Connecting the dots: Theorizing and mapping learning entanglement through archaeology and design

Abstract

Lucila Carvalho is a senior lecturer in e-learning and digital technologies at Massey University, New Zealand. Lucila's research explores how culture and social structures shape the design and use of technology, and how technology influences cultural and social experiences. Lucila's research interests are in the areas of design, technology and learning in formal and non-formal settings. Pippa Yeoman is a contract researcher and sessional lecturer at The University of Sydney, Australia. Pippa's research explores sociotechnical innovations in learning, to date she has conducted more than 1,000 hours of observational research in both school and university settings. Education, broadly speaking, includes formal and informal learning activity, as well as life-long and life-wide learning. Contemporary pedagogical practices tend to emphasize student-centred, project-based and/or inquiry-based forms of learning. This activity often alternates between periods of individual and group work, and learners are expected to gradually take greater control of, and responsibility for, their learning (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013). In the developed world, these practices tend to go hand-in-hand with networked technologies (eg, smartphones and laptops) that give learners' access to a wide variety of online resources. There is no doubt that educational technologies are reshaping and extending traditional spaces for learning in schools, universities, museums and many other spaces. What is in question, is our ability to theorize and critically analyse their effects on communities of learning, across time and space; from the micro-actions AbstractDesigning for digitally enhanced learning has increased in complexity. In response, this paper calls for a reconceptualization of technology-as the reconfiguring of space, place, materials, time and social relations-enrolled and refashioned in emergent learning activity. Such reconceptualization requires analytical tools, methods and processes to map heterogeneous assemblages of people, tools and tasks. Educational researchers and designers are in need of approaches and theories that move beyond deterministic accounts about the utility of individual learning technologies, to connect theory, research and practice. Our research shows that in learning to distinguish between elements that are open to alteration through design and those that are not, educational designers gain deeper insights into the flows of matter, information and humans characteristic of productive networked learning environments. And this, in turn, gives rise to valued qualities of emergent learning activity in alignment with current theories about learning. In this paper, we present a series of methods adapted from archaeology and design, illustrating their power in tracing the complex webs of dependence characteristic of productive learning entanglement, with the aim of supporting future design for learning. © 2019 British Educational Research AssociationConnecting the dots 1105 entailed in making a contribution to an online or in pe...

“Language not just as words”: Supporting new literacies through a design project in disadvantaged schools in Chile

“…In particular, transformations occurred in relation to social activities, with the teacher encouraging student's interaction, participation in authentic activities, as well as students' engagement in creative and productive learning. Interestingly, these results are similar to those found in more affluent schools in English speaking countries (McKnight et al, 2016;Thibaut et al, 2015), suggesting that learning designs that connect elements at the set (digital tools, in this case) and social level (students-students interactions) can enable students to interact with one another in different ways (Carvalho and Yeoman, 2019). Such learning processes are enriched through collection of feedback and advice on how students may develop and improve their own productions, allowing them to feel connected to a community of learners.…”

Designing for Transition: Supporting Teachers and Students Cope with Emergency Remote Education

“…The ACAD framework is now a well-established metatheoretical framework, which has helped many educational designers and researchers to foreground connections between designable elements and emergent learning activity in a range of learning situations (Goodyear and Carvalho 2014 ; Carvalho and Yeoman 2018 , 2019 ; Munoz et al 2018 ). The designable elements acknowledge the physical, social and epistemic nature of learning and are conceptualized through three dimensions of design—set design, epistemic design and social design.…”

“…Similarly, recent debates in education have been critical of the use of terms such as 'online learning' or notions that imply that learning is happening in an online or digital world, detached from the physical realm, as if one is disembodied (Fawns et al 2019). Bayne and Jandrić (in Jandrić 2017) suggest that our interactions with the digital should not be understood as a disembodied experience, but, instead, as involving co-presence in multiple spaces which we all inhabit in our everyday lives.…”

Designing and Building Robust Innovative Learning Environments

“…Another challenge was to create and maintain a clear pedagogical vision. Gislason [23] stressed the importance of achieving a fit between educational programs and the design of the teaching and learning spaces in a materialized vision, also [59]. In the two cases studied here, such a fit was largely achieved in relation to the school buildings and the ILEs [54].…”