pedagogy
eLearning Papers 27 Designing for learning. Call for submissions open!
The 27th edition will focus on Designing for learning. How can teachers develop new approaches to the design of learning activities and whole curricula that takes account of the new complex, technologically enhanced learning contexts? Deadline for submissions: 21 October 2011. Publication foreseen in December 2011. Guest editor: Gráinne Conole, University of Leicester, Head of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance.
New open, social and participatory media clearly have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. The emergence of these technologies has shifted practice on the Internet away from passive, information provision to active, user engagement. They offer learners and teachers a plethora of ways to communicate and collaborate; to connect with a distributed network of peers, and to find and manipulate information. In addition there are now a significant range of free educational resources and tools. However despite this, technologies are still only used marginally in an educational context. Learners and teachers lack the necessary digital literacy skills to harness these new technologies.
This new learning context raises some thought-provoking issues. In a world where content and services are increasingly free, what is the role of formal education? What new teaching approaches and assessment methods are needed? How can we provide effective learning pathways to guide learners through the multitude of educational offerings now available? How can teachers develop new approaches to the design of learning activities and whole curricula that takes account of this new complex, technologically enhanced context? What assessment strategies are appropriate?
Falconer and Littlejohn (2008, p. 20) argue that there are three challenges facing teachers: i) the increasing size and diversity of the student body, ii) the increasing requirement for quality assurance, and iii) the rapid pace of technological change. Conole (2004) has argued that there is a gap between the promise and reality of the use of technology in education and that there is little evidence that education has changed fundamentally.
Much use of technology appears to simply replicate bad classroom practice resulting in simple Web page turning (Oliver, 2000). Similarly Masterman (2008a, p.210) argues that the lack of uptake of technologies is due to a number of factors: lack of awareness of the possibilities, technophobia, lack of time to explore the use of technologies, aversion to the risks inherent in experimentation and fear of being supplanted by the computer. Agostinho et al. (2008: 381) suggest that the uptake of the use of high-quality ICT-based learning designs in higher education has been slow.
Factors include: low levels of dissemination of ICT-based learning projects, lack of ICT-based learning examples to model, lack of time, support and training. Sawyer (2006, p. 8) argues that the impact of the significant investment in computers in schools has been disappointing. There are few studies that show that computer use is correlated with improved student performance. Similarly Koedinger and Corbett (2008, p. 61) write that as new technologies have emerged many hoped that they would have a radically transformative effect on education, but in reality the impact was much less than expected.
The gap between the potential and actual use of technology is a paradox and this is at the heart of the growth of a new area of research that has emerged in recent years. Learning design research aims to better understand this mismatch. It focuses on the development of tools, design methods and approaches to help teachers design pedagogically effective learning activities and whole curriculum, which make effective use of technologies.
Two recent edited collections provide a useful overview of the field of learning design (Beetham and Sharpe, 2007; Lockyer et al., 2008). Conole (forthcoming) defines learning design as follows:
A methodology for enabling teachers/designers to make more informed decisions in how they go about designing learning activities and interventions, which is pedagogically informed and makes effective use of appropriate resources and technologies. This includes the design of resources and individual learning activities right up to curriculum-level design. A key principle is to help make the design process more explicit and shareable. Learning design as an area of research and development includes both gathering empirical evidence to understand the design process, as well as the development of a range of learning design resource, tools and activities.
This call focusses on learning design. Learning design as a term is being used in a number of different ways, this special issues aims to clarify these different perspectives. Arguably, designing for learning is one of the key challenges facing education today; it offers a potential solution to address some of the challenges outlined above. It provides a methodology to help guide and support teachers in the creation of effective learning interventions and resources, which harness the potential of social and participatory media. Papers are welcome on any aspects of learning design, some suggested areas of focus are listed below:
- What are the implications of new social and participatory media for education and how can they be harnessed more effectively to support learning?
- What are the different ways in which learning interventions can be represented?
- How can social networking and other dialogic tools be used to enable teachers to share and discuss their learning and teaching practices, ideas and designs?
- What are the implications for learners, teachers and institutions of new social and participatory media?
- What new pedagogies are emerging as a result of the use of new social and participatory media?
- How are Open Educational Resources being design, used and repurposed?
- What are the implications for formal institutions of the increasingly availability of free resources, tools and even total educational offerings, such as Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)?
Papers of the follow types are welcome:
- Reviews of aspects of the latest learning design results.
- Empirical studies and evaluations of learning design interventions.
- Policy papers and briefings, particularly looking at the implications of new social and participatory media for learning and teaching.
- Papers on different learning design methodologies and representations.
- Reports and evaluation on learning design visualisation tools.
- Reports and evaluations of pedagogical planners.
- Empirical studies on the nature of social and participatory media, their key characteristics and how they can be used by learners and teachers.
- Case studies on how learners and teachers are using technologies and associated design implications.
- Theoretical underpinnings of the field of learning design.
- The relationship between learning theories and learning design.
- Critiques of the relationship between learning design and related fields, such as instructional design, pedagogical patterns and learning sciences.
The article submission closes on October 21, 2011 The provisional date of publication is December 2011.
For further information and to submit your article, please contact: jimena.marquez@elearningpapers.eu
Guest editor
Professor Gráinne Conole, University of Leicester, UK.
See the complete guidelines at: Instructions for writers
Engage Project: Sharing Experience from Game Based Learning Dissemination Workshops
With this contribution, rather than providing definitive solutions, we intend to share knowledge obtained from the cross sectoral implementation of more than 15 workshops carried out as part of ENGAGE portal activities.
We hope our reflections on what contributes to the success of a workshop and our discussion of some of the challenges that might emerge, may be helpful for those willing to use workshops as a methodology to promote Game Based Learning with teachers/trainers in a particular context.
TESI - Teoría de la Educación. Educación y Cultura en la Sociedad de la Información
TESI es una revista cuyo campo de estudio es el impacto cultural del desarrollo de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación en los procesos de formación, el imaginario cultural, los discursos educativos, los escenarios de formación y las prácticas pedagógicas.
Génération Y et gestion publique
Thème 4 : Réinventer la formation ? Quelles sont les attentes de la génération Y en termes de formation ? Quelle pédagogie, quelle durée, quelles modalités sont les mieux adaptées à ce public souvent bien informé ? Quel est le bon équilibre entre formation initiale et formation continue ?
From cheating to teaching: a path for conversion of illegal gambling machines
Video poker machines, a former symbol of fraud and gambling in Brazil, are now being converted into computer-based educational tools for Brazilian public primary schools and also for governmental and non-governmental institutions dealing with communities of poverty and social exclusion, in an attempt to reduce poverty risks (decrease money spent on gambling) and promote social inclusion (increase access and motivation to education).
Thousands of illegal gambling machines are seized by federal authorities, in Brazil, every year, and usually destroyed at the end of the criminal apprehension process.
This paper describes a project developed by the University of Southern Santa Catarina, Brazil, responsible for the conversion process of gambling machines, and the social inclusion opportunities derived from it. All project members worked on a volunteer basis, seeking to promote social inclusion of Brazilian young boys and girls, namely through digital inclusion. So far, the project has been able to convert over 200 gambling machines and install them in over 40 public primary schools, thus directly benefiting more than 12,000 schoolchildren.
The initial motivation behind this project was technology based, however the different options arising from the conversion process of the gambling machines have also motivated a rather innovative and unique experience in allowing schoolchildren and young people with special (educational) needs to access to computer-based pedagogical applications.
The availability of these converted machines also helps to place Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the very daily educational environment of these children and youngsters, thus serving social and cultural inclusion aspects, by establishing a dialogue with the community and their technological expectations, and also directly contributing to their digital literacy.
From analog to digital: new ways of teaching and learning. A quick view of ICT in Spanish schools
We part from the basis that in many cases Spanish schools are still working with an analog paradigm of understanding education. That means, among many other things, that schools are still attached and enslaved to a rigid schedule: they base teaching resources (too many textbooks) to fixed forms of assessing, they use very little globalized knowledge, and work within very specific learning spaces (classrooms). In today´s Spanish classrooms the use of ICT is minimal. We could give many examples of schools which continue to have a 19th century philosophy (industrial) rather than a 21st century viewpoint (informational), but many authors -not in vain- have already argued that today we have schools from the 19th century, teachers from the 20th century and students from the 21st century.
In the first part of this paper we make a brief summary of the relationship between society and technology and, consequently, we identify some previous assumptions which will allow us to understand better the current socio-educational context regarding ICT. In the second part we see the different characteristics that define this transitional stage of an analog school becoming a digital one. Finally, we end up with a series of proposals to make digital schools a close reality.
Visual and pedagogical design of eLearning content
To assimilate and interpret the (mainly) visual content, learners in technology-based environments develop a series of psychological processes such as visual perception, attention, understanding, motivation, memory, thinking and conscience. In order to provide a significant learning situation, effective design must rely on several basic principles aiming to support the participants’ confidence and comfort, but mostly their learning performance.
Pedagogical design requires decisions on specific procedures and rules in every step of the process, from the choice of the learning objectives to the choice of the assessment strategies.
The basic visual and pedagogical design ideas presented in this article are meant to constitute a support for further reflection and an invitation to reconsider, expand and empirically validate the theoretical foundation of eLearning, especially concerning a very much evoked and a less clarified issue: how digital resources and new web tools improve the quality of learning.
Task-based learning and ICT: creative activities in the context of a European project
In this paper we describe two activities proposed by the Italian team that well illustrate the spirit of this project. Though different in aspects concerning the length of the activities, the content knowledge addressed, the kind of tasks proposed and the ICT tools used, the examples we describe share several qualities. In both cases students were asked to create a particular product according to their interests and experiences and directed to a public outside the classroom, and therefore real. In both cases they were also requested to use creativity and they were totally free to conduct the activity, leading them to feel protagonists and responsible for their own outcomes. Both activities can be easily adapted to different educational situations, because their strength depends on the underlying ideas more than on the products developed.
The innovation of these examples is not the methodology nor the technology applied, but rather the way they are used. These examples suggest that working in inventive ways may actually be effective and not difficult nor expensive to implement. To this end, teachers need to use creativity in their pedagogical planning and learn to look at ordinary tools with different eyes.
Pedagogical Songs: learn by doing game based activities
Students of this course are reminded that the aim of the project is not only to create a technological product, but to understand and use some of the educational contributions made by different psychological models, such as behaviourism, information processing, social learning, constructivism or psycho-instructional theories. In short, with this project students face a structured activity, guided by the teacher and carried out with the collaboration of other colleagues; it is clearly focused on a specific content of the school curriculum and the learning objectives of the students. Finally, it takes advantage of the potential computing offers in the design of activities, taking also into account the previous knowledge of students.
The main conclusion of this initiative is that beyond complex technological teaching methods, the use of more basic and less powerful tools can be quite effective in order to achieve our real objective: the psychodidactic integration of ICT into school life.
The full text of this article is available in English and Spanish.The Spanish version is made possible thanks to our partner, the Organisation of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI). // El texto integro de este artículo está disponible en inglés y castellano. La versión castellana ha sido posible gracias a nuestro socio, la Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (OEI).