Research

Last week I went to a seminar on research. Boring? Dry? No! The seminar was titled "Research in professional education, there's more possible than you think" and was run by Bas Haring and Maarten Lamers. Bas Haring is best known of the two, but they make a great couple and complement eachother seamlessly.

The angle of the seminar was that the universities of applied science (which in the Netherlands are just getting started with research) shouldn't try to emulate what the research universities are doing for centuries. Instead we should make use of our own strengths to find new subjects and research them in creative new ways.

For me the biggest takeaway however was an enhanced vision of what research is, separated from how it's done. Another big point we kind of discovered as a group is the confusion between "uitzoeken" and "onderzoeken". (Trying to translate these in English doesn't resolve the confusion.) Probably a lot of activities which are called 'onderzoek' in reality are 'uitzoeken'.
Finally I also have some ideas about how to integrate research in our curriculum. That might be useful because the rest of the organisation is kinda struggling with that. :-)