Diana Laurillard

Dyscalculia: From brain to education

Recent research in cognitive and developmental neuroscience is providing a new approach to the understanding of dyscalculia that emphasizes a core deficit in understanding sets and their numerosities, which is fundamental to all aspects of elementary school mathematics. The neural bases of numerosity processing have been investigated in structural and functional neuroimaging studies of adults and children, and neural markers of its impairment in dyscalculia have been identified. New interventions to strengthen numerosity processing, including adaptive software, promise effective evidence-based education for dyscalculic learners.

The Pedagogical Challenges to Collaborative Technologies.

Collaborative technologies offer a range of new ways of supporting learning by enabling learners to share and exchange both ideas and their own digital products. This paper considers how best to exploit these opportunities from the perspective of learners’ needs. New technologies invariably excite a creative explosion of new ideas for ways of doing teaching and learning, although the technologies themselves are rarely designed with teaching and learning in mind. To get the best from them for education we need to start with the requirements of education, in terms of both learners’ and teachers’ needs. The argument put forward in this paper is to use what we know about what it takes to learn, and build this into a pedagogical framework with which to challenge digital technologies to deliver a genuinely enhanced learning experience.

The teacher as action researcher : Using technology to capture pedagogic form

The article argues that we make best use of learning technologies if we begin with an understanding of educational problems, and use this analysis to target the solutions we should be demanding from technology. The focus is to address the issue from the perspective of teachers and lecturers (the ‘teaching community’), and to consider how they could become the experimental innovators and reflective practitioners who will use technology well. Teachers could become ‘action researchers’, collaborating to produce their own development of knowledge about teaching with technology. For this to be possible, they must be able to share that knowledge, and the article proposes the use of an online learning activity management system as a way of capturing and sharing the pedagogic forms teachers design. An action research approach, like all research, needs a theoretical framework from which to challenge practice, and the article shows how teachers could use the conversational framework to design and test an optimally effective learning experience. Examples of ‘generic’ learning designs illustrate how such an approach can help the teaching community rethink their teaching, collectively, and embrace the best of conventional and digital methods. In this way they will be more likely to harness technology to the needs of education, rather than simply search for the problems to which the latest technology is a solution.

Enabling Creative Learning Design through Semantic Technologies

The paper advocates an approach to learning design that considers it as creating digital artefacts that can be extended, modified and used for different purposes. This is realised through an ‘act becoming artefact’ cycle, where users’ actions in the authors’ software environment, named Learning Designer, are automatically interpreted on the basis of formal active ‘concepts’ embedded in users’ activities as they create learning designs. This is underpinned by semantic technologies, which enable creating active, in computational terms, artefacts. The paper illustrates how the proposed approach integrates pedagogical considerations, expressed using the Conversational Framework, with semantic technologies, especially ontologies, providing a snapshot of the tool. It discusses evaluations and findings from the user studies that were carried out. Finally, some conclusions and next steps are provided.

Technology, Pedagogy, and Education: Concluding Comments

The papers in this volume elaborate some of the critical issues in the work to knit together the opportunities of technology with the requirements and aspirations of education. The papers show how researchers from the separate disciplines of education and computer science are now collaborating to build an interdisciplinary approach to innovation in teaching and learning. Pedagogy is a pivotal point around which we can see the balance tilting now towards technology, with its seductive offers of freedom from formality, now towards education, with its driving forces of assessment, inspection and accreditation, still powerfully conventional. As one way of abstracting from the wealth of material in this volume what it means for teaching and learning, we can focus here on the critical issues it raises, of ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘pedagogy’.

In Search of a New Developmental-Education Pedagogy

Gail O. Mellow (gmellow@lagcc.cuny.edu) is president of LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the US; it serves over 50,000 students, two-thirds of whom are New Americans. It is a leader in using e-portfolios for teaching and assessment. Diana D. Woolis (dwoolis@kpublic.com) is the founding partner of Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI), a pioneer in using web–based collaboration to accelerate learning and integrate professional development, practice, and research. Diana Laurillard (d.laurillard@ ioe.ac.uk) holds the Chair of Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education, University of London, one of the world’s premier schools of education. Her work focuses on bridging the gap between teaching and research and the development of interactive learning design tools for faculty. In Search of a NEW DEVELOPMENTALEDUCATION PEDAGOGY

Designing the pedagogies for student support on the large scale

The field of Learning Design now has an interesting challenge. With the prominence of MOOCs and the related field of Learning Analytics, there is an expectation that learning technology will now be able to solve the problem of the worldwide demand for higher education (currently estimated as ~ 100 m per year). This is a problem that all of us in LD recognise and probably share as being the most important to be solved in the field of education. But our approach is different. How will the future development of Learning Design contribute to solving that problem? This paper will consider how the attributes of the field provide the means to do it. They were set out in the Larnaca Declaration: the focus on pedagogy in all its forms, the description of learning designs as computational objects, the sharing of ideas, the scope across all sectors and subject areas, the pedagogic categorisation of learning designs, the attention to what students do in order to learn, the mapping to implementations, the focus on effectiveness. To meet the demand for education we have to provide the level of nurturing and guidance every student needs if they are to attain their learning potential. Given the scale of the demand, this means moving from the current norm of a 1:25 staff student ratio to a much higher ratio, without loss to the students attainment. At present it is impossible to do this at the high ratio the level of demand requires, but technology is good at solving large-scale challenges. If there is a solution to be found it will come from the teaching community collaborating to design, test, improve and share the pedagogies that achieve high quality student support and attainment on the large scale. To do it, we need all the attributes of Learning Design. So we need a clear consensus of what they are in order to represent them in what we do.

Planning and sharing learning designs: cross-cultural use of a learning design support tool

In order to facilitate their teaching design, more teachers are beginning to engage in collective efforts, with some Chinese teachers also now sharing their resources online to plan their teaching. The learning design support tool described here (the Learning Designer), resulting from an interdisciplinary research project in the UK, provides a new form of collaboration between teachers. This paper tests the value of the tool for cross-cultural sharing of learning designs. It documents the process of a Chinese teacher who tries to represent and share his language teaching planning by using this innovative web-based prototype. The paper reflects on the issues that arise from this cross-cultural study, and the implications for the future of pedagogical innovation.

Making meaningful decisions about time, workload and pedagogy in the digital age: the Course Resource Appraisal Model

This article reports on a design-based research project to create a modelling tool to analyse the costs and learning benefits involved in different modes of study. The Course Resource Appraisal Model (CRAM) provides accurate cost-benefit information so that institutions are able to make more meaningful decisions about which kind of courses—online, blended or traditional face-to-face—make sense for them to provide. The tool calculates the difference between expenses and income over three iterations of the course and presents a pedagogical analysis of the learning experience provided. The article draws on a CRAM analysis of the costs and learning benefits of a massive open online course to show how the tool can illuminate the pedagogical and financial viability of a course of this kind.