All 2 entries tagged Milestones

Chapter plan

Alternative title for the first chapter: "the material of constructivism".

Robert O'Toole : 08 Jan 2010 16:23 |  Tags: Implementation Milestones |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PhD research proposal submitted

Just submitted my application, with the following proposal...

Empowering students and teachers as designers of user-configurable learning space.

Principal question:

How can design methodologies and design literacy help students and teachers to use new “user-configurable” and “edgeless” learning spaces more effectively?

Implied questions:

• To what extents are conventional learning spaces being transformed or replaced by user-configurable and edgeless learning spaces?
• How are these developments “disruptive” of established pedagogies, institutions and student capabilities?
• What strategies are emerging amongst teachers and students for coping and exploiting the potential of these developments?
• How are other more “design-led” industries using established methodologies to cope with and exploit these trends through well-designed user-configurability?
• Can teachers and students successfully adopt such methodologies?
• In what way must traditional teaching and learning change to accommodate such methodologies?

Key concepts:

Learning space: A learning space is constituted from a combination of mediating technologies, pedagogies and people, choreographed by conventions, constraints and occasional transgression. It is most commonly a permanent and static area, with clearly signalled and rigidly maintained boundaries delineating a stage for the playing-out of a well understood, relatively deterministic, set of possibilities.

Recent developments in the concept of ‘learning space’ (as being something more than just inert furniture and building) have demonstrated its central role in enabling (or preventing) achievement and excellence in learning and teaching (Savin-Baden, 2007). I will develop a detailed and widely applicable understanding of ‘learning space’ as pedagogical, sociological and technological. This will be informed by work on the relationship between cognition, tools and space (Clark, 1998). Learning space (physical and online) will be considered to be inescapably social, even when pedagogy and technology seeks to escape the social; thus adding a sociological dimension to the study. Most importantly, I will consider how we can apply formal design methodologies to the creation of better learning spaces (agile design, design patterns, usability testing etc). Concepts like ‘enabling constraint’ (Norman, 1998) and ‘emotional design’ (Norman, 2003) have proven valuable when applied to the design of tools and cognitive spaces. How can we adapt these methods and concepts for the design of learning spaces? Might such a 'design-led' pedagogy make a significant difference to student achievement? Are learning spaces within creative industries (for example galleries) already benefiting from this approach?

Edgeless learning space: Physical and online learning spaces are becoming significantly more un-bounded as technology, pedagogy and society changes. Indeed the very existence of learning spaces bounded by walls (physical or virtual) and determined by well-understood conventions may seem to be under threat. Futurologists are foretelling an “edgeless” university (Bradwell, 2009). In many ways, students are already there. Consider how, from the perspective of the traditional teacher, a lecture is firmly contained within a physical room, a time and place, and a hierarchical organisational structure of courses, assessment criteria, subject discipline and institutional membership. For a student, connected beyond those bounds via social networks and time-shifted through cheap and instantaneous methods for recording and peer-to-peer sharing, the same event is just another element in an essentially distributed and nomadic experience. The openness of an unbounded edgeless learning space also implies a more prominent role for aleatory influences.

User-configurable learning space: User-configurability implies more than indeterminate edgelessness. It presents the student and the teacher with choice. Such spaces operate according to the logic of permutations, options, variable inputs and interactions, and recognizable patterns. The result might simply be greater convenience, or perhaps more productively, a more concentrated challenge to pedagogical and intellectual habits and preconceptions. User-configurable spaces can be edgeless, but at the same time offer specific options for including edgelessness into learning.

Designed learning space: A designed space is one that is constructed (permanently or temporarily) according to a blueprint that matches people and objects in an organisation that unfolds according to a range of possibilities over time. The selection and arrangement of objects offers “affordances” to their users, through which their goals may be realised. “Enabling-constraints” act to simplify and streamline activities and cognitive processes that should be made trivial, thus allowing more time and energy to be spent upon more challenging objectives. The affordances and enabling-constraints within a designed space determine its user-configurability.

Design methodology: A well understood and visible process for constructing and modifying a design, such that its affordances and enabling constraints allow its users to achieve their goals more effectively.

Agile design methodology: A design methodology in which a design is built from a series of rapid iterations, with direct involvement of the users of the design. In this way, the design can become a “self-modifying” collective journey capable of rapid innovation, creative experimentation, whilst maintaining order and direction.

Methodology

I will employ an ethnographic and diagrammatic methodology for studying, designing and assessing physical and online learning spaces. My approach will be both 'student-centric' and 'holistic', considering the continuities and discontinuities that mediate and punctuate the individual and collective learning experience. A series of case studies will form my core body of evidence, documented through narrative accounts, interviews, observations, and employing new technologies for recording and analyzing activities undertaken in learning spaces (data mining of live archived activities coded for location, time, author, as well as semantically).

Innovative learning and teaching spaces (physical and online) at Warwick will provide a focus for this study. There is also much to gain from investigating learning spaces in other contexts, some of which have pioneered successful developments in the theory and design of learning space: schools (including primary), museums, art galleries, theatres, creative industries (not excluding retail), and the self-constructed learning spaces behind successful individuals (artists, writers etc).

References

Bradwell, P. (2009), The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology, DEMOS.
Clark A. (1998), Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, Bradford Books.
Norman, D. (1998), The Design of Everyday Things, MIT Press.
Norman, D. (2003), Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books.
Savin-Baden, M. (2007), Learning Spaces, Open University Press.

Robert O'Toole : 24 Jun 2009 23:31 |  Tags: Ideation Milestones PhD |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem