Authentic learning pedagogy not only allows students to engage in realistic tasks using realworld resources and tools, but it also provides opportunities for students to learn with intention by thinking and acting like professionals as they address real problems. This paper describes research conducted in a first year university course, where social media were used to support authentic and intentional learning. Principles of authentic learning guided the design of the course, and learning tasks and activities focussed on the completion of realistic and complex tasks. Students' mental effort was expended largely on the creation of polished and accomplished products, rather than on the completion of a series of decontextualised or step-by-step exercises. Importantly, opportunities for reflection were provided through the completion of a complex and collaborative task, a journal, and a reflective examination. A qualitative study of two cohorts of students was conducted, as part of a larger design-based research agenda, over a period of two years. Findings showed that providing such course elements to facilitate reflection allowed students to reflect both in action as they participated in the course tasks, and on action as they wrote about their learning experiences.
Authentic learning and reflectionA century ago, Dewey (1916) described reflection not as a passive individual pursuit, but as an active, dynamic and intentional process that profoundly influences one's experiences:The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the relations of things. In other words, to think effectively one must have had, or now have experiences which will furnish … resources for coping with the difficulty at hand (pp. 156-157). This paper describes research conducted on an authentic learning environment employing intentional and reflective pedagogy, designed for large first year pre-service teacher cohort studying education technology. As noted by Polly, Mims, Shepherd, and Inan (2010), nearly every pre-service teacher is required to study an educational technology of some kind in their teaching preparation. Oppenheimer's (1997) inference that many such courses tend to teach hammer rather than carpentry encapsulates all that is wrong with the way that educational technology courses are often taught. Universities preparing pre-service teachers to teach in the 'classrooms of tomorrow', frequently use largely inappropriate reductionist methods that focus on access to technology and technology skills (cf. Tondeur, van Braak,
