Dissemination

Research dissemination and sharing of intellectual capital is critical to building new forms of learning communities and in particular, demonstrating to younger scholars the benefits of interdisciplinary research. The key audiences for this research are younger scholars; community leaders and practitioners; policy decision-makers in government and civil society organizations; other university and college research partners and collaborators. In addition to presenting academic papers and preliminary research findings at related conferences and workshops, intellectual capital will be shared as it is being developed through the research salons now under development. Moving interactively between community research workshops, e-dialogues and public forums, the research program will widely diffuse useful knowledge directly to communities, particularly to smaller and rural communities, as well as the wider publics. The research will build on the existing network of research collaborators, particularly the inclusion of younger and emerging scholars, already established across the country, and the unique research dissemination tools already in place. A series of case studies will also be developed, for educators and community leaders, building a rich narrative database of stories with applied relevance to a wide variety of decision-makers in communities, as well as the policy development community.

In addition, the program will build on expertise developed through e-dialogues to examine community engagement through ‘deliberative dialogue’. Deliberative dialogue is defined as deliberately designed safe-to-fail learning environments that allow diverse groups of people to engage in informed discussion with their peers and experts, to explore their implications and examine alternative social responses. Dialogue will be complimented by ‘E-clustering’ to speed the exploitation of learning and knowledge between communities. E-clustering is the development of nested sets of communities electronically that can then be scaled upward, trying to engage people functioning at all levels (Holling 2003), thereby creating novel electronic communities or “e-communities” of practice for sustainable development.