CCK08 - week 9 – What becomes of the teacher? New roles for educators

No recommended Readings this week

Other useful resources for this week:

Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning – FutureLab - Ann Light and Rosemary Luckin, 2008

This publication is partnered by a practical handbook; Designing Educational Technologies for Social Justice, available from: www.futurelab.org.uk/designforsocialjustice

Notes from readings:

Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning – FutureLab - Ann Light and Rosemary Luckin, 2008

User centred design (UCD) - some attention has been paid to gathering users’ requirements; or it can mean treating all participants as contributing their particular knowledge and skills

Technology-enhanced learning (TEL)

‘participative design’ approaches in which users and professional designers have a more equal say in taking design decisions … participative design processes are more difficult to handle than designer-driven procedures and usually take longer.

Social justice is an interventionist standpoint, in that it seeks to reorganise society’s resources and structures to create a fairer social order.

all members of society do not need or desire the same things and show how changing society to be fairer can be seen as a design challenge

a design approach that allows for the possibility for everyone to be involved is more egalitarian than one which believes only in exclusive talents or professional systems.

The Liberty principle expresses the view that everyone is equally entitled to basic rights and liberties, as long as that does not infringe upon the rights and liberties of others. The Difference principle states that social and economic inequalities between individuals should be tolerated if, and only if, they are of most benefit to the worst off in society.

Milne applies the ‘veil of ignorance’ experiment to designing computer interfaces, asking “how should we design the interface to ensure that User X would enjoy a sufficient degree of usability, regardless of their characteristics?” (Milne 2005).

If everyone wanted the same thing, it would be easy to design society. Allowing for choice and individual difference is a problem for both philosophers and designers.

In Sen’s view, justice requires us to enable people to engage in the activities necessary to achieve what they want, rather than to give them what they want. Thus, developing one’s ability to satisfy one’s needs and desires is itself a very important good to be distributed as broadly as possible. ‘Development as Freedom’ (Sen 1999)

users in the design process, are intrinsically more socially just than others.

(1996). Schön sees unpredictability as an important characteristic of the design process  …. that design is not a predictable activity

Process is often overshadowed by outcome

TEL research recognises and contributes to the move towards a learner directed style of learning, such as that described by Knowles (1984) as ‘andragogy’, and the more self-determined learning paradigm proposed by Hase and Kenyon (2000) referred to as ‘heutagogy’.  Researchers are now particularly concerned with the role of motivation and the way that systems can recognise a learner’s motivational state (D’Mello and Graesser 2007), and the role of metacognition, through for example developing systems that support learners’ help-seeking behaviours (Aleven et al 2004).

What does seem clear is that there is a gap in experience, expectations and technical experience between many young people and their teachers and administrators

The fact that user-generated content breaks with the traditional top-down hierarchical model of education raises questions about power balances, democracy, culture, privacy and how we might ensure that user generated content can improve learning for all citizens

The potential for learners to have an greater voice in the nature of the subject matter being learnt, the resources, including the technologies, being used to support their learning, and the nature of the physical or virtual environment in which they learn, is central to this agenda.