Toward a Culture of KMb? / Vers une culture de mobilisation des connaissances

Michael Johnny, RIR-York

Staff within York’s KMb Unit are not the only people talking about KMb at York.  Based on our recent experience, there are many faculty and students who are engaged in KMb activity. 

Les employés de l’unité de Mobilisation des Connaissances (MdC) de York ne sont pas les seuls à parler de MdC à York. À la lumière de nos récentes expériences, beaucoup de professeurs et  d’étudiants sont engagés dans des activités de MdC.

One of the early strategic objectives for our work at York University in Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) was to help build a research culture; this was one of the university’s priority areas.  And while priorities may change, no one will argue this does not remain important.  However, what about building a culture of knowledge mobilization?  While I allow you a moment to reflect on that suggestion, I would like to share with you a brief summary from four distinct events which took place March 19 and 20, 2012.

Sustainability Energy Initiative – Monday, March 19, 2012 – Seminar Series – New Research in Sustainable Energy  – The Faculty of Environmental Studies, Sustainable Energy Initiative has been established to build and strengthen the teaching, research and partnerships needed to create new green energy economies in Canada and around the world.  The connection to KMb was made explicit by Prof. Jose Etcheverry in his introductory comments, stating SEI is “trying to mobilize knowledge, taking a quantum lead toward sustainable energy”.  The approximate 50 people present represented research, community and advocacy interests and had probing questions for Prof. Mark Winfield and the three recent MES graduates who spoke on their research in areas of sustainable energy.  Prof. Etcheverry, in his role as facilitator, did a masterful job in seeking connections from research to areas of public policy and professional practice.

York School of Social Work – Tuesday, March 20, 2012 – World Social Work Day – York faculty within the School of Social Work participated in an international conversation around social work engagement which was facilitated by a Stanford Social Innovation Review webinar.  Faculty and students within the School of Social Work have a logical and extensive engagement piece associated to their scholarship, and the web cast, “Channeling Change – Making Collective Impact Work” provided some interesting conversation points for the approximate 20 people including community members of the TD Centre for Community Engagement who assembled in the Kinsmen Building to participate.  York’s David Phipps led a conversation for the faculty, graduate students and community leaders who were present.  Knowledge Mobilization practices and processes were central to the conversation, and it was a provocative question to pass to the group, “Does York need to break silos and speak on issues with one voice around engaged scholarship?”.

Faculty of Education – Tuesday, March 20, 2012 – Research Support Series – Three York faculty spoke to a small but engaged group about Knowledge Co-creation and Knowledge Mobilization.  Profs. Jennifer Hyndman, Rick Bello and Steve Gaetz spoke about their experiences with engaged scholarship.  Having faculty share their experiences around this is significant given the commitment the university had made in this area as evident by the recent Provostial White Paper  “Towards a more engaged university”.

United Way York Region – Tuesday, March 20, 2012 – Meeting House – Part of an ongoing series of community engagement around issues relating to social infrastructure in York Region, United Way York Region (and partner in the delivery of KMb) hosted a meeting for residents in Vaughan.  These meetings (there are two more planned in Markham and Richmond Hill, and two had already taken place in East Gwillimbury and Newmarket) are helping inform a regional summit on social infrastructure in Fall 2012, and York Research and KMb plan to participate.  Such consultation and capacity building is an important first step to engage in KMb.

This two day window of time reflects the extent to which KMb has become a significant part of research culture.  It is worth noting that this reflects three faculties at York seeking to engage the broader York community around issues of KMb.  The KMb Unit has never, nor will it ever, hold proprietary ownership over processes of KMb and we are pleased that we were only audience members contributing to and celebrating KMb success without having to own it.  In these three York events, similar to the event hosted by our community partner, we serve as a resource to support and help amplify the work in KMb which is ongoing throughout the university.

A culture of KMb?  Safe to say we’re well on our way to achieving this! Stay tuned as we develop a regular series profiling engaged scholarship and KMb at York University.

Two Steps Forward for KMb at UQAM / Deux pas en avant pour la mobilisation des connaissances (MdC) à l’UQAM

Luc Dancause and Jérôme Elissalde (RIR – UQAM)

Mobilize This! first published this post in French on September 13, 2011.  We re-publish it here translated into English.

In 2011-2012, almost 200 new researchers will join UQAM. In an effort to provide more support to these newcomers regarding knowledge mobilization, UQAM is launching a new website and a researcher’s guide.

Au cours de la période 2010-2012, l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) accueille près de 200 nouveaux chercheurs. Dans une optique de mobilisation des connaissances, l’UQAM lance coup sur coup un nouveau site et un guide destinés à mieux soutenir les chercheurs dans leurs activités.

Building on the excitement of the back-to-class period, the Office of Research and Creativity( Service de la recherche et de la création or SRC) introduced two new tools that will prove useful in the future. First, the SRC launched its new website. The content of the site has been completely restructured and expanded with the goal of making it an indispensable and user-friendly tool for the entire research and creative community at UQAM. From this site, researchers can find all the resources and information they need to manage their research and creative projects.

In a second step, the SRC collaborated with colleagues in the Office of Partnerships and Innovation Support (Service des Partenariats et du Soutien à l’Innovation or SEPSI) to launch the first version of a guide entitled “Guide to Research and Creativity at UQAM: Tools and Resources to Ensure Your Projects Succeed.” This document is a tool to help researchers find their way amongst the many support services offered at UQAM during the many stages of a project, from the early stages of funding, right through to the eventual mobilization of knowledge. Designed primarily as an electronic document, the guide will evolve according to the needs of researchers at UQAM.

From the perspective of knowledge mobilization, the launch of both products allows UQAM to remind researchers that a wide range of support services is already available on campus. The Office of the Vice-President, Research and Creativity, has also implemented a program to support the mobilization of knowledge, bringing together professionals from the SRC, SEPSIS and the Office of Service to the Community (Service aux collectivités or SAC) to both improve KMb services and make them more accessible.

The program to support knowledge mobilization at UQAM provides:

• Consultation on the use of knowledge (knowledge dissemination, transfer, etc.);
• Identification of opportunities (for funding, partnerships, etc.); and
• Support for the development of partnerships and collaborations

In a future MobilizeThis! post, we will take you behind the scenes to the process we undertook in developing the “Guide to Research and Creativity at UQAM: Tools and Resources to Help Your Projects Succeed,”  which was itself an interesting experience in knowledge mobilization within our university.

KMb Journal Club / Le comité de lecture de la MdC

The ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche journal club is a new web feature that will make KMb related academic research accessible to knowledge brokers.

Le comité de lecture de ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche est une nouvelle initiative en ligne qui va rendre la recherche académique sur la mobilisation des connaissances accessible aux courtiers de connaissances

What were you doing on April 30, 2010? It was a Friday and that day we posted the results of our web survey. Our respondents gave us great feedback and we have acted on some of those by adding to our KMb in Action and introducing Delicious KMb bookmarks of KMb associated web sites. We know that finding information on KMb is one of the top two reasons people come to the ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche website.

We are now pleased to introduce a new feature to our web services to help our stakeholders get KMb related information – the KMb Journal Club.

We have previously written that knowledge brokers need to practice what they preach and seek out KMb evidence on which to base their KMb practice. The trouble is, like so many of our community partners, we lack the time to seek out, digest, evaluate and apply research to our own situations. The journal club will present a summary of KMb related academic journal articles in a standard format that will make KMb research accessible to KMb practitioners. This won’t be a researcher’s perspective.

Each journal club will be presented with the following sections:

1. Article reference
2. url if the article is open access
3. Abstract
4. Article summary
5. Key observations from practitioner’s perspective

We will be using a publicly accessible discussion forum on the ResearchImpact O3 site to host the journal club. Each journal club will be posted, with the paper attached if it is open access, and readers will be able to use the reply feature to comment or ask questions of the journal club author. We will be posting the first KMb journal club in a couple of weeks.

If you are reading a journal article that you think would be relevant to KMb practice you are invited to submit a journal club summary to us for consideration by e mailing to kmbunit@yorku.ca.

Rethinking Research Impact / Repenser l’impact de la recherche

By David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York)

Some new thinking from researchers helps to refine our thinking about the impact of research and how we measure the “impact” (or “contribution”) research might have on policy and practice decisions.

De nouvelles réflexions de chercheurs nous aident à redéfinir notre compréhension de l’impact de la recherche et la manière dont nous mesurons « l’impact » (ou la « contribution ») que peut avoir la recherche sur les décisions en matiere de politiques et de pratiques….

Thank you Sarah Morton. Sarah Morton is co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh. She came to Toronto to visit ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche (York) for 2 weeks. During that visit she made a presentation to the Southern Ontario KTE Community of Practice, met with eight civil servants from Municipal Affairs & Housing, Health & Long Term Care, Education, Food & Rural Affair and Cabinet Office and with Ben Levin’s group at Research Supporting Practice in Education (RSPE). After a weekend in Barrie’s Bay, Sarah came back to Toronto and the world of KMb for a meeting with the International Alliance of Leading Educational Institutions, York’s KMb Expo and then the KTE CoP again where Sandra Nutley (Research Unit for Research Utilization, also the University of Edinburgh) also made a presentation.

As someone from CRFR tweeted “@CRFRTweets: Sarah Morton’s met more knowledge translators in the last 2 days in Toronto than in 10 years in Scotland” (June 7, 3:45pm).

Two meetings stood out for me. Amanda Cooper presented work on evaluation of 44 knowledge intermediary organizations in education including RIR. I won’t preempt her publication by disclosing her results but her evaluation framework was made public at the Canadian Society of the Studies in Education meeting at Congress 2011 in Fredericton. She evaluated the websites of those 44 knowledge intermediaries and scored them on their presentation of their efforts for KMb products, KMb events and KMb networks. Because KMb is a people mediated process, events and networks get weighted more heavily than products in their evaluation framework. This is one of the first quantitative evaluation frameworks for a system of KMb – most frameworks measure the effects of individual KMb interventions. I look forward to Amanda’s forthcoming paper so we can have a fullsome discussion of this methodology and seek to test it in other settings.

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York) was pleased to be invited to guest blog for Science of Blogging, a science blog run by @TravisSaunders, PhD Candidate, Obesity Researcher and Certified Exercise Physiologist. His blog, below, was posted on May 4, 2011. Check out the blog rolls on Mobilize This! and Science of Blogging. Each is following the other but you’ll see a few other great science and knowledge mobilization blogs there as well.

Dear Professor, To blog or not to blog?  This is not a question that you should worry about…for now. You compete successfully in three peer review arenas: publishing, grant seeking and tenure & promotion (T&P).  These three are interdependent with success in one begetting success in another.  The three are built on the same assumption: that your peers are in the best position to critique and thus make awards of publications, of grants and of tenure.  This isn’t going to change dramatically in the near future, so please don’t fret over all this blogging stuff.  Your klout score is not about to sway your T&P committee.

But note that in Canada, at least, times they are a changin’ (♫)

Canadian research funding is dominated by three federal granting councils (SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC) all of whom are rolling out new funding programs with non-academics on the peer review committees.  As I mentioned in a previous blog some (admittedly only a few) peer reviewed journals are including non academics on their editorial boards.  Campus-community collaborations are increasingly recognized by T&P committees (especially when the university based scholar and his/her community partner receives a $1M Community University Research Alliance) and there is even a national alliance to examine academic reward and incentive structures for community engaged scholarship.

But you don’t have to worry about that…for now.  

A community of 1000 and growing / Une communauté de 1000 membres… en croissance

1000 followers – it’s not a record but Twitter is an important part of connecting to a broader community of knowledge practitioners.

1000 abonnés – Il ne s’agit pas d’un reccord, mais Twitter représente une voie privilégiée pour rejoindre la communauté élargie des “praticiens du savoir”.

Lady Gaga has 7,941,444 twitter followers. Oprah has 5,549,842. CNN has 1,889,096. Charlie Sheen has 3,531,943. Sometime between 11:00 am and 11:45 am on March 26, 2011, @ResearchImpact hit 1000 followers. It took us 22 months to get there.

It’s not a competition and followers are only one measure of the impact of a twitter presence. Charlie Sheen might have 3,500 times the followers of ResearchImpact but I hope that in the world of knowledge mobilization we’re having more of an impact than he is. Impact is an interesting thing on twitter. There are a few services that allow you to measure your impact on twitter.

Klout: we score 52 out of 100

ResearchImpact is a Specialist
You may not be a celebrity, but within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none. Your content is likely focused around a specific topic or industry with a focused, highly-engaged audience.

TwitterGrader: we score 97.4 out of 100 and we rank 233,333 out of 9,157,539

Twitalyzer: we score 1.1 out of 100 which puts us in the 62nd percentile.

I have no idea what any of this means. Scores range from 1.1 to 97.4 out of 100. At the end of the day are we getting re-tweets, comments and mentions by our followers? Yes. And that’s what matters to me.

Re-imagining the ivory tower / Reconcevoir la tour d’ivoire

By David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York)

KMb is enhancing transparency and access to universities but as we work hard at engaging we remain struck in silos inside the ivory tower.

La mobilisation des connaissances accroît la transparence et l’accès aux universités. Toutefois, malgré le travail acharné que nous accomplissons en ce sens, nous demeurons prisonniers des silos à l’intérieur de la tour d’ivoire.

Recently I attended a curling bonspiel in Ottawa and because my team lost as soon as they could I ended up on twitter and saw this @fedcan tweet

Good morning all! We’re live blogging @fedcan‘s annual conference this morning at blog.fedcan.ca

The Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (FedCan) was holding their Annual Conference,  which featured a talk by SSHRC President, Chad Gaffield. The theme of the conference was “The Humanities Paradox: More Relevant and Less Visible Than Ever?” and the title of Chad’s talk was “Re-imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age“, both of which had a theme of exploring the relevance of academic research outside of the academy. Chad’s talk was wide ranging but for anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing Chad speak as many times as I have his observations were familiar. They were all linked by the theme of “re-imagining”, imaging a new paradigm of scholarship that is emerging on campuses across Canada. Specifically, Chad spoke of re-imagining in three areas: teaching, research and campus-community connections.

Teaching:

• The old “professor push” method of teaching is evolving into a student centred, inquiry based method of learning. Text heavy, power point slides are being replaced by image heavy and digital rich media. Students are exploring problems rather than being told solutions.

Research:

• Researchers are pursing horizontal connections across different ways of knowing. This means that researchers are not only reaching out to other scholarly disciplines but they are embracing community, Aboriginal and other traditions of knowledge.

To each reader, their research / Pour chaque lecteur, sa recherche

By Andrea Kosavic, York University Libraries

Guest blogger and York University Digital Initiatives Librarian, Andrea Kosavic, writes about “York Space”, a repository for academic research that researchers can use to enhance accessibility of their research outputs. By taking advantage of institutional infrastructure such as repositories, researchers can leverage technology to make their findings more visible and accessible to those who seek them.

Bloggueur invité et libraire à l’Université de York, Andrea Kosavic écrit à propos de “York Space”, un dépôt virtuel pour les recherches que les universitaires peuvent utiliser pour améliorer l’accessibilité de leurs résultats. En tirant parti de ce genre d’infrastructure institutionnelle, les chercheurs peuvent utiliser la technologie pour rendre leurs résultats plus visibles et accessibles.

The title of this post is a play on the second law of library science as proposed by S.R. Ranganathan, which is “Every reader, his or her book.” It appears to be such a simple and straightforward concept, but I will argue that it still merits our attention.

Working as a librarian in a university library I am often asked what steps an academic can take to make one’s research stand out and get noticed. Researchers are looking above and beyond leveraging the system of ensuring that their work is published in an influential peer-reviewed journal that is broadly indexed.

While I did recently find an article that exposed some rather twisted examples of how a crooked researcher can “game” their citation counts in Google Scholar, beyond these unscrupulous methods, what other options are there?

I recently experienced a real life example that brought some clarity to that question.

I had been suffering from acute head pain while flying, and was referred to a specialist. After ruling out other possibilities, the neurologist assured me that I was suffering from airplane descent headaches. Using those exact search terms, he found an article in Google that suggested some preventative strategies. Armed with the citation I confidently searched our catalogue only to discover that York University Libraries did not hold a subscription to the journal. This was an eye opening experience, where I realized what the public, who do not have the privilege of our wealth of resources, must be experiencing on a regular basis. I was able to call on my network of colleagues to retrieve the paper, but this experience helped to clarify the question of increasing research visibility.

If we want the best return on our research investment, we need to ensure that the research can be found where researchers, professionals, policy makers, and the general public conduct their searches.

Our research needs to be where our readers are.

York brokers knowledge for climate change/L’engagement des courtiers de connaissances de York dans la lutte aux changements climatiques

On March 1st, York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit and the Climate Consortium for Research Action Integration hosted the York University Climate Change Policy & Research Day. This was the biggest event held so far as part of the Knowledge Mobilization for Climate Change project. The event gave us a taste of just how valuable and urgent it is to seek greater research collaboration between researchers and policy makers to tackle climate change.

Le 1^er mars dernier, l’Unité de mobilisation des connaissances de York et le Climate Consortium for Research Action Integration ont organisé la journée des politiques et de la recherche sur les changements climatiques. Il s’agissait du plus important événement tenu à ce jour dans le cadre du projet Mobilisation des connaissances et changements climatiques. Cet événement nous a permis d’entrevoir la valeur et l’urgence d’une collaboration accrue entre chercheurs et décideurs publiques dans le but de contrer les changements climatiques.

March 1^st was a big day for the Knowledge Mobilization for Climate Change project.  York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit along with its partner, the Climate Consortium for Research Action Integration (CCRAI), hosted the York University Climate Change Policy and Research Day.   The event was chaired by Karen Kraft Sloan, Special Advisor on the Environment to the Vice President Research and Innovation, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies and Canada’s former Ambassador on the Environment.

This event brought together 3 distinct groups (a complete list of panelists is included below):

• policy staff from local and regional governments and community organizations
• researchers from York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, as well as Science & Engineering
• graduate students from across various academic disciplines

The event began with a morning open forum between policy staff and researchers. An audience of York graduate students and faculty as well as other invited policy staff observed the forum. The policy makers presented on climate change issues they face, shared adaptation strategies, and identified areas where they need expert opinions and more research. York’s professors responded with their ideas and presented their latest research on climate change impacts and adaptation.

York University Climate Change Policy and Research Day

This is an invitation to an upcoming event as part of the Knowledge Mobilization for Climate Change project.

You are warmly invited to take part in the York University Climate Change Policy & Research Day. The goal of this event is to profile some of the climate change related work being done at the municipal and regional level, have a discussion on the existing research gaps and needs, and explore opportunities for collaboration between local policy makers and York researchers.

Presenters from the City of Toronto; the Regions of York, Durham, and Peel; Toronto and Region Conservation Authority; and the Weather Water Gateway project will be joined by a panel of York faculty members with research expertise and interest in climate change related topics.

This event will also allow graduate students to hear from policymakers about potential career paths and speak to them directly about the Climate Change summer internships being offered by York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit. To get full details about the Knowledge Mobilization for Climate Change Internship competition, please go to this link.

Date: March 1st, 2011

Time: 8:30am-3:00pm

Location: Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson

York University

For full details of scheduled activities, please see the event agenda by accessing the following link. Seating is limited. Please register for your ticket by going to the following Eventbrite link. Breakfast and lunch will be served.This event is generously supported by funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.