Collaborative Creation of Teaching-Learning Sequences and an Atlas of Knowledge

The article is about a new online resource, a collaborative portal for teachers, which publishes a network of prerequisites for teaching/learning any concept or an activity. A simple and effective method of collaboratively constructing teaching­-learning sequences is presented. The special emergent properties of the dependency network and their didactic and epistemic implications are pointed. The article ends with an appeal to the global teaching community to contribute prerequisites of any subject to complete the global roadmap for an altas being built on similar lines as Wikipedia. The portal is launched and waiting for community participation at http://www.gnowledge.org.\u

Knowledge Mapping for Open Sensemaking Communities

By analogy to cartographic representations of spatial worlds, Knowledge Maps provide an ‘aerial view’ of a topic by highlighting key elements and connections. Moreover, just as spatial maps simplify the world and can fuel controversy, maps of conceptual worlds provide vehicles for summarising and negotiating meaning. In conjunction with the UK Open University’s Open Educational Resources OpenLearn project, we are investigating the role of such maps for both learners and educators to share – and debate – interpretations of OERs. In this brief update, we describe how a mapping tool (Compendium) has been integrated with OpenLearn’s elearning platform (Moodle) in order to support tasks such as concept analysis, problem-solving, literature review, learning path planning, argument analysis and OER design

Preservice Teachers Respond to And Tango Makes Three: Deconstructing Disciplinary Power and the Heteronormative in Teacher Education

This study employs Foucauldian concepts to analyse macro and micro contexts of publicly spoken and silent discourses describing ‘homosexuality,’ ‘education’ and ‘teacher’ in order to identify teacher subject positions available to preservice teachers. The macro context is analysed by tracing heteronormative discourses found in newspaper stories involving teachers and public schools that address conflicting views of homosexuality. The macro context analysis indicates two binary teacher subject positions: martyred (unemployed) teacher/silent (employed) teacher and sophisticated teacher/unsophisticated teacher. The micro context analysis is of preservice teachers\u27 responses to And Tango Makes Three, a picture book by Richardson and Parnell. This analysis demonstrates how preservice teachers take up and negotiate teacher subject positions found in the macro analysis. Combined, the analyses allow the researchers to consider how preservice teachers\u27 performances of teacher subjectivity open up possibilities for re-imagining new teacher subject positions and what this might mean for the practice of teacher educators

Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps

This chapter reports pilot work investigating the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping to scaffold young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Our research objective is to better understand pupils’ usage of dialogue maps created in Compendium to write scientific ex-planations. The participants were 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. Through qualitative analysis of three case studies, we investigate the value of dialogue mapping as a mediating tool in the scientific reasoning process during a set of learning activities. These activities were published in an online learning envi-ronment to foster collaborative learning. Pupils mapped their discussions in pairs, shared maps via the online forum and in plenary discussions, and wrote essays based on their dialogue maps. This study draws on these multiple data sources: pupils’ maps in Compendium, writings in science and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Our analysis highlights the diversity of ways, both successful and unsuccessful, in which dialogue mapping was used by these young teenagers

Holistic engineering design : a combined synchronous and asynchronous approach

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches