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Higher education institutions are facing an increasing demand to collaborate with each other in the knowledge economy. Yet, research on how higher education management enhances collaborative work is rare. This paper takes research collaboration as an example and presents a provisional exploration initiated by a higher education institution in Singapore to enhance collaborations among researchers within the institution. The paper first explores three key challenges (i.e., harnessing differences, avoiding counterproductive coercing of collaborations, and optimizing team size) and introduces a social network perspective as a means to understand research collaboration. It uses analytic tools from Social Network Analysis to provide insight into the patterns and dynamics of collaborations among researchers within the institution. The insights are used to inform the institution's formulation of strategies to enhance research collaboration, including strategies for research development, research community engagement and talent retention. Critical considerations are given to the ways in which management might adopt and adapt a social network perspective to facilitate collaborative work in higher education. Exploring the utility of social theories and tools for enhancing collaborative work in higher education contributes to 'importing' theories to higher education research, particularly the institutional management and the knowledge and research themes of higher education research.

Research management is an emerging field of study and its development is significant to the advancement of research enterprise. Developing the science of research management requires investigating social mechanisms involved in research management. Yet, studies on social mechanisms of research management is lacking in the literature. To address this gap, this paper proposes importing methodologies and theories from other social science disciplines to study the social mechanisms of research management and to build the science of research management. The paper first articulates what constitutes the science of research management, then proposes to appropriate Design-Based Research (DBR), a methodology in education research, for building the science of research management while at the same time strengthening the theory-practice nexus. A study of education research is then presented to illustrate how DBR is used to enact the theory of homophily which is imported from sociology. It reveals an opportunity to use social designs to develop social relationships among teachers from different schools for networked learning. Such a research endeavour also has potential to advance theories of relationship-building in sociology. Inferring from the example as an analogue to what is suggested for research management, the paper advocates a way to reciprocally connect research management as an emerging research field with more established social science disciplines at large and to advance both the theory and practice of research management.

This article reflects on the landscape of ICT-mediated learning research in Singapore schools over the past 12 years. This ICT (information and communications technology) journey is situated in the context of the Singapore education Masterplans and the inception of substantive research funding in this area of work since 2003. The article questions the fallacy of "If You Build It, They Will Come." "Building it first" may be necessary for key strategic purposes in order to nudge the education system forward. In the journey, centralized top-down support complements decentralized bottom-up initiatives. The policy of "top down support for bottom up initiatives" is discussed. ICT-mediated learning as implemented by teachers and schools, while at the same time supported by enabling policies, is key to the endeavor. Making visible process (bottom up) interactions that occur in such learnings would enable (top down) policies to be more adequately targeted.

Successful analogical reasoning requires an analogue in a source domain to have high degrees of structural and surface similarity with a learning task in a target domain. It also requires learners to have sufficient source- and target-domain knowledge. We review the literature and speculate that "less" might create "more"; in some situations, analogies that have fewer degrees of similarity may be more effective for learning. In this exploratory study, we engaged eight school leaders in dyads to develop a bottom-up perspective on innovation diffusion through analogical reasoning. The qualitative data in the study appear to echo our speculation. The dyads that have less prior target-domain knowledge face challenges with regard to innovation diffusion when they learn with analogues that have more degrees of similarity -- both structural and surface. They, however, are able to learn with analogues that have fewer degrees of similarity. Learning was shown to take place when the dyads reflected on an analogue first, before they compared the analogue and innovation diffusion to make any analogical inferences. Although constrained by the exploratory nature of the study, the findings provide preliminary evidence that "less" is possible to create "more" in analogical reasoning under certain conditions, implying an interesting direction for experimental examination in future.

The COVID-19 pandemic is compressing the timeline for Singapore's digital transformation in education. Reflecting on the implementation of Home-Based Learning (HBL) during the pandemic, we examine three barriers that inhibit digital transformation and technological implementation in education with leadership considerations: the first order barrier is infrastructural and can be mitigated by leadership foresight; the second order barrier concerns design capabilities of teachers which can be mitigated by tight-but-loose calibration; and the third order barrier deals with sustainability which can be mitigated by ecological leadership. The tight-but-loose calibration optimises the 'tight' system-led innovations such as Student Learning Space (SLS) for efficient deployment and for equitable access of high quality online resources for students; and 'loose' opportunities for teacher-led innovations on learning designs within and beyond system-led innovations to nurture teacher agency and professionalism. We posit that ecological leadership is key to sustaining deep change together with the 'tight-but-loose' system calibration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions are facing an increasing demand to collaborate with each other in the knowledge economy. Yet, research on how higher education management enhances collaborative work is rare. This paper takes research collaboration as an example and presents a provisional exploration initiated by a higher education institution in Singapore to enhance collaborations among researchers within the institution. The paper first explores three key challenges (i.e., harnessing differences, avoiding counterproductive coercing of collaborations, and optimizing team size) and introduces a social network perspective as a means to understand research collaboration. It uses analytic tools from Social Network Analysis to provide insight into the patterns and dynamics of collaborations among researchers within the institution. The insights are used to inform the institution's formulation of strategies to enhance research collaboration, including strategies for research development, research community engagement and talent retention. Critical considerations are given to the ways in which management might adopt and adapt a social network perspective to facilitate collaborative work in higher education. Exploring the utility of social theories and tools for enhancing collaborative work in higher education contributes to 'importing' theories to higher education research, particularly the institutional management and the knowledge and research themes of higher education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]