My supervisors have suggested that I start putting together some parts of my 9 month report. It’s been illuminating so far, the bits that are bigger than I expected, and the sections that are drastically underpopulated!
I like to write answers to questions, so often the first part of any writing work for me is finding the questions to ask. I used the notes from the Research Methodologies course to start off:
[paraphrased]
- What is the area/question your are discussing?
- Why is it important?
- What has existing work done?
- What is the gap in this work?
- How does your contribution address it?
- What is the structure of the rest of the document?
My answers to this question so far are:
What is the area/question your are discussing?
This report considers the area of competence and competence structures. The term competence has not been authoritatively defined, and as a result, the term has numerous definitions used by different research communities.
Why is it important?
The establishment (and subsequent adoption) of a robust definition for both competence and competence structure would enable new ways of efficiently organising, sharing and delivering content.
What has existing work done?
Many communities have been working towards a system of what they perceive to be competences and competence structures. However, whilst appearing to be similar, once they are explored beyond surface characteristics, these projects and activities sometimes refer to completely unrelated concepts.
Much work has been done (ACRL, CASAS, CPA, Mager, NOICC, O*Net, PASS, SCANS, TATS) on defining instances of competences, but not on the creation of a generic, reusable model for the competences and their relationships. Each of the organisations mention have their own definition and model for a competence, but not a shared, translatable and interoperable one.
What is the gap in this work?
This lack of common, machine-computable model for competence represents a gap in the field.
How does your contribution address it?
This phd intends to specify the essential components of a framework that describes generic, reusable competences and the various links between them.
A primary focus will be to work with what already exists in the competence field, creating a framework flexible enough to accept competences that have already been created, but robust enough to allow the machine computability that will make competence structures useful in the contemporary field of education.
What is the structure of the rest of the document?
Section 2 of this document attempts to highlight the important features of current research and characteristics of several existing competence systems.
Section 3 outlines the research question, motivations and planned future work.
I’ll sort references later!
Postgraduatum – all posts by Teresa Binks – University of Southampton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please get in touch if you’d like to access this work with a different license.
