AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse

An Analytical Framework for Designing Future Hybrid Creative Learning Spaces: A Pattern Approach

Existing frameworks which serve as reference for the design of creative space in educational institutions and organizations, have shown some limitations. On one hand, current spatial design theories concerned with hybrid spaces and digital technologies are limited; on the other hand, the analysis of digital technologies’ influence on spaces conducted in Information System and Computer Science research fields rarely uses a spatial theory as a foundation [1]. The aim of this ongoing research is to develop an analytical framework that integrates creative space types and a blended space model in support of the design of future hybrid creative environments (FHCS framework). The current findings have shown that many different social-spatial design solutions exist in both physical and digital spaces, and which are systematically organized as a pattern language. Identified pattern candidates are from specific application domains (e.g., spatial design, HCI Design, E-learning, and game design), and they capture and represent design knowledge of experts. Therefore, the pattern language from Christopher Alexander et al. [2] seems an appropriate approach to bring together design guidance and tools from different disciplines, in a vocabulary that can be shared across disciplines. Through a pattern mining process, various pattern frameworks and many pattern candidates that are related to the design of hybrid creative learning spaces have emerged from the analysis. As a result, 323 patterns are derived from four disciplines, and 13 generic pattern clusters have evolved in relation to the hybrid design themes

Participatory Culture as a Model for How New Media Technologies Can Change Public Schools

This paper addresses the gap between the potential of new media learning tools for transforming learning in and out of schools and the schools’ commitment to technologies that support testing and accountability. We propose the idea of participatory culture as a robust model for how to think about the emerging practices of learning in digital media spaces. Participatory cultures describe the social interactions and activity structures in which real-world learners engage to advance their interests. Participatory cultures retain the concept of consequential outcomes, and add robust accounts of the social and technological ways in which learners interact to attain outcomes. We argue that the gap between schools and digital worlds can be intentionally bridged if we match the affordances of participatory cultures that traditional schools often struggle to meet. The participatory culture framework can help to make sense of learning in and out of schools, and points toward viable paths to integrate the best of new media experience into contemporary school design

Evaluating smart city learning

Measurement and analysis of individually interpreted learning experiences can build a knowledge picture of how learners perceive immersive technology-mediated learning in smart cities. Comparison of these learning experiences, with theoretical factors derived from relevant literature, may then shed light on the usefulness of theory in practical learning design and approaches to the evaluation of immersive learning environments analysed from a theoretical basis. In turn, this may contribute to current approaches of urban smart city environment planning for citizen engaged ‘human smart cities’ [14]. Mobile learning location-based prototypes will be developed with subject experts and implemented in open (urban) spaces located at Upper Barrakka Gardens, Valletta for history and Argotti Gardens, Floriana for botany. This paper discusses potential methodologies for designing a measurement of the effectiveness of these learning experiences and associated learning design for immersive urban learning environments mediated by mobile and networked technologies. Acknowledging the hybrid nature [9] of smart city learning, interactions between digital tools, content and community, measuring both intra- and inter-learner experiences is anticipated. Identifying and quantifying these dimensions of interactions will help us understand more about how urban smart learning activities create immersive experiences for each learner, engaging them in a variety of internal cognitive and social processes. To clarify mutual interaction between theoretical and empirical factors, a system of theoretical factors of significance is proposed to be developed, and then correlated, with learning experience analysis factors. A brief review of hybrid learning environment research, including ubiquitous learning [4] manifested in hybrid [9], mobile [8] and smart city [2] environments, provides context for how analytical methodology might be applied to an interactive learning system in smart cities. Phenomenographic techniques of variation and outcome space are investigated, together with the Dialogic Space concept [30] of conversation interaction for analysing dialogues.Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union.peer-reviewe

Active Algorithms: Sociomaterial Spaces in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC

This paper will explore two examples from the design, structure and implementation of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera. This five week long course (known as the EDCMOOC) was delivered twice in 2013, and is considered an atypical MOOC in its utilisation of both the Coursera platform and a range of social media and open access materials. The combination of distributed and aggregated structure will be highlighted, examining the arrangement of course material on the Coursera platform and student responses in social media. This paper will suggest that a dominant instrumentalist view of technology limits considerations of these systems to merely enabling or inhibiting educational aims. The subsequent discussion will suggest that sociomaterial theory offers a valuable framework for considering how educational spaces are produced through relational practices between humans and non-humans. An analysis of You Tube and a bespoke blog aggregator will show how the algorithmic properties of these systems perform functions that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of either the teachers using these systems, or the authors who create the software, thus constituting a complex sociomaterial educational enactment

Web-based museum trails on PDAs for university-level design students: Design and evaluation

This article, published in an international peer-reviewed journal, details the design and evaluation of trails at the Victoria & Albert Museum created for university students in design by curators and tutors from the Royal College of Art, University of Brighton, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. The trails were innovative in that they were not didactic but dialogic, containing and encouraging multiple perspectives, exploring social uses of museum spaces and non-traditional interpretations of museum artefacts. They succeeded in enhancing students’ knowledge of, interest in, and closeness to the artefacts. Related outcomes included the trails themselves, a detailed summative evaluation report, a conference paper presented at a mobile learning symposium in London, and continuing collaborations with the Victoria & Albert Museum. The methodology for analysis was developed in the author's PhD research, which was conducted in parallel. The article has been cited in the British Journal of Educational Technology; Computers and Education; Interactive Learning Environments; Journal of Educational Computing Research; and in a doctoral thesis: Ken-Zen Chen (2012) Hidden Works in a Project of Closing Digital Inequalities: A Qualitative Inquiry in a Remote School (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Broader findings suggest that technology has a key role to play in helping to maintain the museum as a learning space that complements that of universities as well as schools. The trails were analysed using a conceptual model the author created, which combined a contextual model of learning with activity theory. This complemented the more traditional method of front-end/ formative/ summative evaluation normally undertaken by museums. The model enabled differentiation of the personal, social and physical contexts of learning, and focused on the technology as mediating the students' learning. Walker formulated the theoretical framework for evaluating the project; he also undertook the summative evaluation of the research featured within this

Online Connectivity : A Social Study of Educators’ Affinity for Teaching and Learning Using Social Media

This qualitative study investigated an online space for educators, known as #sschat, for the purpose of helping to inform and shape more formal professional learning experiences. Participants were able to engage in asynchronous and synchronous discussions related to social studies education by interacting in any of the four hashtags associated with the #sschat affinity space (i.e., #engsschat, #hsgovchat, #sschat, #worldgeochat), the #sschat Facebook page, the archived #chat sessions, and/or by contributing to the creation of the weekly #worldgeochat questions. Seven common elements of Gee’s affinity spaces conceptual framework were used to frame this study. This framework drew attention to the practices of self-directed learners who were guided by their passions related to teaching and learning. By engaging as an insider during this one-month study of #sschat, I was able to consider what was happening in this affinity space from the participants’ perspective. I collected and analyzed more than 6,000 tweets and almost 300 Facebook posts along with the websites associated with the #sschat affinity space and shared by the participants. The question that guided this study was: what could be learned from online spaces such as #sschat that can help inform and shape more formal professional development experiences. Through a deep analysis of the data, three important findings emerged that help to provide insight into the types of experiences that are likely to be valued by educators and conducive to learning. The first finding concerns how the diverse experiences and needs of the participants seemed to affect the interactions that occurred in the #sschat affinity space. The second key finding involved how the combination of social media platforms and functions, participants’ knowhow and experiences, and their practices appeared to contribute to a participatory environment that facilitated a wide range of interactions in support of social studies education. The third key finding of my study suggests that professional learning is a personal experience; educators want the ability to choose with whom they interact, the design of the space, and the manner in which they engage in these experiences. Digital technologies were leveraged by participants making it possible for them to engage in crowdsourcing, reflective thinking, and role-shifting activities. This study expands the notion of affinity spaces beyond a space for individuals to engage in activities involving their personal interests and passions. A deep analysis of the data suggests that affinity spaces may also be beneficial for professionals, such as educators who want to engage in experiences involving teaching and learning

Pedagogical Infrastructures of Design Studio Learning

In the design studio, within educational contexts, sketching, model-making and prototyping of tangible objects are parts of the design process that support students in achieving final design solutions. This paper presents research in which three design experiments involving design studio settings, using a Learning by Collaborative Designing model for supporting knowledge-creating learning for university-level craft teacher education, were undertaken. The design studios aimed at guiding first-year students to appropriate professional processes and practices of design. The Pedagogical Infrastructure Framework was applied to analyse the social, epistemic, cognitive and material-technical aspects of three design-studio settings. Through meta-analysis of the three experiments we asked: What can we learn from these design studio experiments about the pedagogical infrastructure that supports creative design practices of working with design knowledge, tools and technologies in a real learning setting? As a result of the experiments we discuss the limitations and opportunities of these pedagogical settings, as well as considerations for future development of studio-based settings as pedagogic innovations emerging for integrating material-technical and socio-digital technologies, practices and spaces for learning.Peer reviewe

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Ideabook: Libraries for Families

The IDEABOOK is a research-based framework to guide and broaden family engagement in libraries.The framework helps libraries move beyond thinking of family engagement as random, individual activities or programs, but rather as a system where library leadership, activities, and resources that are linked to goals. The framework represents a theory of change that begins with a set of elements—leadership, engagement, and support services—that build a pathway for meaningful family engagement beginning in the early childhood years and extending through young adulthood.This IDEABOOK was developed for anyone who works in a library setting—from library directors and children's and youth librarians, to volunteers and support staff—and shares many innovative ways that libraries support and guide families in children's learning and development