606 research outputs found

    Emerging technologies for learning report (volume 3)

    Get PDF

    A Pedagogical Application Framework for Synchronous Collaboration

    Get PDF
    Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s

    A Pedagogical Application Framework for Synchronous Collaboration

    Get PDF
    Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s

    AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

    Get PDF
    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

    Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Physicality, Physicality 2007

    Get PDF

    LITERACY AND LEARNING ACROSS PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL SPACES: A CASE STUDY IN A BLENDED PRIMARY CLASSROOM

    Get PDF
    In light of technological innovations, schools are increasingly adopting digital tools and promoting online spaces for learning. Consequently, the shape of teaching and learning is shifting beyond the physical classroom. Drawing on sociocultural theory, distributed cognition and a networked learning framework, this case study explores how a blended approach shapes teachers’ practices and students’ learning and literacy processes. The study was situated in a Year Six classroom in an Australian technology-rich independent school. Data was collected during the 2013 school year and included: 1) observations; 2) 125 hours of classroom video-recordings; 3) a collection of digital artefacts designed by the students; 4) interviews with teachers and students; 5) a student survey regarding technology integration in the classroom; 6) entry logs posted by participants on the Edmodo social network site. Multiple approaches to data analysis were used in order to answer the study’s research questions, including: networked learning analysis, thematic analysis, situated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and a quantitative descriptive analysis. The findings suggest that blended learning spaces support teachers’ distributed orchestration of classroom activities across tools and resources while also leveraging students’ engagement in reciprocal teaching as well as self-driven and collaborative learning. Digital technologies open space for new ways of communication, interaction and learning in the classroom, yet such affordances are dependent upon teacher’s facilitation and expertise. In addition, an interactive pattern of literacy practices was evident in the classroom, where processes of authorship, readership, production, audience, and consumption were established between students. Finally, alignment between teachers’ beliefs and the perceived value of technology was a key factor for technology integration in the classroom

    Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

    Get PDF
    In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability

    THE ENTANGLEMENT OF INFLUENTIAL TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS IN PRACTICE AND DESIGN

    Get PDF
    Design for academic practice is an important phenomenon in Higher Education. This is the practice through which informal, non-professional designers operating in a variety of roles in academic institutions carry out the design of systems, resources, activities and processes that are intended to enhance academic practice. Despite its importance, the area has not received sufficient attention in studies of academic practice, quality enhancement and digital transformation. This thesis argues that the absence of insight into how designers for academic practice engage with digital technology in their design practice contributes to the mismatch between the ambitions for digital transformation in higher education and the reality of how digital technology is used in higher education. This research has developed an approach to address this issue and enhance how designers for academic practice engage with the digital technologies that are enacted in the practices of lecturers in an academic institution. This approach adopts a novel theoretical lens developed for this research, termed Influential Technology Channels, that produces a model of technology use in everyday practice and provides access, through the existing use of technology, to the enactment of academic practice. This model is used alongside another contribution from this research, practice-based personas – a modelling method that represents the diverse collections of technology use that constitute academic practice, and thus enables designers for academic practice to navigate and engage with the diversity of practice in the population of lecturers in the academic institution. Using this approach to design for academic practice, the form of design characterised and investigated in this research, informal designers are supported to achieve a greater understanding of the audience for which they are designing and explore designs that build upon existing, diverse, situated practice in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Through the implementation of an instrumental case study, this research demonstrates how these methods provide the meaningful connections between design and practice that can support digital enhancement and digital transformation initiatives on a broad scale, enabling designers to better engage with diverse people, practices and uses of digital technology as they seek to enhance academic practice

    Learning in a digitally connected classroom: Secondary science teachers’ pedagogical reasoning and practices

    Get PDF
    Despite decades of research surrounding Information Communication Technology (ICT) use in schools, the pedagogical reasoning required to provide meaningful ICT enabled learning opportunities is rarely analysed in the literature. The purpose of this research was therefore to investigate teachers’ pedagogically reasoned practice. This study involved three exemplary Australian secondary science teachers, renowned for their expertise in utilising ICT working in classrooms where students had school issued one-to-one computers and reliable network access. The research utilised qualitative methods, including semistructured interviews, video-based observational data, and an array of lesson artefacts. The study followed a naturalistic multiple-case study design to explore the pedagogical reasoning and actions of these science teachers. The study identified different forms of pedagogical reasoning and action for a digitally connected world. Many aspects of this iterative model bear close resemblance to Shulman’s (1987) original conception of pedagogical reasoning and action. In each case, sophisticated reasoned decision-making drawing upon a range of teacher knowledge bases, most notably technological pedagogical content knowledge took place. The pedagogical reasoning and action model presented demonstrates a backward mapping approach where the use of ICT was directed at supporting the development of scientific content and educational outcomes of the mandated science curriculum. The research also found that these teachers held social constructivist beliefs for the use of ICT and intentionally designed ICT enabled opportunities from a learning affordance perspective. The research also demonstrated a reflexive relationship between the teacher’s beliefs and their pedagogical practices. Teacher activity involved significant preparatory work in the selection and curation of motivating, authoritative and multimodal Internet accessible ICT resources and tools aligned to the mandated science curriculum. In each case, the teachers had purposefully created a customised classroom online presence or website, offering students a flexible learning environment, an uncommon practice at the time of the study. The teachers designed ICT enabled learning opportunities following a guided inquiry model, frequently involving collaborative problem-based strategies. In each case, the students were the dominant users of ICT in the classroom using ICT for discovering knowledge, constructing knowledge and for sharing knowledge. The teachers’ role was predominantly one of orchestration of the learning environment, scaffolding and questioning students as they engaged with guided inquiry-based learning tasks. Ultimately the research revealed the critical role of the teacher in mediating the affordances of ICT for meaningful learning. Overall the findings offer useful insights into how exemplary science teachers’ reason and act about the use of ICT in a digitally connected classroom. An important implication for the development of initial science teacher education programs arose from the study, notably that preservice teachers require ongoing and authentic course opportunities to support the development of the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge relevant for a digitally connected classroom

    Sociomaterial perspective of learning design practice and Its implications on learning design software development

    Get PDF
    Research in Learning Design (LD), a subfield of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), aims to enable teachers to design and share pedagogically informed teaching ideas that make effective use of technology to enhance learning. LD is a widely researched field with numerous LD tools and LD approaches. However, despite its richness, there are several challenges to be addressed, including the low adoption of a plethora of LD tools that do not meet adequately the requirements of HE lecturers and practitioners. The thesis presents a sociomaterial design framework and design principles for LD tools to fill the gap between the Learning Design Practice (LD-P) of HE lecturers and existing LD tools and LD approaches. Design-Based Research (DBR) was employed as the primary paradigm and method in this thesis. A sociomaterial design framework was developed and the design principles for LD tools were derived through iterative design phases of DBR: analysis, development, two cycles of testing and reflection. The study was structured as follows. An extensive analysis of the LD field, existing LD approaches and LD tools, their weaknesses, strengths, and challenges are presented in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 presents the methodological design details of the thesis. The open issues and challenges are further explored from experts’ perspective using interview protocol, and from HE lecturers’ perspective via a survey in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, respectively. The findings from Chapter 2, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 helped to triangulate data that constituted the foundation-stones for a sociomaterial design framework and verified the need for introducing a new conceptual framework. In Chapter 6, an analysis of the LD-P of the experts from the sociomaterial perspective is presented, whilst an analysis of HE lecturers’ LD-P from a sociomaterial perspective is presented in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 presents the novel sociomaterial design framework and uses it to examine available LD tools and LD approaches. Chapter 9presents points of overlap and misalignments and design principles derived from the analysis of Chapter 8 and also it presents the sample implementation of the design principles. Finally, Chapter 10 gives a summary and findings of this thesis, thesis contributions and directions for future works
    • …
    corecore