Beetham's article and notes on the key concept
v Development of design principles from theories of how people learn and how can be applied to learning with digital technologies.
v It is the activity that the learner engages in and the outcomes of that activity that are significant for learning.
v Design for learning should therefore focus primarily on the activities undertaken by learners and only secondarily on the tools or materials that support them.
v Learners need opportunities to make a newly acquired concept or skill their own: to draw on their own strengths and preferences and to extend their repertoire of approaches to task requirements.
v There is a need for integration across activities, whether:
o Associatively: building component skills into extended performance
o Constructively: integrating skills and knowledge, planning and reflecting
o Situatively: developing identities and roles
v A learning activity is an entity that is meaningful to the learner, given his or her current level of expertise.
v Different issues in activity design:
o Authenticity of the activity
o Formality and structure
o Retention/reproduction Vs reflection/internalization
o The role and importance of other people
o Locus of control
v Defining a learning activity: it can be defined as a specific interaction of learner (s) with other (s) using specific tools and resources, orientated towards specific outcomes.
v Examples of learning activities might include solving problems, comparing and evaluating arguments, presenting facts or negotiating goals.
v Jonassen classification of activities:
o Rule based-associative learning
o Strategy based-constructive learning
o Role based-situative learning
v Designing for learning outcomes: learning outcomes are typically expressed in the form learners will be able to (verb) (qualification) where the verb describes the kind of activity that learners will undertake (e.g. solve, describe) and the qualification describes the context, scope or method to be used (e.g. solve equations of the type X).
v It has been argued that the current generation of digital technologies is better situated to open-ended outcomes that the technologies of the Instructional Design era. Simulations and virtual environments are used to foster exploration rather than a linear progression through materials.
v Individual learning logs and e-portfolios allow learners to collate evidence towards broadly defined learning loads and to reflect on their progress.
v Collaborative technologies and VLEs can be used to capture dialogue, bringing to light the processes as well as the outcomes of learning.
o A more broadly defined outcome leads to wider range of activities that need to receive support and feedback.
v The resulting designs may be highly learner-centred, but only if there are sufficient teaching resources to support them effectively.
v Designing for learners:
o The aim is to make all learning facilities adaptive to individual needs (Dagger et al. 2005).
o Depending on the task and context, it may be necessary to consider learners':
§ Subject-specific experience, knowledge and competence
§ Access needs, including any physical and sensory disabilities
§ Motives for learning and expectations of the learning situation
§ Prior experience of learning, including the specific model (I.e. online)
§ Preferred approaches to learning
§ Social and interpersonal skills
§ Confidence and competence in the use of information and communication technology (ICT)
v Learners cannot be treated as a bundle of disparate needs: they are actors, not factors, in the learning situation. They make sense of the tasks they are set in terms of their own goals and perspectives, and they may experience tasks quite differently if digital technologies-with all the social and cultural meanings that they carry-are involved.
v Another challenge is that is not clear that learners should be accommodated in their preferences rather than challenged to try alternatives.
v An alternative approach is the provision of flexible learning in which learners make their own choices over issues such as the tasks they undertake, the meditational means they use and the evidence they provide for assessment.
v Despite the capacity of technology to present a wider range of options, the limiting factor remains the availability of skilled practitioners to provide relevant feedback and support.
v Designing with digital resources and technologies
v The technologies available in the learning environment and how learners are encouraged to use them for specific activities are therefore essential aspects of design.
v Design objects (artefacts):
o Digital cameras and microscopes
o Electronic whiteboards
o Mobile devices
o Laptop computers and web pages
v The layout of a seminar room affects how learners interact, while different kinds of learning are possible in a fieldwork situation, laboratory or workplace. Digital environments similarly help to structure learners' time and space and they support or constrain learners' interactions.
v Properties of designed artefacts are often referred to as their "affordances" for a particular use: in this case their affordance for learning is to talk about tools and resources in terms of how they mediate learning. As a result, the artefacts can have different meanings in different activity contexts.
v Resources are content-based artefacts that use various representational media such as text, images, moving images and sound. The medium used can have a profound effect on how content is assimilated and remembered and that different learners have different capacities with different media. A choice of medium or the opportunity to experience two media in parallel-for example a spoken text and a visual diagram-have been shown to be particularly effective for learning.
v For today's digital natives online research and the capacity to manage multiple forms of information are essential life skills and this alone, makes their use in education desirable.
v The main intrinsic benefits of digital resources are their greater flexibility of access, reproduction and manipulation. Simply being able to study at a time, place and pace to suit them can profoundly change learners' relations.
v "Tool" here is used to designate an artefact designed to support a specific task function rather than to represent content, though as we will see this distinction is becoming blurred.
v Tools for creating representations in different media e.g. Powerpoint, web editors, video and animation software, digital cameras-are all too often regarded as the prerogative of the learning designer, but there is no reason why they should not be used by learners to create their own representations of subject matter. Applications can even be shared to enable collaborative representations to be built, as happens face to face with electronic whiteboards and with wikis online.
v The portability of digital representations is particularly valuable in this respect.
v Tasks of analysis are likely to be very subject-specific and there is a wide range of digital tools-diagnostics, informatics, design and manufacturing systems, specific analytical software-with which learners may need to become familiar.
v Computing power is the potential of artefacts based on information (software) to be used as tools. With these tools as mediators, learning activities can take place in an entirely represented space: for example, using models, simulations and complex digital environments.
v Laurillard distinguishes five different media "types"-narrative, communicative, interactive, productive, and adaptive - with different capacities to mediate learning.
v With the rise of networked computing, consideration of digital services must stand alongside consideration of digital artefacts when designing for learning.
v Having learners explore different functions, make choices about use of a tool, and integrate it with other tools in the environment. Designers should also take account of learners' own technologies, including mobile phones, email, instant messaging, and personal assistants, digital TV and radio and social software. The use of such "private" technologies is an essential aspect of the construction of the personal identity and there are preliminary findings that it can help learners bridge the gap between their existing skills and the kinds of ICT literacy required in formal education.
v Situative learners need a sympathetic mentor with insight into their context and the ability to support their developing role. Teachers committed to a constructive approach require a wide range of facilitative skills-negotiating outcomes, supporting learner discussion, giving relevant feedback -and the ability to respond to learners' different needs. Vygotsky argued that learning is a socially mediated activity in the first instance, with concepts and skills being internalized only after they have been mastered in a collaborative context.
v Piaget and Papert give dialogue a secondary role but agree that it can support the individual processes of reflection and abstraction. Opportunities for dialogue are considered crucial in most approaches to learning. Some or all of these interactions can now take place through computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems.
v Text-based media are by far the most widespread. Expertise need no longer be "handed out" by the teacher from the front of the class, but can be contributed more equitably. Turn-taking becomes less significant (everyone can "talk" at once) and many face-to-face markers of difference are removed. Participation also becomes more explicit and the content of discussion becomes available for reflection and review-many online courses routinely assess participation. The explicit nature of online dialogue makes it particularly good for negotiating and building shared understanding in collaborative tasks. Perhaps, the main advantage of these new media, however, is the ability to participate with a much wider range of other people (e.g. remote experts, learners in other institutions and countries) and at a time and place to suite the learner.
v Text-based CMC also requires new skills from learners. The explicit nature of communication favours a more reflective approach than face-to-face dialogue; demands keyboard skills and good standards of written language, and also require the motivation to participate without the support of a live social context. There are studies that report students being uncomfortable with these demands, for example, struggling with the learner locus of control or with the use of peer review and feedback.
v CMC offers opportunities both to break with established modes of discourse, and to make explicit the ground rules and structures of power that exist.
Yiannis Dimitriades transcript
ü He puts particular interest in supporting practitioners in real contexts, not in exploring theoretical processes and he's interested as he tells me in things that work.
ü Instructional design is processes and steps and methods that guided, that were used in order to structure the process in order to be able to have high chances of success => not to guarantee the success [but] to increase the chances of success in the teaching-learning process.
ü The difference with respect to the instructional design would be that not only there is content, there are also activities. There is not only a teacher and an absent learner who simply practices. But also there are learners, an individual, in a collaborative way. So in this case, we do have content plus teachers plus learners plus activities.
ü The current educational situation is that the situation is really complex. In such a complex process, somebody needs a methodology at least in order to create new materials or new courses or new stuff. And when you do have a complex situation, you need support.
ü "What's the role for creativity for the teacher?"
ü Learning design can support and make more explicit the process elements and the structural elements.
ü Creativity is a huge word that can be understood in terms of how somebody designs something, how somebody enacts something-that is, makes it effective.
Design tensions:
ð How you can include all these formal elements of learning design together with the creativity, improvisation, quality elements that normally are hidden.
ü Scripting is one word that has been used extensively in educational psychology, mainly associated to the idea of guiding, of how you can provide scaffolding, in constructivist terms, on the processes. One extreme of scripting could be the classical one, two, three, four, five steps that we have to follow in order to do something.
ü They want to include models of students, models of teachers, models of contents, all elements of the environment, finally the process is so heavy-weight that [it] cannot be applied.
ü Something that's not too heavy-weighted, that's practical, that's do-able, that's enjoyable and that can bring in individual creativity or whatever we prefer to call it, can be realised.
From what I have read from the above articles and my notes in Activity 1, I can see that there are some similarities. For example, there is focus on learning design in the way that we organise the activities that need to be submitted and used while teaching. We take into consideration the technologies that we will use and the students themselves as to what aims they are expected to respond. The creativity of the teacher is strongly affected as to what the Principle of the school is thinking about the teaching ways that a teacher uses. Most of the times the creativity of the teacher is in danger. At the time, the most important sentence is that the design should not be heavy weighted but it should be practical, do-able, enjoyable and that it can also bring individual creativity.