Design framwork:
Wenger (1998)
Design: The challenge of design, then, is to support the work of engagement, imagination, and alignment.
Engagement: As a context for learning, engagement is not just a matter of activity, but of community building, inventiveness, social energy, and emergent knowledgeability. To support these processes, an infrastructure of engagement should include facilities of mutuality, competence, and continuity.
Imagination: It takes imagination in order for learning to encompass and deal with a broader context. Toward this end, an infrastructure of imagination should inclued facilities of orientation, reflection, and exploration.
Alignment: Through alignment, we can learn to have effects and contribute to tasks that are defined beyond our engagement. In order to make this possible, an infrastructure of alignment should include facilities of convergence, coordination, and jurisdiction.
Goodyear (2002):
Space & Place, Organisation & Community, Task & Activity
Each designed space is inhabited by students and teachers who constitute the places in which learning takes place.
Organisational rules and rules of etiquette can be provided for online or face-to-face interactions. What cannot be designed is the community that may or may not develop from these. We are sure many of you will have had the experience of the same organisational or structural forms having different outcomes when inhabited by different cohorts of students.
Designers set tasks, which are prescriptions for the work the students are expected to do, while the activity is what students actually do.
Students construct their setting, their own learning context, out of the technology and infrastructure, the other tasks they have to face, other calls on their time, their past experiences and their understanding of what their teachers actually value and these factors range much more broadly than the design itself.