowledge is exchanged, co-produced and practically applied between researchers and research-users. In fact, before graduating, one of my own research projects focused on the extent to which York University’s Department of Psychology has embodied KM.

I am a graduate of York’s Department of Psychology. After graduation – as a continuation of my own interest in knowledge mobilization – I began providing volunteer support at York’s KM Unit. To avoid any scrutiny of favouritism or conflict of interest, David placed me under the excellent and professional supervision of KM Unit Manager, Michael Johnny (I challenge you to try and find a clear profile headshot of him on the internet anywhere – either not wearing sunglasses or blinking!)

I am exclusively reporting to him as a volunteer. I have helped with the successful development and delivery of the annual KM Expo following the excellent lead of Knowledge Mobilization Officer Krista Jensen.

This is where some of you might remember me from the KM Expo last year, or from attending some of the KTE Communities of Practice meetings. I’ve also provided some support around key areas of data analysis for the ResearchImpact project. It was an enjoyable opportunity to join the KM Unit for a business trip to the University of Victoria earlier this year and present data at a ResearchImpact meeting (read the blog post here).

It’s a great privilege to have met such esteemed international and local mobilizers – from both university and community sectors – such as Angie Hart and Kim Aumann from the University of Brighton’s Community University Partnership Program; Stan Shapson, York’s Vice-President of Research & Innovation; Jane Gibson, Director of Knowledge Transfer and Exchange at the Institute for Work & Health; and Daniele Zanotti, CEO of United Way of York Region.

I’m looking forward to volunteering and participating in KM Expo 2010, hoping to see many of you again while networking with many more people within the KM community.

And remember; keep talking to your husband, wife, partner, girlfriend or boyfriend about KM because – sometimes when you marry a mobilizer, you can become a mobilizer too!

After 12 years… I’m back!

You’re used to reading about York’s KM Unit and ResearchImpact in this blog as well as on Twitter @researchimpact. Occasionally we get some press that we don’t have to write like the article on KM in Canada done by University Affairs (April 7, 2008). Now we’ve passed peer review. In the August 2009 edition of Evidence & Policy, David Phipps and Stan Shapson published “Knowledge mobilisation builds local research collaborations for social innovation”. Read the abstract here. The paper positions York’s KM Unit amongst other initiatives to link research to practice including the ubiquitous technology transfer office but also offices such as the University of Brighton’s Community University Partnership Program (shout out to Angie Hart for her wonderful work). We ground our work in Lavis’ KTE methods of producer push, user pull and knowledge exchange [J. Health Serv. Res. Policy (2003) 8(3):165] and we extend those to include the co-production of knowledge.

From the paper, key lessons learned (ok, learning) include:

• Developing an institutional capacity to support KT (as institutions support technology commercialization) results in benefits to the institution, researchers, graduate students and research users
• It takes time to break down community–university barriers and develop trust. Care must be taken to manage expectations on both sides.
• The use of broadband technology to connect stakeholders over distance and over time can facilitate research utilization over a large geographical area
• Community/government partners are earlier adopters of the services of the KT unit than faculty
• Decision-maker partners must be engaged throughout the planning, funding, delivery and evaluation of the KT Unit

We are delighted that Evidence & Policy agreed to receive our article and that its peer reviewers recommended it for publication. Evidence & Policy is an important journal for KM. “Evidence & Policy is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to comprehensive and critical assessment of the relationship between research evidence and the concerns of policy makers and practitioners, as well as researchers” (Read more here). We are delighted because our work is hitting a wider audience. We’re delighted because of the validation this provides to our work. And I am delighted because this is my first peer reviewed publication in 12 years but I remain grounded because I recognize that recognition of peers is nice but the continued validation provided by partners is more valuable. As Kathleen Bloom wisely points out, “impact is determined by the user” not by academic peers.

Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

As a graduate student at York University, the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit has provided not just summer work but an opportunity to learn about some of the more policy-relevant research being carried out on campus. But as a PhD candidate in York’s Department of English, my relationship to KM is a bit murkier. Scholars, critics, professors, and graduate students who study literature are not typically engaged in research that is obviously policy relevant or that has much of a direct, material impact on, say, a local community. The same is probably true of academics in other areas, such as the fine arts. KM encompasses a pretty broad suite of services, but what can it offer disciplines like English – disciplines where research, though valuable in and of itself, does not necessarily always aim to have an explicit social use?

Well, one thing KM offers – or, at least, one thing it has offered me – is a better understanding of the nature of collaboration. There’s a lot of chatter, in the world of research, about the need to break through the silos in which academics are often isolated, and to bring these supposed hermits blinking into the light, into contact with others. Of course, the image of the researcher in the silo has become a cliché, and clichés can grate a bit, especially when you study poetry, as I’m fortunate enough to do. (Poetry, see, often tries to avoid clichés in pursuit of some more memorable way to say what amounts to the same old thing.) But when I really think about the cliché of the silo, I can’t help but picture an academic in an actual grain silo, up to his Adam’s apple in sorghum or something. As I picture it, this poor professor (or graduate student, or researcher) is talking and talking, saying important things even though the words remain trapped in the silo, caroming around, echoing uselessly. Outside of the silo, passing pedestrians hear only muffled noises, if they hear anything at all – if they even notice the silo! The silo, I should add, isn’t necessarily the academic’s fault; it may be the result of a discipline’s insularity, or the rigidity of institutional barriers, or any number of roadblocks for which there may be good reasons.

Knowledge brokers would seem to be those folks intent on knocking some holes into the silo – not just to let some beams of light in but also to let some beams of light out: out of the silo and into the community. They don’t want to dismantle the silo per se; they just want to help spread the sorghum. Or something.

So the silo metaphor, though a little cliché and unwieldy, is not so bad, if you really think about it (and, by doing so, rehabilitate it). And KM people, like poetry people, are always, it seems, thinking in metaphors and analogies and similes. One of the better metaphors sees knowledge brokers as agnostics: in other words, they believe in collaboration but have no firm, orthodox ideas about the form that collaboration should take. Another good one: knowledge brokers are especially imaginative matchmakers. They’re always looking to manufacture novel matches between researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. They’re open to different, Twister^®-like relationships.

Whatever else KM represents – and this may include many things – it surely represents the potential of two-way relationships, the potential to learn from others even as they learn from you, the opportunity not just to mobilize knowledge (like the cliché of the rolling, moss-less stone) but to share knowledge. To engage in activities that are mutually beneficial. To make, I suppose, metaphors. A metaphor, after all, enables us to see one thing in terms of another. It enables a connection.

York’s Special Research Edition of YorkU Magazine Looks Back on KM as We Look Forward to More

Last week York published its special Research Edition of York U, the magazine of York University. This edition of YorkU features many stories of only a few of the great researchers we have at York but KM was up front and personal. KM was featured in the welcome from VP Research & Innovation, Stan Shapson and the introduction from Sam Schwartz, Chair of the Board Academic Resources Committee. President Shoukri linked KM right back to York’s mission statement illustrating the foundational role KM plays between the university and its non-academic research stakeholders, “Knowledge is of no benefit to anyone if it sits on a shelf. The greatest responsibility of the university is to mobilize that knowledge – to share it with the community and the world to help solve the problems we face, to improve competitiveness, to increase prosperity.”

KM at York started in 2005 with a CIHR/SSHRC Intellectual Property Mobilization grant to York and our KM partner University of Victoria. Working from two other SSHRC grants we have also received support from York’s Division of Vice-President Research & Innovation as well as important financial support from our partners, York Region District School Board and Regional Municipality of York. Money is nice but partnership is essential. Over the last 4 years we have worked with over 100 different community and government agencies who have worked with York faculty and graduate students. Some of our strong supporters have helped out on our Joint Advisory Committee and the United Way of York Region permeates our existence in a mutually supportive fashion.

York’s KM Unit has brokered a number of relationships that continue to grow. President Shoukri mentioned some of these including a few we have previously written about such as Mobilizing Minds and a partnership between Stephen Gaetz’ Homeless Hub and Bernie Pauly of UVic. These are but two of the 155 partnerships we have brokered since 2005. That’s good but not good enough. We continue to work with local organizations seeking to engage with York research. We have a great relationship with the MITACS ACCELERATE Program to fund graduate interns working with decision maker organizations. We are piloting social networking tools for research and knowledge mobilization. We are poised to double our library of ResearchSnapshot research summaries and we are seeking to add other universities and communities to ResearchImpact, Canada’s knowledge mobilization network.

That’s what we’ve done but let us know how we’re doing. Tell us how wonderful we are or how we can do better using the comment feature above. To help us grow and meet your needs better we shall soon be sending you and all our KM community a survey about our web based services. Thanks for helping us grow.

Read the YorkU Magazine articles here. And to read the whole Special Research Edition 2010 of YorkU, click here.

What’s old is new again – test your knowledge about knowledge systems

Many of us think that KM (KT/KE/KTE/KI/KMb… whatever) is an emerging discipline.  It may be an emerging academic discipline but the practice isn’t new.  Jonathan Lomas [Brit Med J (2007) 334:129] reports that KM-like networks of industry and academics were active in the German dye industry in the late 1800s (side bar, this might have been more like industry liaison than KM, for more on that see our blog August 6, 2009).  Also, the University of Wisconsin State Agents performed a KM-ish role for local agriculture at the turn of the 20^th century [Educational Record (1992) 73(2): 12].  Nonetheless, I still get pleasantly surprised when I read an “old” article that reads like it could have been written today.  In 2003, David Cash (then at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) wrote “Knowledge systems for sustainable development” [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100: 8086].  Read the full article here.

How many of these key points from the article sound familiar to you?

1. Effective knowledge systems engage in communication, translation and mediation
2. Efforts to mobilize are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action
3. Active, iterative, and inclusive communication between experts and decision makers proves crucial to systems that mobilize knowledge
4. Mobilizing requires active mediation (at ResearchImpact we call this knowledge brokering)
5. Mediation works through increasing transparency (for more on transparency, see our blog on August 25, 2009)
6. Systems mobilize knowledge for action by translations that facilitate mutual comprehension
7. Mediation activities help make the boundary between experts and decision makers selectively porous

If you got 7 out of 7 congratulations, you’re new knowledge isn’t so new!

Employing these methods of communication, translation and mediation enables an organization to become a boundary organization.

“These functions can be institutionalized in ‘boundary organizations’, organizations mandated to act as intermediaries between the arenas of science and policy. As originally conceived, boundary organizations have at least three features: (i) they involve specialized roles within the organization for managing the boundary; (ii) they have clear lines of responsibility and accountability to distinct social arenas on opposite sides of the boundary; and (iii) they provide a forum in which information can be co-produced by actors from different sides of the boundary through the use of ‘boundary objects’”

Note the emphasis on co-production, something we highlighted in our recent paper in Evidence & Policy.

So, we might as well all go home as in 2003 David Cash and his colleagues wrote all that I could ever want to write in 2009.  The challenge now is to practice what he preached.  York University, the University of Victoria and ResearchImpact are boundary organizations.  Our knowledge brokers have a foot in both (ok, many) camps and seek to continuously make boundaries pourous by increasing transparency allowing knowledge to be co-produced by researchers and decision makers.

Hold the date of February 9, 2010 for our 3^rd annual KM Expo that will feature discussions of boundaries and means of overcoming them.

One Giant (Annual) Leap for York’s KM Unit

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

Jason Guriel

Working with the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit at York University has been my summer gig for the past few years. Most of the time, I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of English, which means I do some teaching, mark up student papers, and read piles of books (in February I took the last of the comprehensive exams for which I had to read the piles). But come May, when I rejoin the KM Unit, my thoughts turn, as a young man’s will, to the mobilization-of-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-maximizing-the-impact-of-research-on-policy-among-other-things. And I return to something closer to what I think of as the real world: a 9-5 schedule and a packed lunch.

But here’s the interesting thing about this annual ritual: because I don’t usually visit the KM offices while I’m in school and, therefore, don’t witness much of its day to day goings-on throughout the year, the KM Unit, when I finally rejoin it every May, always seems dramatically different, as things will do when they’ve had a year to evolve incrementally, quietly, out of sight. I rejoin it only to discover: my beard-less manager of last summer has grown a beard; the research summaries I toiled over are now online; the blog that was a dream of yesteryear has an actual URL; and the KM Unit itself is no longer a tenuous experiment, with a grant, and housed in a tiny office but, rather, is a successful experiment, with a budget and, well, okay, still housed in that tiny office (but we’re moving; we’re getting there; we’re, you know, mobilizing). This has been one of the more gratifying aspects of my relationship with the KM Unit at York: experiencing its evolution as an annual leap forward (of course, it may not look this way to those who are here all year, in the trenches, but that’s how the evolution looks to me, from my perspective, checking in, as I do, every summer).

It’s a strange gig, then, because (unlike other kinds of seasonal jobs) I never know quite what I’m returning to, but I know enough to expect to be pleasantly surprised; to expect that the KM Unit will be more substantial than it was the summer before. In other words, the KM Unit keeps expanding outward, keeps building capacity, keeps working to connect some of Canada’s best researchers to a larger community of researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers. It keeps mobilizing stuff. I feel privileged, as ever, to have some small part in all of this. And I’ll look forward to being pleasantly surprised again, next summer, by the next leap forward.