Transcript Document

Education 2.0? Designing
ambient pedagogies and meaningful
experiences for future learning
Andrew Ravenscroft
Talk at JISC-CETIS Conference 2007
“Beyond Standards, Holistic Approaches”
Deputy Director & Principal Research Fellow
Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI)
Learning interaction and dialogue design
London Metropolitan University
Overview of talk
 A motivational problem? from interest to learning
 Rationale and methodology for learning design
 Ambient pedagogy and ‘experience design’
 Exemplar projects and tools (DDGs & Learn2getha)
…questions and issues
From interest to learning?!
A design approach that implicitly addresses the key, and ostensibly
motivational, challenge:
How to convert huge-scale social and media-rich interaction for
interest to large-scale media-rich interaction for learning?!!
…re-conceptualise e-learning to emphasise digital practices
rather than media form and representation
…the most important thing about content and tools is what you
can do with them that is relevant to you
…resonates with old ideas
‘I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
(Confucius, 551 – 479 BC)
…give learning practices, or ‘active doing’, back to the
learners through exploiting their developing digital
literacies
Increasingly we are not ‘on’ the web, or ‘in’
the web, we are part of the web
“here comes everyone” (Imagine, BBC)
…through web-technologies
A design rationale and methodology
 Towards future learning practices
 Ambient learning designs (or pedagogies)
 Designing for the learner experience (cf. just content
and tools)
 Stance that reconciles personal and institutional
needs in the context of developing digital literacies
(evolution or paradigm shift?)
Future learning practices
 Embrace developing digital literacies (OS, Web 2.0 etc.)
– media-rich, multimodal, participation-centric, provisionality of
representations etc.
 Design for opportunities offered by new technologies cf.
optimising old/existing methods (e.g. VLEs)
– text and book, author-reader/broadcaster-consumer, fixed
representations etc.
+
 Get ‘back to basics’ about learning and re-claim
…thinking, meaning making, understanding, dialogue, communities
of inquiry etc.
…cf deliver learning = management of instructional content
Ambient pedagogies and ‘experience design’
1. Build on and integrate with developing media-rich digital
technologies and practices, learning ‘feels like’ a natural digital
practice
2. Highly social, communicative, relevant and engaging experience
3. Semi-formal activities reconciling institutional and personal
activities and requirements
4. Flexible, open and yet configurable experiences – ‘bounded
openness’
5. Realised through ambient learning designs in open learning
environments
attractive learning opportunities cf. enforced instructional
practices
Exemplar projects, tools and approaches
- Digital Dialogue Games
(the InterLoc tool)
- Highly structured and
engaging learning
practice
- Learn2getha consortium
- Configurable
pedagogical interface
to open technologies
Digital Dialogue Games (DDGs) and InterLoc
Collaborative exercises in ‘digital discourse’
Development of reasoning and discussion skills
Linking dialogue and thinking to writing
Range of adaptable dialogue games
• Argumentation (CDR)
• Exploratory dialogue
• Creative thinking
v. Attractive, inclusive and engaging
• e.g. low barriers to participation (like web 2.0
stuff)
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
InterLoc: A structured learning practice
 Synchronous Interaction as a social game
–
–
–
–
Structured rule-based interaction (scaffolding)
multimedia dialogues (4-6 players)
Roles: player, facilitator, learning manager
Pre-defined dialogue features that promote thinking
• Moves: Inform, Question, Challenge, etc.
• Sets of Openers to perform each move: “I think…”, “I
disagree because…”, “My evidence is…” etc.
– Feedback on personal dialogue style
 Content generated as an Active Document
 Coordination with Web 2.0 and mobile devices
Technical approach
1. Client-server architecture, based on Jabber
messaging protocol (sophisticated OS messaging
protocol)
2. JAVA application programming (sophisticated
learning and interaction design)
3. Html interface (attractive user-experience)
4. Client deployed through Web-start technology
…flexible and sophisticated tool that is easily deployed
and feels like a ‘web-experience’
InterLoc: future thinking and meaning making?
InterLoc: turn taking and ‘listening’
Extreme Sports example
User selected content (Web 2.0)
Feedback on performance
Replay on mobile phones
Pilots: Some comments
Did the dialogue game, using the sentence openers, change how you expressed, clarified or refined
your ideas on this topic? Please comment as appropriate (LonMet)
S1. Yes it did, with the openers, I then had to t think before composing the rest of the sentence
As a student, would it be useful to participate regularly in dialogues like this one? (Southampton)
S2. Yes, because everyone can put their views across without loads of pupils shouting!
S3. Good point.Often quiet people do have very good points to make, but are too scared to
make them.
Did you enjoy discussing the topic in this way, and do you have any further comments? (LonMet)
S4. yes. %100
LondonMet pilots:
Most learners enjoyed it & several said they wanted it for other courses. Most preferred the dialogue
games to f2f discussion!
Learn2getha consortium
More powerful and wide-ranging realisation of Ambient Pedagogies
and ‘experience design’
Develop a configurable pedagogical interface to Web 2.0
technologies (LondonMet, ELP2 – Bradford, MeAggregator –
Reading, OpenLearn – OU)
Model examples of good learning practice with Web 2.0 technologies
and address known problems
Provide a ‘one stop shop’ for Web 2.0 technologies that Institutional
technologies can link with
An interface and middleware for overlaying ambient learning designs
and structured experiences on existing open technologies
The vision
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without
vision is a nightmare” (Japanese proverb)
Truly pervasive (‘anywhere’), inclusive (‘anyone’) and
transformative (‘valuable’) learning interaction and
practice for the digital age 
more democratic learning and collective inquiry
Questions and issues
Are we mixing apples and oranges?
Social networking and Web 2.0 technologies will only support superficial
communication and media sharing and should not be confused with
more formal learning and more sophisticated meaning making?
Should we be looking to import practices and technologies from outside the
Academy, or will there always be parallel worlds?
Will practices with knowledge technologies supplant conventional
educational institutions and practices?
Special Issue of JCAL: “Web 2.0 and learning: a revolutionary paradigm or a
development of CSCL?" (mid 2008)
More information
Contact & papers etc.:
[email protected]
http://homepages.north.londonmet.ac.uk/~ravensca/
Research theme:
Learning interaction and dialogue design
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/ltri/research/interaction.htm
Digital Dialogue Games
www.interloc.org