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AbstractChange models revolve around communication between designers and adopters, but the processes involved are far less often the focus of our scholarship. We present design conversation as an inclusive, participatory avenue to designing educational changes and as a legitimate focus of design scholarship. Design conversation sits apart from other forms of communication, such as dialectic conversation and discussions, in which opinions are staked out and defended. Design conversation is a group endeavour where a group searches for common meaning and designs a new entity. Design conversation is linked here to the need for a systems approach to educational change. We discuss this need; describe the nature of design conversation, its theoretical foundation in systems thinking and its use for educational systems design. The direction and nature of communication in selected change models is then compared to design conversation and, finally, its implications for educational systems design are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Based on initial content analysis research into the semiotics of advertising for online learning, this paper extends our understanding of the commodification of education via the web by carefully examining the implications of this marketing on the goals of democracy, the just distribution of education and knowledge as resources, and the consequent impact on social justice and equity.

This article presents and discusses Accidental Ethnography (AccE), a methodology for practitioners to examine past experiences and contribute their findings to scholarly discourse. Accidental ethnography is the systematic analysis of prior fieldwork. It utilizes extant data "accidentally" gathered (i.e. the data were not collected as part of a predesigned study) to provide insight into a phenomenon, culture, or way of life. The accidental ethnography method—a nascent method in research literature—was developed to provide a means of in-depth exploration of past practitioner learning experiences beyond personal reflection. This article organizes, advances, and systematizes an accidental ethnography method for practitioner–researchers. We propose here a method that encompasses broader intentionality on the part of the researcher and a potentially unorthodox chronology of steps in the ethnographic research process. For practitioners in education, where much is learned through action and reflection, accidental ethnography offers a methodological approach for rigorous reflective research by front-line practitioners who have traditionally had difficulty finding time to make rigorous contributions to the discipline. This article introduces the methodological approach, elaborates the accidental ethnography research process, situates the method within action research methodology, and provides an example of an accidental ethnography project.