Investigation vs. Individualization

I think both Jeff and Tess do an excellent job of summarizing, synthesizing, translating, and explaining the “Five Pedagogical Principles” outlined by Hewett and Ehmann. In particular, I really like Jeff’s point about individualization where the preparation of the students and the persona of the instructor (in large part) play a role in how successful a given lesson will be and explain why there are no “one-size-fits-all” pedagogies (in online instruction or elsewhere). Indeed, Jeff’s discussion on this notion of swapping pedagogical techniques amongst colleagues is something straight out of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field, which describes most of the research of practitioners (i.e. composition teachers) as “lore,” or “…the accumulated body of traditions, practice, and beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned, and taught” (22). This sounds legitimate enough, but North paints this kind of pedagogy (and research) in a negative light because of its unreliability (hence, the need for more investigation with an empirical bent). In relation to online teaching and investigation, I agree that more empirical study is needed and perhaps we as practitioners are the ones to do it, but (as Jeff mentions) the constraints on our time only allow us to investigation through gradual experimentation and implementation of online technology. So, the question then becomes how far removed from individualization is this form of investigation (where the instructor is learning bits and pieces of technology by collecting data from their own classrooms)? Did I misread what you were driving at Jeff? Thoughts?