2012 York KMb Learning Events / Les activités d’apprentissage offertes par York MdC en 2012

Michael Johnny, RIR, YorkU

York KMb is offering sessions for researchers, staff and graduate students to help make their research relevant to professional practice and policy development.

York MdC offre des séances de formation à l’attention des professeurs, du personnel et des étudiants gradués afin de les aider à accroître la pertinence de leurs recherches sur le plan de la pratique professionnelle et du développement de politiques.

For the past five years, York’s Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit has focused our KMb activities on service and awareness raising for faculty, graduate students and external organizations and leaders who are seeking to engage in KMb.  Since 2006, York KMb has led 186 information sessions for community organizations and has supported 142 graduate students to meaningfully engage in KMb activity.  While we’re proud of our efforts to raise awareness of the opportunity and importance of knowledge mobilization, two recent developments that have supported an expansion of our capacity building initiatives: securing a community-based knowledge broker, and second, a mandate from federal research granting councils to include a knowledge mobilization strategy on funding applications.

The unique role of a community-based knowledge broker supporting York KMb has enabled our unit capacity to address some of the emerging issues in knowledge mobilization that are centred within York University.  With an increasing demand for engaging York researchers in collaborative project opportunities, our service unit saw a need to support learning opportunities here at York to help expand the capacity of university researchers who have interests in collaborative research, or, in mobilizing their existing research to help inform public policy and/or professional practice.

Given this, we’re pleased to announce the release of a series of learning events that help university researchers and administrators learn tools and strategies to engage in KMb within research projects. This series will include sessions on clear language writing and design, social media (specifically twitter, blogging and collaborative technologies) and developing strategies in KMb. Sessions have been developed that provide one hour information sessions or half-day hands-on workshops on several aspects of KMb.

Feedback has been positive and we’re excited to continue to roll out learning sessions throughout the calendar year.  Dr. Christopher Innes, Canada Research Chair and Distinguished Research Professor within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (English) commented, “This is great.  Sessions like this are important for York researchers to strengthen their research projects with plans for Knowledge Mobilization that are recognized by research funding councils.  The KMb Strategy Building session provided important tools to assist me and my project team”.

Upcoming events include KMb 101 (February 13), Clear Language Writing and Design (February 27), O3 (March 6) and WordPress (April 3). The full calendar of events is available here.

In addition to building capacity on campus, York has been asked to provide a KMb webinar to the Canadian Association of University Research Administrators.  This national webinar will help raise awareness of the emerging role of KMb for university researchers and their research partners.  The webinar will be help on February 14 at 1:00 EST.  Information about registration can be found here.

Upcoming KMb Learning Events at York

The Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit at York will be providing the following learning sessions for York University researchers, staff and graduate students to help make their research relevant to professional practice and policy development throughout 2012:

Social Media 101 – a lunch hour session to provide an overview of social media tools and their relevance to collaborative research projects.

Twitter – a 2.5 hour hands-on session where Twitter is introduced within a research context. Participants can set up an account and learn about practical applications for their research.

O3 – O3 is an online collaborative tool for available free to researchers, which can facilitate effective and efficient collaboration (without flooding your email inbox!)

WordPress – Blogging is emerging as a popular medium to share information and express ideas. Researchers are finding interesting uses for blogs to complement their scholarship. Join us and learn what blogging can do to enhance your KMb efforts.

KMb 101 – Maybe you’re familiar with the term, or maybe you’re not. This lunch hour session will introduce you to knowledge mobilization and how services are delivered here at York.

KMb Strategy Building – Granting councils are asking more and more for research teams to identify their KMb strategy. In this hands on session, learn about strategic elements, create a draft strategy for your project, and tips on how to present your strategy.

KMb Peer to Peer Network – this is an informal network for York staff and researchers who have explicit responsibility for KMb. Come and meet others in similar roles, share and learn from others.

Clear Language Writing and Design – Sessions designed to introduce the principles and practical tips on writing for the reader, including diverse audiences.

For a complete list of dates, please see the poster below. To register for any of the sessions, please visit http://bit.ly/KMbYorkLearning or contact Krista Jensen, KMb Officer, at kejensen@yorku.ca or ext 88847.

A Knowledge Mobilization Lunch at UVic / Un déjeuner de la mobilisation des connaissances à UVic

Dale Anderson, RIR-UVic

Knowledge mobilization and the public: That was the theme of the inaugural event in our KMb Lunch Series held on October 19 at UVic.

La mobilisation des connaissances (MdC) et le public: tel était le thème de l’événement inaugural de notre série Déjeuner de la MdC à UVic du 19 octobre.

Our kickoff speaker, Dr. E. Paul Zehr, shared his story of the very successful Café Scientifique he and colleagues from the Centre for Biomedical Research have established. The Café features talks (and he stressed they are talks, not PPT lectures) by university faculty on their research, held for a small group of up to 70 people at a local pub. Faculty talk, participants listen, beer and other beverages are consumed, and questions and discussion ensue. Paul believes sharing research with the public this way actually serves the interests of researchers, as it helps the public see the value of research dollars, and also helps them apply research findings to their own lives. The Café has been so successful, it has folks who sign up for all nine sessions, and has led to a spin-off Café organized by Physics and Astronomy.

Katy Nelson and Inba Kehoe from the University Library were our second speakers. They told us about UVic’s open access publishing options, including UVic Space and UVic’s online journal hosting service. Getting research into the hands of those who don’t have access to peer-reviewed journals is becoming a requirement of many funding agencies, and is one of the first steps in the knowledge mobilization journey.  UVic Space helps meet this need, and the library’s webpage lets you see how many people from across the world do access these documents: Russia, China, Switzerland … who knew?  

Sharing KMb knowledge and experience with colleagues was important, but equally important, the event gave participants an opportunity to make those connections we all realize are critical to KMb. While we gathered for just an hour, in that short hour we planted the seed for yet another Café Scientifique … and thus KMb grows, and researchers and the public all share the benefits.   

For more information, check out:

Café Scientifique 

Open Access Publishing at UVic

Online Journals hosted by UVic

Knowledge Mobilization and Research Matters

York’s KMb Unit was one of two featured presentations at the March 24 Research Matters talk sponsored by the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. Research Matters is a monthly speaker series which highlights LA&PS researchers, their research and “the way they see the world”. Attendees represented several disciplines within LA&PS (did you know this Faculty, if you add all it’s faculty, staff and students, is the approximate size of McMaster University?!) and there was also guests from outside the University.

The KMb presentation focused on the following three overarching questions :

• What is Knowledge Mobilization?

• Why is Knowledge Mobilization important?

• How do we deliver KMb services at York?

One of the tenants of KMb is that the messenger needs to be a trusted source, and not to belittle the credibility of our unit, but it was felt that having faculty and external collaborators share their experiences to help answer these questions was more appropriate. As a result, I was able to show four videos which the KMb Unit has developed (you can watch them on YouTube here), all of which speak to the questions above. And like any successful KMb event, there were numerous one-on-one conversations afterward with attendees who were seeking a business card, had a question, or in one case, wanted to explore how KMb could assist with their research project.

The second presenter was Dr. Nick Mulé from the School of Social Work. He shared his numerous research projects around LGBT knowledge development and how he has integrated elements of Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Translation and/or Knowledge Mobilization (which he has coined as KTEM… not to be mistaken with KTEAM… or for those who remember, the A Team). Nick’s emerging interests in KMb, and how he is integrating KMb principles and practices into his research projects was my takeaway on the day. I was pleased to hear Nick share his skills and experience in engaged scholarship, demonstrating that it is possible to advance a scholarly career while engaged in community-based research. By integrating KMb principles and practices, Dr. Mulé successfully demonstrated that, in fact, Research Matters!

My sincere thanks to Associate Dean of Research, Barbara Crow and the Research Officers and support staff in LA&PS for the opportunity to share our work and extend the invitation of the KMb Unit as a service unit to support researchers and their collaborators.

525,600 Minutes- How do you measure a year of KM?

Tuesday, March 2nd was the third annual KM Expo where York and it’s (mainly community) partners celebrated the past year of KM and looked forward to another. We were pleased to welcome over 95 participants to examine how KM can help broker relationships over, under, around and through Boundaries: between research and practice/policy; between community and university; between research and partner.

One always surprising and satisfying session is the un-conference time where participants identify topics of interest, including evaluation, training for KM careers, what is/are knowledge(s), changing the university culture, and social media. Danielle Zanotti (CEO, United Way of York Region) is always entertaining and thoughtful as he compared York’s KM Unit to his Nona (grandmother) who was strategic in her choice of partner – his Nono (grandfather). Tim McConnell (President and CEO, McConnell Foundation) reflected that putting voices around a table who wouldn’t normally sit together creates a clash of different understandings that creates new knowledge. He also recognized that policy makers (provincial and federal) where mainly absent from our KM table.

Many participants were asked the same question, “If you could tell the university to do one thing over the next year, what would it be?” We heard the following:

1) Engage in more brokering
• ResearchImpact-York has received over 150 requests for research brokering and will continue to do more

2) Create time/incentives/rewards for faculty to engage in KM
• We see this frequently. CHSRF has held some conversations with VPs Academic and Provosts but little progress has been made on including community engaged research in tenure & promotion

3) Create a learning cycle around KM
• ResearchImpact-York has created the KM P2P network, we’re developing KM tools, and we are active in the Ontario KTE CoP

4) “Universities are leaders in tradition” – become more open
• York has recently released the Provost’s White Paper providing a vision of York as Canada’s engaged university

5) Develop evaluation tools for KM
• Summer 2009 York conducted a formal evaluation of the last 4 years of KM. This report and recommendations arising from the repor will be presented on this blog soon.

6) Support digital literacy as an emerging skill-set
• See York’s initiatives like the Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, our work on O3, ABEL and other resources such as we wrote in this blog post

Throughout the 2010 Expo the theme was bees. We asked ourselves the question, “to b or not to b” and we decided to b. Starting with the 2010 Expo and following the lead of other knowledge mobilization leaders in Canada, including Peter Levesque, the Harris Centre, and SSHRC, York will adopt the acronym KMb.

ResearchImpact – York will be posting videos and presentations from the Expo on this blog and on KMb in action but for now, please see here for 525,600 minutes of KMb.

YorkU’s KM Expo 2010 – there’s still time to register!

Join us on Tuesday, March 2, 2010, when York University’s KM Unit will be hosting their third annual KM Expo at Le Parc in Richmond Hill.

The theme of the YorkU KM Expo 2010 is “Bridging Cultural Boundaries: Push, Pull and Co-Production of Knowledge” and we will explore the unique cultural boundaries that exist between university researchers, graduate students and their non-academic research collaborators from community organizations and government agencies. Featuring plenary, breakout, unconference and networking sessions, the KM Expo will explore how the push, pull and co-production methods of KM partnerships help universities and their partners become ‘boundary organizations’*.

Date: Tuesday, March 2

Time: 8:00 am to 5:30 pm

Location: Le Parc Conference and Banquet Centre
8432 Leslie St (Highway 7 and Leslie), Richmond Hill
Map to Location

There is no cost to attend the Expo but space is limited.  See below for the day’s agenda.

Register early!  RSVP to kejensen@yorku.ca or register online.

* Boundary organization: an organization that sits at the boundary of and spans the cultures of research and action & of science and politics.

Map to Le Parc

Driving Directions
From the South- Take the DVP/Highway 404 north and exit at Highway 7. Take Highway 7 west to Leslie Street. Turn left on Leslie and then right into the Le Parc parking lot.

From the North- Take Highway 404 south and exit at Highway 7. Take Highway 7 west to Leslie Street. Turn left on Leslie and then right into the Le Parc parking lot.

From York University- Take Highway 7 east to Leslie Street. Turn left on Leslie and then right into the Le Parc parking lot. Alternatively- take Highway 407 (toll road) to Leslie Street northbound and turn left into the Le Parc parking lot, just south of Highway 7.

Transit Directions
From Finch Station- Take the Viva Blue line to Richmond Hill Centre and transfer to the Viva Purple Eastbound line and depart at Leslie Street OR Take the Viva Pink from Finch Station and depart at Leslie Street (during peak hours only). Le Parc is located on the South-West corner of Leslie St and Highway 7.

From York University Keele Campus- Take the Viva Purple Eastbound line and depart at Leslie Street. Le Parc is located on the South-West corner of Leslie St and Highway 7.

Need a ride from York Keele Campus?

There will be a bus leaving Keele Campus from the East side of the Commons by the flags, directly South of the York Research Tower, at 7:30am sharp and will return to campus from Le Parc at 5:00. If you miss the bus, you can take the Viva Purple Eastbound located in front of the Archives of Ontario building and depart at Leslie Street.

Michael’s ‘Aha Moment’!

I am flattered to know someone asked for a blog based on a Tweet I contributed on the ResearchImpact Twitter feed.  First, a few observations and disclaimers.  I am glad blog posts do not mirror dissertations in rigour or length.  Next, I do not claim to be an authority on ‘outcomes’ or ‘impacts’ although my work is heavily invested in both terms/processes.  Lastly, I admit I carried around strong assumptions that the logic model for impact followed a sequential (and not very quick moving) flow from activity to outcome to impact. 

January 11 and 12, I had the pleasure of attending a Scientist Knowledge Translation Training event which was hosted by The Hospital for Sick Children and was led by Drs. Melanie Barwick and Donna Lockett .  Over two days, Melanie and Donna shared practical tools for developing Knowledge Translation (KT) plans, led discussions toward a more clear understanding of KT and provided valuable exercises to improve attendees capacity to understand the ‘user context’ for successful linkage and exchange, which is a foundation for successful KT.  The 25 attendees present were predominantly health practitioners who had KT responsibilities embedded into their job descriptions although there were some health researchers and policy professionals in attendance as well.

However, back to the notion of impact.  Never one to be terribly shy, I asked about the relationship between outcomes and impact, stating my feeling it was not possible to measure impact so closely to any KT transaction because impact was a by-product of outcomes.  What triggered this question was a slide that identified short-term, intermediate and long-term outcomes.  Moreover, while this makes sense, some confusion arose for me with regard to ‘measuring impact’, which in my experience is a challenge in policy and practice-relevant research.  So when one of the facilitators commented that she would be seeking impact measures based on short-term behavioural or practice changes amongst the participants of the session, I was skeptical.  What followed was a brief discussion between us two about the relationship of outcome and impact and that it is possible to identify impact measure very closely after a KT transaction.

The ensuing discussion did not necessarily change my beliefs around impact in relation to outcomes.  Reflecting back, I would say they have expanded my beliefs.  Impact is no longer solely a longitudinal process which one must wait (pick your timeframe – 6 months, one year, five years, and so on) to identify behaviour or practice changes.

I look forward to further discussion on this topic, and the inevitable reading that I will embark upon to challenge and reinforce my expanded belief system on impact.  Given the significance of this topic for publicly funded researchers and practitioners, it is a conversation which we should all be engaged with, and a topic we should give voice to.  Hey, that could be a second ‘aha moment’!

YorkU’s KM Expo 2010 – save the date!

Join us on Tuesday, March 2, 2010, when York University’s KM Unit will be hosting their third annual KM Expo at Le Parc in Richmond Hill.

The theme of the YorkU KM Expo 2010 is “Bridging Cultural Boundaries: Push, Pull and Co-Production of Knowledge” and we will explore the unique cultural boundaries that exist between university researchers, graduate students and their non-academic research collaborators from community organizations and government agencies. Featuring plenary, breakout, unconference and networking sessions, the KM Expo will explore how the push, pull and co-production methods of KM partnerships help universities and their partners become ‘boundary organizations’*.

Date: Tuesday, March 2

Time: 8:00 am to 5:30 pm

Location: Le Parc Conference and Banquet Centre
8432 Leslie St (Highway 7 and Leslie), Richmond Hill
Map to Location

There is no cost to attend the Expo but space is limited.  See below for the day’s agenda (to be confirmed).

Register early!  RSVP to kejensen@yorku.ca or register online.

* Boundary organization: an organization that sits at the boundary of and spans the cultures of research and action & of science and politics.

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.