Collaboration
I have, I think, always collaborated in some ways with many different teachers and colleagues. For example, my master’s thesis (Cowie, 1997) was entitled ‘Collaborative journaling through email’. It was about developing teaching skills through reflective talk with a peer teacher. We wrote to each other by email which, at the time, was a relatively new way to communicate. If I were to do that again it would probably involve some kind of immersive technology such as AR or VR.
Whilst working at Saitama University in Japan in the 1990s, I helped to create and organize two teacher development groups: (a description of what this meant in terms of teacher autonomy is included in Barfield et al, 2001). I have also been program chair and president of two Japan Association of Language Teaching groups (JALT): the Teacher Development SIG and Okayama JALT chapter. However, it was not until 2011 when I was working at Okayama University did I start to use technology to facilitate communication with colleagues. I used Google + to create a support group called OkaDai E-learning (see the screenshot below) and made a WordPress website to share information about teaching at the university. In the absence of an LMS I have also used Google + to create about 25 student classroom communities.
The vast majority of academic collaboration has been with my wife, Keiko Sakui. In total, together we have produced about ten articles and book chapters, and one textbook. In addition, we have presented together many times on technology-related issues. We have also created five online English language and communication courses using the Udemy platform which I have mentioned frequently in this portfolio. Please refer to the following Google Map (screenshot below) which identifies three different types of collaboration (conference locations, data collection with research participants, and co-authors).
I have also published articles and made presentations with different colleagues (Claire Ushida and Tim Cleminson). We used Google Docs and Google Slides to write and present together. I have published one webinar (with Russell Stannard and Keiko Sakui) using Adobe Connect. I am on the editorial board of one journal (JALT Journal) and regularly review for about five others. My reviews can be accessed on Publons.
I have researched the use of technology by language teachers in several different countries (see Cowie & Sakui, 2013) and that has led to great friendships and follow-up collaboration. For example, through New Zealand contacts we have been introduced to a number of schools to conduct interviews and observations (see Sakui & Cowie, 2017); and we have introduced Australian and New Zealand researchers to contacts in Japan. In 2020, I joined the ASCILITE Mobile Learning SIG which meets weekly on Zoom and contributed to two concise papers which have been accepted for the ASCILITE 2020 conference.
In 2020, as a result of COVID-19, I have worked with even more colleagues at Okayama University. The full-time staff in the languages department co-created and curated a number of different online documents to help each other transit to wholly online teaching. I facilitated and led peer support groups that met on Zoom to supplement the textual support. I have documented this in two articles (Cowie & Sakui, 2020; and, Cowie, in press). Here is an extract from the second article exemplifying the type of collaboration that took place:
Documents were created and shared online, and then they were discussed through emails and over Zoom. These meetings took place at an individual and group level and in two languages. In addition, role differences became blurry as part-time teachers who had never previously had any specific responsibility beyond their own classes suddenly found they were ‘knowers’. They could contribute in a major way to a distributed network of knowledge and learning (Goldie, 2016) and traditional hierarchical differences between full- and part-time staff were disrupted.
In addition to working with my colleagues in the languages department, as a result of receiving a Teaching Award in September 2019 I was asked to join, from April 2020, a small new department called the ‘Centre for Teaching Excellence’ (CTE). A major part of this role has been to organise and lead workshops on online teaching for faculty across the university. These workshops and one regional conference were organised on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The CTE is also in the process of advising the president of the university on a future online strategy.
Reflection
I am by nature a communicative and collaborative person which shows in much of my professional work. The two #cmaltcmooc courses I participated in from March 2019 and again from September 2020 have been great opportunities to try out new online tools to expand my networks and professional contacts. The participants on the course have been very helpful in putting this submission together and that could not have happened without technology (Hangouts and Zoom, for example). I intend to continue that networking process in order to reach out to others in the same academic area, using, for example, Twitter or Research Gate. Manca (2018) has a very interesting review article comparing ResearchGate and Academia, and as a result of reading that I decided to focus, for the time being, on ResearchGate. Since updating Research Gate in March 2019, I have had a number of researchers requesting copies of my papers and suggesting various ways to collaborate. The CMALT accreditation process itself is also a great way to find out what expectations, standards and ways of working with technology there are outside of Japan.
References
Barfield, A., Ashwell, T., Carroll, M., Collins, K., Cowie, N., Critchley, M., … & MC, R. (2001). Exploring and defining teacher autonomy. In Developing Autonomy, Proceedings of the College and University Educators. Conference, Shizuoka, Japan. Tokyo: The Japan Association for Language Teaching.
Cowie, N. (in press). The development of an Ecology of Resources for online English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in a Japanese university during the COVID-19 pandemic. IJERI: International Journal of Educational Research and Innovation. 15.
Cowie, N., & Sakui, K. (2020). Advice from the field: Tips for teaching online. Kobe JALT Journal, 2(1), 23-29.
Goldie, J. (2016). Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age? Medical Teacher, 38(10),1064-9. https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2016.1173661
Manca, S. (2018). ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: A literature review. Research in Learning Technology, 26: doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2008