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Marian Chamrada
Personal Statement | ICT Details | Recent Projects
Personal Statement
As part of my first degree, I have been travelling and teaching in several African and Asian countries. The direct experience with different educational settings yet with often strikingly similar educational issues has brought me to the School of Education and Lifelong Learning of the University of Exeter.
Here I am studying the possible impact of cross-cultural, dialogic virtual communication platform on further development of teachers. This participatory action research is so far based on a relatively small group of schools from the UK, Czech Republic and China, but with a vision to soon expand this community of teachers to Mexico, Denmark and South Africa.
Teachers working together, having to coordinate common projects, communicate with each other and collaborate in a creative way, these are not only the practical outcomes of the study but also a basis for exploring the main question: How does international collaboration between teachers, using a virtual platform, contribute to their further growth and development as not only professionals but as humans?
Since it is essential to use ICT as the main communication tool for the project, due to large distances between participants, I also investigate different designs of platforms, so that such communities would find collaboration welcoming and sustainable.
Joining MirandaNet fellowship can therefore be seen as a very natural step of networking on my journey.
ICT Interests
My interest is mainly in Virtual (mainly online) platforms of collaboration between teachers from cross-cultural educational settings. The PhD research I am currently conducting deals with identifying issues that are connected with teachers' joining and sustaining communities of practice using these virtual environments.
Similarly, I am interested in the influences ICT has on teachers thinking processes and on their personal and professional development. This area also covers teacher students and newly qualified teachers. I am interested in their perceptions of ICT and of its role in their professional lives.
Recent Projects
The PhD project:
Global Dialogic Communities: The impact of cross-cultural cooperation on professional development of teachers
The main focus of the study is on problems with establishing and maintaining collaborative communities of teachers, as well as understanding the impact of cross-cultural communication and cooperation on teachers’ Continuing Personal and Professional Development (CPPD). Based on previous experience with work and enquiry in various educational settings on three different continents, I had become interested in finding possible ways of bringing together teachers to share ideas, experiences, issues and problems, in an open minded dialogical way largely supported by modern communication technologies. In this project, the emphasis is on developing international models of CPD as an expansion to already existing models drawn from previous research and related literature. The main questions that arise from the pre-design of the study are related to the teachers’ understanding of their own development, their motivation to start up or join communities of cooperation, and the reasons for establishing these communities internationally.
Other projects:
Escalate
I am also a member of a research team at the University of Exeter. The study is investigating how new technologies (online discussion forums, blogs, interactive online learning tasks) can promote engagement and raise the perceived quality of learning experience of students in higher learning.
Argunaut
Closely related to the Escalate project, the Argunaut study focuses on developing tools that would assist moderators in achieving effectivness insynchronous discussions using environments displaying graphical argumentation maps. The aim of this study is to unify awareness and feedback mechanisms for working in e-discussion environments.
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