Harnessing community knowledge to guide teaching with technology: an introduction to the Learning De Home : Annual Conference 2014

Harnessing community knowledge to guide teaching with technology: an introduction to the Learning De

Public Group Active 7 years, 8 months ago

Tue, Sep 2 2014, 1:35pm – 2:35pm

Description

Advancements in learning technology have provided teachers with an ever expanding toolkit to construct innovative learning experiences for students. However, often working in isolation, teachers may struggle to deploy technology in ways that are most effective for learning. As Laurillard et al. (2013: 2) observed: “[t]here is as yet no well-structured body of knowledge about how to exploit fully the use of all the different kinds of learning technologies now available”. This session will raise and respond to what we consider to be the next big questions for learning and technology:

How can we effectively harness the potential of technology to create the conditions for learning to take place?
How can technology help lone teachers learn from the experience of colleagues working on similar problems around the world?

The session will take the form of an interactive workshop, where participants will have the opportunity to use and evaluate a new lesson planning tool called the Learning Designer. The Learning Designer is a web-based tool to help in the creation and sharing of learning designs and to support the integration of learning technology. A learning design is displayed as a sequence of activities, similar to a lesson plan, with all its main properties visible and editable. The development of the tool is informed by Laurillard’s (2002, 2012)) Conversational Framework (CF) which provides a theoretical model for understanding how the teaching-learning process operates. The CF is embedded within the Learning Designer, helping to guide users in their design of effective lesson plans. Feedback in the form of a pie chart allows users to gain an informed view of the overall learning experience they have created. The tool thereby supports the effective use of technology in teaching and learning by making more explicit the relationship between technology and the kind of learning that is required.

Collaboration is at the heart of the Learning Designer. The Learning Designer provides a way for teachers to learn from each other, by constructing a library of learning designs that can be used, adapted and reviewed by others. Our aim is to build a community of teacher-researchers, and a shared pool of expert knowledge. To this end we have invited teaching and learning professionals to take part in International Learning Design Challenges to populate the library with learning designs and to engage in the peer review of learning designs. We hope that the review process will ultimately endow learning design with the same degree of rigour and status associated with peer reviewed research.

Structure of the session

Please bring your own laptops to this session.

1. The session will commence with a demonstration of the tool, and an overview of its pedagogical framework and review criteria for evaluating effective learning designs.

2. Working in small groups of 2-3, participants will then have the opportunity to adapt an existing learning design using the tool.

3. Participants will be are asked to review another group’s learning design applying the review criteria.

4. The session will conclude with participants’ reflections on the applicability of the tool for designing learning with technology.

References

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking University Teaching. London: Routledge.

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science. New York & Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Laurillard, D., Charlton, P., Craft, B., Dimakopoulos, D., Ljubojevic, D., Magoulas, G., … Whittlestone, K. (2013). A constructionist learning environment for teachers to model learning designs. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(1), 15–30.