Anita Zijdemans Boudreau
OISE/UT

KMDI Fellow: 2004/5-2005/6

PhD thesis: Exploring a socio-technical design for knowledge development: The Millennium Dialogue on Early Child Development

Supervisor: Daniel Keating (OISE/UT)

When Anita Zijdeman's started with the Learning Society Network as a hopeful Masters student stirred by the possibilities of technology for social change, empowerment, and global education, it wasnt long before she witnessed firsthand the disparities between naive inspiration, academic bureaucracy, and human resistance to change. Her first TLNCE project involved designing and implementing an online collaborative environment for a geographically distributed group of scholars working on a book through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Human Development division. As funds got tied up in bureaucratic red tape delaying production of the technology, the undaunted scholars continued work, relying on the familiar methods of word processor (or secretary), email, and the occasional face-to-face meeting. In the final analysis the environment was hardly used but their collaborative writing effort was a success.

Lessons learned: Building a technology solution for supporting distributed collaboration is one thing, getting people to change their work practice is another. Timing and motivation are everything.

 Anita's Masters project entailed a community-school collaboration for youth health promotion. Students from two local schools used an online environment designed to support their action research showing evidence of the issues they perceived to be affecting their own health and well-being. Though lack of resources and facilitation hindered community engagement, the students actively participated and shared their findings on the web.

Lesson learned: Given the chance, most adults will avoid technology. Kids, on the other hand, embrace it.

While Anita puzzled these lessons and other related issues, the distinguished group of scholars from the first project published their book. Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations would congeal her world view and impact her future academic career in ways that she could never have anticipated. It served 4 extremely important functions: it spearheaded a multi- and cross-disciplinary counterpoint to the silo approach typical of academic research; it popularized the notion of gradients for describing enduring and pervasive trends in Developmental Health (an omnibus term for a full range of developmental outcomes from physical & mental health to competence & coping); it established evidence that societies with sharper gradients (social status differences) have generally lower developmental health; and finally, in response to this finding, it concluded that the future health and well-being at both the individual and population levels, particularly given these times of economic shifts and escalating technological change, depend upon our ability to become a Learning Society.

Perhaps it was having three children of her own that struck the inspirational chord; or perhaps it was a misguided desire to battle seemingly insurmountable odds. But when the opportunity came up to work with Daniel Keating on developing a theoretically grounded model for a learning society, Anitas doctoral trajectory was set in motion. Since then it has been a journey of trial and error, ups and downs, and a lot of experiential learning as Anita and her colleagues have worked to forge a trail toward societal change for optimal human development.

One of the highlights on this journey, also Anitas dissertation, has been the Millennium Dialogue on Early Child Development. This initiative represented an initial foray into implementing the learning society model through establishing an infrastructurethe Atkinson Centre for Society & Child Developmentto facilitate a year long series of ICT-supported learning activities and events. These included: a nationwide curriculum development project; a face-to-face and online graduate course; a two-day live Webcast using ePresence; and post production educational Knowledge Media development.

 Another of Anitas fortunes has been to work with Gale Moore at KMDI in broadening her interest in human-centred or participatory design and knowledge media, through the HIVE Project. Funded under a CITO student internship, she and Gale worked with families to explore the potential role of ICTs in helping to alleviate the problems of communication, coordination, and knowledge flow as they interact with diverse teams of health practitioners to run a home-based intervention program for their autistic children.

Anita is Technology & Learning Director at the Atkinson Centre for Society & Child Development and also incorporates her research into her part-time teaching in Preservice Education.