The doubtful guest? A Virtual Research Environment for education

In this paper the authors describe a novel ‘Virtual Research Environment’ (VRE) based on the Sakai Virtual Collaboration Environment and designed to support education research. This VRE has been used for the past two years by projects of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme, 10 of which were involved in a research and development project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. The authors present vignettes of how the VRE has been implemented by three projects, drawing on extensive case records built up over two years of supporting and researching these projects. Rather than adopting the VRE as their sole locus of communication and collaboration, project members were careful to adopt specific VRE components which aligned well with the design of their research projects and established patterns of collaboration, some projects ‘hacking’ tools and other VRE functions in order to address specific needs and ways of working. The authors offer some interpretations of the contrasting patterns of adoption observed, drawing on Ciborra’s work on the role of new technologies in a range of organisational settings, and conclude with a discussion of how new technologies might be integrated into established educational and research practices