Come hang out with Wil and me to talk about new research ideas! ACM ICER 2019 Work in Progress Workshop

Wil Doane and I are co-hosting the ACM ICER 2019 Work in Progress workshop that Colleen Lewis introduced at ICER 2014 in Glasgow (my report on participating). Colleen and I co-hosted last year.

It really is a “hosting” job more than an “organizing” or “presenting” role.  I love Colleen’s informal description of WiP, “You’re borrowing 4 other smart people’s brains for an hour. Then you loan them yours.”  The participants do the presenting. For one hour, your group listens to your idea and helps you think through it, and then you pass the baton. The whole organizing task is “Let’s put these 4 people together, and those 4 people together, and so on. We give them 4 hours, and appropriate coffee/lunch breaks.” (Where the value “4” may be replaced with “5” or “6”.)

Another useful description of WiP is “doctoral consortia for after-graduation.”  Doctoral consortia are these great opportunities to share your research ideas and get feedback on them.  Then there’s this sense that you graduate and…not have those ideas anymore? Or don’t need to share them or get feedback on them?  I’ve expressed concern previously about the challenges of learning when you’re no longer seen as a learner. Of course, PhD graduates are supposed to have new research ideas, which go into proposals and papers. But how do you develop ideas when you’re at the early stages, when they’re not ready for proposals or papers?  That’s what the WiP is about.

The WiP page is here (and quoted in part below). To sign up, you just fill out this form, and later give us a drafty concept paper to share with your group.

The WIP Workshop (formerly named the Critical Research Review) is a dedicated 1-day workshop for ICER attendees to provide and receive friendly, constructive feedback on works-in-progress. To apply for the workshop you will specify a likely topic about which you’ll request feedback. WIP participants will be assigned to thematic groups with 4-6 participants.

Two weeks before ICER, participants will submit to the members of their group a 2-4 page primer document to help prepare for the session and identify the types of feedback sought. At WIP, depending upon group size, each participant will have 45-75 minutes to provide context, elicit advice, support, feedback, and critique. Typically, one of the other group members acts as a notetaker during an individual’s time in order to allow the presenter to engage fully in the discussion.

WIP may be the right experience for you, if you would like to provide and receive constructive advice, support, feedback, or critique on computing education research issues such as:

• A kernel of a research idea
• A grant proposal
• A rejected ICER paper
• A study design
• A qualitative analysis approach
• A quantitative analysis approach
• A motivation for a research project
• A theoretical framing
• A challenge in a research project

The goal of the workshop is to provide a space where we can receive support and provide support. The workshop is intended for active CS education researchers. PhD students are instead encouraged to apply for the Doctoral Consortium, held on the same day as WIP.