Cyber-Social Research: Emerging Paradigms for Interventionist Education Research in the Postdigital Era

This chapter explores the processes of research-informed educational intervention and change at a time when much teaching and learning is pervasively mediated by digital tools and environments. Drawing on theories and practices of design research and agile research, we propose a model that we term ‘cyber-social research’. For this, we draw inspiration from ‘agile’ software development processes, adapting these to interventionist projects designed for education reform in the postdigital era. We outline a theory of agile research and present a case study of an educational intervention that uses agile, cyber-social research methods. For this, we describe a project that designs and evaluates the effectiveness of an innovative, browser-based concept mapping and peer review tool. This example demonstrates the significance of cyber-social research methods that harness the affordances of the digital, integrating agile and design research principles for learning in the postdigital age.