Computational support for teachers’ design thinking: its feasibility and acceptability to practitioners and institutions

A significant area of learning design research has been the development of software applications that guide teachers’ thinking as they plan, construct and revise learning events for their students. In this paper, we review conceptualisations of, and approaches to, the activity of pedagogic design and highlight the implications for the provision of computational support for this activity. We then outline different ways in which that support has been implemented in three digital tools: Phoebe, the LAMS Activity Planner and the Learning Designer. We consider the challenges to, and implications of, deploying these tools from the perspectives of three groups of stakeholders: developers, teachers and institutions. Our findings suggest that, while such tools are acceptable in principle, they face a number of technological and socio-cultural challenges to their acceptability from teachers’ perspectives and to their deployment within institutional strategies for teaching and learning in a digital age.     

TELEVISION SPECIFICITY AND PARTICIPATORY PLANNING: TWO PARTICIPATORY EXERCISES

The author describes two participatory exercises to involve pupils in practical consideration of some of the factors facing television programme planners in composing schedules for a particular evening's viewing. Although intended for secondary school media studies, the approach could be adopted at other levels and illuminates features of the media relevant to all students of communications and members of the general public.     

Media Education in the 1980s

Teaching about the media need not be an elaborately complex business but could be done simply and effectively by very many teachers. Failure to do so is an omission of great magnitude and danger. As television stands on the threshold of change and expansion, Media Education must move to the centre of the curriculum, and this article suggests some of the constituents of a worthwhile course. The nature of television images, effects and values are discussed, and four major areas proposed for further investigation.     

Digitally mastered? Technology and transition in the experience of taught postgraduate students

Taught Master's students have been largely overlooked in research into learners' engagement with digital technologies. This article reports work to redress this imbalance, in which an extended email correspondence was conducted with 23 Master's students. Specifically, it investigates (1) the extent to which these students start their courses both functionally competent in the use of IT and digitally literate, and (2) the relationship between students' engagement with digital technologies and their experience of transition to postgraduate study in five areas: knowledge and skills, autonomy, ‘deeper’ learning, enculturation into an academic community, and self-concept. Findings suggest that students may initially be less functionally competent in IT than might be expected, but use these tools in an informed manner. Engagement with a wider range of digital technologies parallels their shift from novice to expert practice and their developing self-concept as researchers; however, non-digital means also remain important in mediating all aspects of transition.     

A framework for designing interactive multimedia to scaffold young children's understanding of historical chronology

Young children's understanding of thehistorical past is often characterised by alack of temporal differentiation and a sense oftotal discontinuity with the present. Researchhas suggested that this situation may be causedin part by their formation of inappropriaterepresentations when solving problems ofchronology. To help children construct moreappropriate external representations forparticular tasks and reason more effectivelywith them about chronological concepts, weinvestigated the role that interactivemultimedia might play in scaffoldingteacher-led activities in the classroom. Inthis paper we report on our conceptual designand pedagogical approach to developingeffective dynamic, interactive representationsand activities at the computer interface, aimedat bridging the conceptual gap between concreteexperience and abstract concepts. Evaluationsof the software built using this frameworkshowed that the program was well received bychildren and teachers alike, and that it wasable to facilitate children's understanding of,and ability to reason about, chronology.