J. Ola Lindberg

Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching

Internationally, virtual world environments such as Second Life® (SL) have become accepted as platforms for innovative educational activities at many universities in recent years. One such activity ...This chapter discusses the application of a transactional approach to educational design. Its purpose is to describe how such an approach could be applied to a thesis course. To fulfill this purpose the chapter unfolds by indicating that the practice of supervision faces challenges from changes in society. Technology-enhanced participation in supervision is one answer to these challenges. Inspired by scholars such as Bakhtin, Dewey, and Vygotsky the applied transactional approach expands on ideas such as dialogues and educational settings. The implementation of these ideas into the educational design intersects within two principles, group-work, and open and public exchanges of information. The transactional approach is then illustrated with the help of a first-year undergraduate thesis course in the discipline of Education.Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching presents recent and important theoretical and practical advances in educational technology design in higher education, examining their possibilities for enhancing teaching and learning. This volume includes discussions of technologies and applications grounded in legitimate learning theories and from an ethical perspective that emphasizes mutual understanding.

Online Learning Communities and Teacher Professional Development: Methods for Improved Education Delivery

In todays society, the professional development of teachers is urgent due to the constant change in working conditions and the impact that information and communication technologies have in teaching practices. Online Learning Communities and Teacher Professional Development: Methods for Improved Education Delivery features innovative applications and solutions useful for teachers in developing knowledge and skills for the integration of technology into everyday teaching practices. This defining collection of field research discusses how technology itself can serve as an important resource in terms of providing arenas for professional development.

Blogs and the Design of Reflective Peer-to-Peer Technology-Enhanced Learning and Formative Assessment.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of blogs as part of a formative assessment practice, to report how reflective peer-to-peer learning can be designed and provided in online h ...

Shared video media and blogging online: Educational technologies for enhancing formative e‐assessment?

Purpose - This paper provide an understanding of the students’ meaning-making processes, as they are part of an e-assessment practice via written blog posting upon their own and their co-students ...

Introduction: Moving from theory into practice : on the informed design of educational technologies

This special issue of Technology, Pedagogy and Education originates from a symposium on educational technology held in 2012 at Umeå University in Sweden. Through keynote speeches, cutting-edge research knowledge was disseminated and combined with follow-up dialogues among the participants. Interesting, innovative and critical questions and concerns about the informed design of educational technologies for teaching and learning were addressed. Many insightful answers and suggestions were given; but even so, the editors of this special issue, after closing the symposium, thought that the question of how research can be designed in a sustainable and successful way, as well as implemented, integrated and used by practitioners, was not answered satisfactorily enough. Compared to other research fields, such as, for example, medicine and engineering, the link between research and practice does not yet seem, apparently, to be strong in the field of education. According to Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003), for example, educational research has, over time been both questioned and challenged by practitioners such as school leaders, teachers and politicians. When practitioners experience problems, they seldom turn to research. Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003) even claimed that ‘education has no collective voice to counterbalance less expert commentators. Indeed, many “common sense” results that are widely accepted by the public (e.g., “retention works”) fly in the face of modern research’ (p. 9). Research results seem to have had difficulty making their way into educational settings. One might ask: why does this seem to be the case? Why is it so hard for researchers and practitioners to work together and, through mutual efforts and joint visions, improve their educational practices? How come there is such difficulty integrating research and development work? Mor (2014) for example suggested that researchers and teachers in fact can both take the role of providers of knowledge and designers of teaching and learning activities through educational technologies. In this special issue, we attempt to go further into this complex web of problems. One way we suggest the problems can be resolved is through informed design of educational technologies. Informed is – in broad terms – here understood as the design of educational technologies that are built on solid and explicit theoretical assumptions. This implies designs that are possible for both researchers and practitioners to criticise and develop on their own assumptions and that, most importantly, have the possibility to enhance teaching and learning in digitalised educational environments (see Olofsson & Lindberg, 2012). Next in this editorial, we provide a brief overview of already formulated critical insights and concerns within this field of research. Thereafter, the six articles included in the special issue are presented as well as their specific relation to the idea of having an informed design as a starting point for enhancing teaching and learning. With inspiration from Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003), this will be doneIntroduction: Moving from theory into practice : on the informed design of educational technologies

Moving from theory into practice : on the informed design of educational technologies

This special issue of Technology, Pedagogy and Education originates from a symposium on educational technology held in 2012 at Umeå University in Sweden. Through keynote speeches, cutting-edge research knowledge was disseminated and combined with follow-up dialogues among the participants. Interesting, innovative and critical questions and concerns about the informed design of educational technologies for teaching and learning were addressed. Many insightful answers and suggestions were given; but even so, the editors of this special issue, after closing the symposium, thought that the question of how research can be designed in a sustainable and successful way, as well as implemented, integrated and used by practitioners, was not answered satisfactorily enough. Compared to other research fields, such as, for example, medicine and engineering, the link between research and practice does not yet seem, apparently, to be strong in the field of education. According to Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003), for example, educational research has, over time been both questioned and challenged by practitioners such as school leaders, teachers and politicians. When practitioners experience problems, they seldom turn to research. Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003) even claimed that ‘education has no collective voice to counterbalance less expert commentators. Indeed, many “common sense” results that are widely accepted by the public (e.g., “retention works”) fly in the face of modern research’ (p. 9). Research results seem to have had difficulty making their way into educational settings. One might ask: why does this seem to be the case? Why is it so hard for researchers and practitioners to work together and, through mutual efforts and joint visions, improve their educational practices? How come there is such difficulty integrating research and development work? Mor (2014) for example suggested that researchers and teachers in fact can both take the role of providers of knowledge and designers of teaching and learning activities through educational technologies. In this special issue, we attempt to go further into this complex web of problems. One way we suggest the problems can be resolved is through informed design of educational technologies. Informed is – in broad terms – here understood as the design of educational technologies that are built on solid and explicit theoretical assumptions. This implies designs that are possible for both researchers and practitioners to criticise and develop on their own assumptions and that, most importantly, have the possibility to enhance teaching and learning in digitalised educational environments (see Olofsson & Lindberg, 2012). Next in this editorial, we provide a brief overview of already formulated critical insights and concerns within this field of research. Thereafter, the six articles included in the special issue are presented as well as their specific relation to the idea of having an informed design as a starting point for enhancing teaching and learning. With inspiration from Burkhardt and Schoenfeld (2003), this will be doneIntroduction: Moving from theory into practice : on the informed design of educational technologies

Assumptions about participating in teacher education through the use of ICT

Purpose – With a philosophical stance in relation to education, this paper aims to discuss different understandings of participation in an information and communication technology (ICT)-supported d ...

What do upper secondary school teachers want to know from research on the use of ICT and how does this inform a research design

This study investigates what teachers taking part in a longitudinal research project on the use of ICT for teaching and learning in three upper secondary schools in Sweden want to learn more about. At the beginning of the project eighty-four teachers were invited to respond to a questionnaire relating to what teachers wanted to learn more about during their participation in a research project, both for themselves, their colleagues and their students. The questionnaire consisted of Likert-scale and open-ended questions. Sixty teachers responded, thereby yielding a response rate of 71%. In focus in this paper is a qualitative content analysis of the open-ended questions. The analysis revealed six desired areas of learning: (a) technological aspects, (b) how to use ICT for teaching and learning, (c) the Learning Management System (LMS), (d) safety and plagiarism, (e) best practice and (f) collaboration and professional development. The aspects of knowledge addressed in these themes were analysed and discussed in relation to the TPACK model. A conclusion that can be drawn from the analysis is that the teachers inquired different forms of knowledge and that interpretation of ‘technological pedagogical content knowledge’ only emerged in one of the themes. This study then informed the research design in multiple ways, the two most apparent being a survey of students acknowledging teachers’ expressed research interests and the design and implementation of a formative intervention group interview.

Bridging School-Subjects and Distances in Upper Secondary Schools

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to report how Swedish upper secondary schools involved in a European Union-financed collaborative project intertwined aspects of subject integration and internatio ...

MANAGING IT ON A MUNICIPALITY LEVEL – ON THE ROLE OF IT STRATEGISTS IN DEVELOPING DIGITAL COMPETENCE

In Sweden, the digitalization of K-12 schools has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Several larger governmental initiatives targeting issues such as the one-to-one classroom and teachers’ develo ...