Education and Information Technologies 10:3, 157163, 2005.

c 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Manufactured in The Netherlands.

Learning Our Way Forward in eLearning:

The Story of Something Fishy

SEAMUS
O CANAINN AND JEAN HUGHES
Blackrock Education Centre, Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, Ireland; School of Science and Technology,
Institute of Art Design Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, Ireland
E-mail: seamus@blackrockec.ie
E-mail: jean.hughes@iadt.ie

Abstract
This paper describes how a number of unlikely publishing partners unexpectedly found themselves exploring
eLearning as a medium for teacher and pupil learning. Blackrock Education Centre supports teachers through
professional development programmes and the publication of educational resources under the auspices of the
Department of Education and Science (DES) in the Republic of Ireland. This paper describes how the intention to
create a standard primary school classroom resource by the Education Centre has been unexpectedly transformed
in ways which have enabled us to explore eLearning in partnership with a local Institute of Technology, IADT.
In doing so, we have ourselves become learners in unexpected ways with our teachers and students. The paper
describes how intentions emerge in conversation in processes of local interaction and that the strategic direction
of an organisation (in our case, our unexpected involvement in eLearning) is best understood in retrospect.
It is about how our identity is transformed in our learning and how strategy can be viewed as an emergent
property of relationships. The learning resource is entitled Something Fishy, a humorous play on an English
expression meaning something a little suspicious, even subversive. Somethnig Fishy can be viewed at www.
somethingfishy.ie
Keywords:

elearning, strategy, emergence, conversation, complexity

The process of producing Something Fishy began with a request to the Blackrock Education
Centre from the Central Fisheries Board (CFB) to assist them in publishing a classroom
pack on the work of the Board. Over the next year other partners joined in an unplanned way,
including most importantly, the Institution for Art Design and Technology (IADT), a college
in the Irish polytechnic sector. This unplanned process and the collaboration between
diverse partners was what allowed the emergence of a novel and unexpected outcome that
went far beyond our initial expectations. Our unintended exploration of eLearning is an
example of how strategy emerges in practice.
In describing this initiative at this point in time it is important to emphasise that the
process is not complete: in fact I will argue that by looking at the project from the inside
while it is unfinished will give a better understanding of the emergence of strategy in the
process. I hope that this will communicate a better sense of the interactions taking place
and the opportunities and choices we face continually, and which at the end of the day are
a better indicator of what is going on in our organisation than any final summary report.

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In taking this approach I am aware that I am in conflict with prevailing mainstream

thinking on strategic planning, with its emphasis on goal setting in moving towards a
knowable future. My contention will be that strategic direction emerges in continuous
communicative interaction between human beings. It emerges in what John Shotter calls
a zone of indeterminacy, a zone of uncertainty. . . a zone between actions (what I as an
individual do) and events (what actually happens to, in, or around me, outside of my
agency to control (Shotter, 1993:38). This activity Shotter describes as joint action,
which though it will produce unintended and unpredictable outcomes does nonetheless have
an intentional quality to it which is apparent to the participants. In this process strategic
direction is continually being negotiated and is really only evident in retrospect:
Strategic management is the process of actively participating in the conversations
around important emerging issues. Strategic direction is not set in advance but understood in hindsight as it is emerging or after it has succeeded (Stacey, 2000: 413,
italics added).
The Blackrock Education Centre is primarily concerned with teacher professional development under the auspices of the Department of Education and Science (DES) in Ireland.
We also have our own publishing and consultancy division which generates a significant
independent income which enables us to take our own initiatives. It was in the latter capacity, as publishers, that we were approached by an unusual educational partner, the Central
Fisheries Board.
The Central Fisheries Board in Ireland has responsibility for inland fisheries including
immediate coastal areas and had wanted to promote a greater awareness of its role among
schools by publishing a curriculum resource pack and poster. The Education Centre has
considerable experience of this kind of publishing and we agreed to meet with them. We
met, typically enough with their public relations people, because these kinds of publications
are usually seen by sponsors as public relations exercises.
We spent a long time with them discussing the poster they had had designed and which
they proposed distributing to schools with the proposed pack. Many fish species were
displayed in full colour. We were a little apprehensive about becoming involved in a project
which just fed more information into schools which already had a surfeit of posters and
packs, and we sought to turn the discussion around. We probed them on the work of the
Board, what the Fisheries Officers do from day to day. It became clear that much of their
work was concerned with negotiating with local authorities, farmers, construction foremen,
industry about the quality of water in their local environment. If the water quality was not
of a high standard, fish could not survive and there would be no industry.
It was my colleague Marian who had the moment of insight: Your job is to manage
habitat was her observation. It was a brilliant observation because it enabled us to think
of the work of the CFB in a way which would allow us to bring it into the classroom
as an integral part of the curriculum and not just as a detached body of information. Our
marketing friends were bemused at being told their job but they did see the sense of it. It
was an exercise in joint action which to use another Shotter tool revealed something that
was there in peoples experience but which was rationally invisible to those closest to it.

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It also had the effect of contributing to the formation of the identity of the Centre as well
as that of the Central Fisheries Board.
Fishermens Tales
However, we werent happy with meeting the public relations department only, and we
sought a meeting with the CFB staff who worked in the field. This was arranged some time
later and we spent a very animated Friday afternoon participating in a discussion among a
most agreeable and persuasive group of people who were so enthusiastic about their work.
We had asked that they each describe what they do. What we hadnt realised when we
sought the meeting was that this group had not met to converse like this before and that they
enjoyed hearing one anothers description of their work as much as we did. We noticed that
they paid increasingly less attention to us. Occasionally we interjected and we tried out my
colleagues sense of the role of the Central Fisheries Board, as a manager of habitat. Was
that how they saw their role on a day-to-day basis?
What we were trying out was a new way of looking at what they did, helping to create a
new identity which would make sense in a classroom as well as among CFB staff. We were
challenging a patterned understanding of role that had emerged within the organisation over
many years. It was also possible of course that the idea of producing the educational pack
was a defence against changes being imposed from the outside resulting from changes in
government policy. In suggesting a new way of looking at the organisation were we adding
to anxiety that had been hidden from us?
As we conversed, a possibility began to emerge which we had not anticipated: it became
clear that some of these officers were already in the habit of visiting schools and on occasion
inviting schools to lakes or rivers at important times -when rivers and lakes were being restocked. We wondered whether this could become part of the work of other Fisheries officers
as part of the development of the pack. It wasnt possible to develop this idea as much as we
would have liked at that time, but we had a tantalising glimpse of how another resource could
be made available in a way which would be very beneficial to the environment and would
also enable our colleagues in the Central Fisheries Board to get their message across. At
the heart of this suggestion was the realisation that the formation of real relationships with
real people would be more persuasive to children than information however well presented.
Patricia Shaw writes of the transformative activity of conversing in her book Changing
Conversations in Organizations (Shaw, 2002). I felt that in the conversations in which we
were engaged with the Central Fisheries Board we were together transforming our way of
viewing ourselves and our way of viewing one another. The Education Centre was helping
the Central Fisheries Board to create a sense of its changing identity in our conversation. At
the same time the Centre was being transformed and we could each glimpse possible futures.
Teacher Professional DevelopmentA New Partner on Board
When we agreed with CFB to write the materials, the Education Centre undertook to
organise the necessary teacher professional development at our own expense. This would

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be a cost to the Centre and we hoped that we would be able to persuade other Education
Centre colleagues in the Irish network to also take part. While thinking about it, I had a
conversation with Jean Hughes, a colleague from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology
(IADT DL), our neighbour in Dun Laoghaire. Jean had just completed a training course
with Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada and chaired the eLearning interest
group in IADT. We discussed whether we might try out our fish project as an eLearning
initiative: IADT had the software and the technical skills; we had the content and the clients.
The content was well written and designed with a curriculum focus so it was relatively
easy to present on the web. We decided to explore the possibility of providing teacher
professional development as a web-based project, something we hadnt considered at the
beginning.
Once again there had been no master plan, just the judgement that could recognise an
opportunity that we had co-created in conversation. The Education Centre has taken some
pride in being in the vanguard in relation to some developments in ICTs in education in the
past. We had not yet been involved in eLearning for teachers, or as we put it, integrating
ICTs into teacher learning. We were also of course conscious of the interest the Department
of Education and Science (DES) had in eLearning and here was a wonderful opportunity to
explore it. The CFB had paid for the materials development and the Centre was partnering
with IADT a college with unique expertise in digital media to add a dimension to our work
that we hadnt explored before. Unexpectedly, we were now talking about possibly the first
indigenously designed bi-lingual eLearning project for Irish teachers.
We wanted to pilot the materials and we sought the collaboration of colleagues in other
Education Centres. 17 of us turned up in the IADT on a cold November morning to take part
in the training. All of the teachers had some experience of ICTs and were enthusiastic about
active environmental learning. None had experience of eLearning. At that initial meeting,
Jean agreed to be on line for chat and discussion during the week. The time chosen was
unusual and for me unexpected: when the kids are in bed9.00 to 10.00 pm. Mondays and
Wednesdays. Its not a time that we would have thought of for teacher training.
Once the on-line chat started it became apparent that the materials were being used in
ways which we hadnt expected. Intended as a teachers resource, the teachers quickly began
to use the online material in the classroom and got a remarkably positive response from the
children. We began to think that the electronic version of our project would take precedence
over the hard copy in the classroom. That was curious because, in our first conversation with
the Central Fisheries Board, a poster and worksheets were the intended outcomes, and we
hadnt even considered using the internet. Once again the conversation between participants
was setting the direction of the project in unexpected ways. This continued over several
months of the pilot.
We met with the teachers on a further occasion to reflect on what we had learnt, and
to speculate on where we might go next. It was evident from our discussions that the
current form of the resource was not well suited to childrens use. This wasnt altogether
surprising because what we had put on the web had been designed for teachers and it
was on the teachers initiative that it had been used in the classroom before it had been
modified. We were asked why more animation and video hadnt been included. The answer
was simple: we had designed the resource for production as hard copy and had been put

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on the web for teacher training in a pilot project. The issues which were coming up had
to do with the capabilities of another medium and schools didnt have the bandwidth
but could Something Fishy act as a driver for broadband in schools? This wasnt entirely
speculative because the Central Fisheries Board is under the control of the Department
of Communications, Natural Resources and the Marine, and the Secretary General of the
Department, who had seen the project had expressed great interest.
Other comments included the observation that Something Fishy should be used as a stimulus for other classroom work, rather than being studied exclusively as a generic project on
fish: that students should be encouraged to explore aspects of their own local environment as
a response to using the material we had devised. In fact several of the teachers recommended
that the web based materials not be too well finished: it should be up to the teacher and her
class to add their own material. If it were too polished, there would be less inclination to engage with it. A question I was concerned about was whether the exercise we had engaged in
could be described as professional development at all. Hadnt the professional development
dimension been lost as the teachers resource had been translated into a classroom resource
straight away? One teacher responded with the very acute observation that the professional
development was taking place in the classroom. Another referred to the chat rooms as a
learning environment. None of them had used chat rooms before and not all used it in the
course of the pilot project. This led me back again to my earlier observation that it is in the
engagement that we are giving shape to our learning: the Education Centre and IADT are
learning about eLearning by doing it. Teachers are learning to use web based resources in
the classroom by doing it. Something Fishy has also prompted several pieces of research:
one participant is doing a Masters thesis on it and a lecturer in IADT has used it for student
research in a course on instructional design.
Arising from these conversations with teachers and with colleagues in other Education
Centres, other opportunities have begun to emerge. The Blackrock Education Centre and
IADT will collaborate in a teacher professional development course in July which will focus
on the creation of locally developed resources which will supplement the resources provided
by Something Fishy. But well do it in a different way to anything weve tried before:
the participants will be trained in the use of digital media and in the use of instructional
design software (Web CT) and will then be required to produce their own resources in their
local environments. The course will be offered at the same time in three widely dispersed
Education Centres linked by video conferencing over a period of the week of July 5th9th.
Teachers in each of the three locations will work in their own environments and collaborate
and share with colleagues in other parts of the country. The intention is that they will learn
to develop digital media resources based on the natural environment in their own localities,
and do so in a collaborative interaction with colleagues in other parts of the country. It will
be a course in instructional design using ICT and based on resources in their own immediate
locality, using Something Fishy as a stimulus.
Another interesting suggestion brings us back to the afternoon we met the CFB officials: in organising a local course during the summer shouldnt we invite the local fisheries
officers to take part to assist in identifying local resources and opportunities for continuing cooperation. This would make a lot of sense in addressing our original objective of
making the work of the CFB better known to school children, but it would also make it

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possible to form the local relationship that would help in bringing the curriculum out of the
classroom.
A complex process
Looking back it will probably look as if Blackrock Education Centre, IADT and the Central
Fisheries Board had set out to design an eLearning project, but of course we didnt, and
given that it has been such a dynamic project to date, we are reluctant to speculate on
any final state. There is a real sense of our not knowing what we are doing. However
there is something extraordinarily exciting about engaging with our not knowing in going
forward. It is in engaging with our not knowing that we co-create new knowledge in
continuous interaction with our many collaborators. And the range of those taking part in
the conversations is increasing: the children who took part in the pilot project contributed
directly, by way of email and through sharing their experiences with their teachers. The
project is being shaped by the users, teachers and students in the very process of using
it. Lessons have been revised on the suggestion of users, and the recent announcement
of broadband to all schools encourages us to explore the addition of video and animation
during the coming months.
We dont know much about eLearning as a tool in teacher professional development,
but were learning as we use it in a process of continuous transformation in conversation.
I think of it as continuous co-creation of identity. And all of us are creating our identity:
obvious institutional partners are the Blackrock Education Centre, the Central Fisheries
Board, the IADT, Dun Laoghaire, and indeed the Primary Curriculum Support Programme
whose curriculum acts as an enabling constraint on our course design. But also participating
in this transformative process are all the groups and individuals whose sense of themselves
and the sense that others make of us is changing in unforeseen and unpredictable ways.
Stacey et al. (2000) describe organisations as complex responsive processes of relating
within the causal framework of transformative teleology. By describing human organising in
this way they are challenging taken for granted assumptions about causality and agency.
Organisational change can best be understood, not as the outcome of rational decisionmaking by senior management, nor as the unfolding of some mature form of an already
existing state. They contend that the future is continually under construction in the present,
what they call transformative teleology, teleology meaning final cause. This means that the
relational processes of communication are themselves actively constructing the future in
the present and that the future is unknowable in advance:
Throughout, the process is characterised by the paradox of the known-unknown and
in it emerges the aims people formulate, the goals they set, the intentions they form
and the choices they make. What is being expressed here is individual and collective
identity at the same time (Stacey et al., 2000:188,9).
The process I have described seems to me to be a much better indicator of how strategy
emerges in an organisation and of how we learn our way forward in practice, than any pat
description of a finished and polished initiative.

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