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This title draws on research into educational research networks in schools, colleges and informal education settings to explore hw researchers can engage in networks and carry out research on networks and networking.

The educational world is increasingly dominated by 'network rhetoric'; not only are teachers and learners seen as participants in networks, the availability of low-cost electronic devices, collaborative environments and new forms of data 'born digital' have changed the nature of education research. How can researchers and research-informed practitioners best engage in and with networks and develop effective networking practices? How might networks and networking be conceptualized in order to frame and support their work in and on networks? How do networks relate to existing organizational forms and how might new networking practices emerge? This book draws on extensive research into educational research networks in schools, colleges and informal education settings to explore these questions. Carmichael combines theoretical insights into networks from different disciplinary backgrounds and awareness of technological developments, with the accounts of teachers, researchers, and technologists. He considers how educational research as a field is changing, how individual and collective research capacities might develop, identifies new research approaches and discusses the emerging role of the 'researcher-networker'.

Chronology on the south coast of Peru is adrift. Researchers have a choice of using developmental stages or historical periods. Increasingly, fuzzy thinking has led to the publication of chronologies employing both stages and periods in the same chart. Authors seem unaware that stages and periods are fundamentally different ways of organizing the past, underpinned by different sets of assumptions which ask different questions. The current work is specifically concerned with the relative chronologies for the south coast Paracas and Nasca cultures, but it also reviews the fundamental principles of stages and periods, examines the workings of John Rowe's Master Sequence, and provides clear definitions for terminology. In conclusion, an updated chronology for the south coast Early Horizon and Early Intermediate Period is introduced.

In the twenty-first century, what could be more important than networks? Such is the power of their influence and attendant technologies that it is unsurprising that our thinking about networks is permeated with images and metaphors from electronic networks. This orientation may equally influence thinking about education, whether that is of students or teachers. Researching and Understanding Educational Networks extends the discussion of educational networks in a unique and novel way by relating it to teacher learning. Following an investigation of teacher and school networks in the UK, the authors found that theoretical perspectives taken from existing work on such networks were not adequate to provide an understanding of their potential, nor to provide the basis for researching them in ways that reflected the variety of teacher experience. This book presents analyses of the problems with existing theories of teacher learning, which for example draw on ideas of 'communities of practice', and explores what network theories can be brought to the problem of how teachers and schools create and share new knowledge about practice. Innovative networking theories discussed include: social network analysis social capital theories actor-network theory investigations of electronic networks including computer-meditated conferencing how people learn at events such as conferences. Researching and Understanding Educational Networks explores a new application of networks theories derived from quite different fields of work, and extends it both by being concerned about networks beyond organisations and specifically about educational networks. Their application to educational networks, and to teacher learning in particular, is a unique contribution of the book. This enables it to be of interest to both researchers and those studying for higher degrees, including students who are professionals working in schools. Robert McCormick is Professor of Education at the Department of Education, The Open University. Alison Fox is at the Department of Education, University of Cambridge. Patrick Carmichael is Professor of Educational Research at the Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure, Liverpool John Moores University. Richard Procter is a research student at the Institute of Education, London. Chapter 1. Educational Policy and Technological Contexts Chapter 2. Theorising Networks Chapter 3. Teacher Learning Chapter 4. Mapping Networks Chapter 5. Network Nodes: entities or relationships? Chapter 6. Network Links: interactions or transactions? Chapter 7. Network Traffic: creation and sharing Chapter 8. Networks in Context: spatial and temporal issues Chapter 9. Case Studies Chapter 10. Electronic Networks and Teacher Learning Chapter 11. Implications

There are parallels between the post-Marxist traditions of operaismo (workerism) and autonomism and emerging ideas about the ‘postdigital’. Operaist analyses and approaches, and particularly the work of Romano Alquati on co-research, have the potential to contribute to discourses as to what might be involved in postdigital inquiry in educational settings, and to better understand of critical data literacies. For such educational inquiry to evolve into a comprehensive strategy of ‘co-research’, it is argued that what is needed are models of teacher inquiry with the potential to challenge dominant rhetorics, to support emancipatory research and development, and to establish the postdigital as a counter-hegemonic educational programme.

Interdisciplinary working is often understood as involving individuals or teams from different disciplines to engage with common problems, but this has proved to be an enduring challenge. An alternative framing of interdisciplinary working is Hall's ‘culture of inquiry’, in which it is conceptualised as narrative creation in an environment of formative critique. This paper explores the relevance and applicability of this idea to educational research and development, specifically in the context of purportedly interdisciplinary TEL projects. It draws on the author's experience in projects in which multiple narratives — pedagogical, technological and social — have the potential to contribute to both to individual and collective understanding and the development of new practice.

Accounts of how research capacity in education can be developed often make reference to electronic networks and online resources. This paper presents a theoretically driven analysis of the role of one such resource, an online archive of educational research studies that includes not only digitised collections of original documents but also videos of contextual interviews with the original researchers, linked and presented using emerging 'semantic web' technologies. An exploration with a group of early career researchers in education of how the archive might be used to support their own research activities is reported: this suggests that thinking about such online resources as elements of heterogeneous 'assemblages' may be useful in their design and in understanding their role in research training and research networks more generally.

The increasing popularity of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the availability of software capable of reading and editing XML documents present opportunities for Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) facilities to be incorporated into \"groupware\" applications such as collaborative workspaces and \"document bases\", and to be made available across networks both within organisations and across the Internet. Collaborative systems have, in the past, characteristically, been geared to retrieve and present whole documents, and while annotation and discussion of documents has been possible within such systems, the \"pencil-level\" analysis commonplace in CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) has been lacking. XML, when combined with a scripting language such as Perl, can be used to offer basic QDA functionality--retrieval by text and codes, attachment of memos to text fragments, and the generation of summary data--via a standard web-browser. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0202134

The origins and endings of Nasca culture lie with the appearance, florescence, and termination of Nasca religion (south-coastal Peru, Early Intermediate Period, ca. 100 B.C.-A.D. 600). Elaborate, polychrome iconography on ceramic vessels reveals a pantheon of supernatural creatures representing the materialized ideology of Nasca worldview. This article takes an iconographic approach to examine the origins of Nasca religion by tracing the central deity-the Masked Being-the most complex, common, and constant figure of the painted designs. It is demonstrated that the predecessor of the Masked Being was the Paracas Oculate Being, which originated in the Ocucaje Basin of the Ica Valley. Both deities were the icons of severed-head (huayo) cults. Archaeological examples of the diadem always painted on Masked Being motifs are seldom found outside of Ocucaje and the Paracas Peninsula cemeteries, where they date to Paracas Phase 10. Paracas ancestors, migrating from the Ocucaje Basin during the Necrópolis Era (ca. 100 B.C.-A.D. 100), brought a religion and severed-head cult, which on the Nazca frontier morphed into a new belief system conducive to new social and environmental circumstances. It is proposed that, in the southern region during Early Nasca times, religion facilitated a subsistence strategy of gardening and gathering combined with herding, hunting, and residential mobility as an adaptation to a hyper-arid desert environment subject to droughts and flash floods. This study advocates a multi-regional approach to Nasca archaeology by developing independent chronologies, ceramic seriations, and culture histories for each region.