Lars Birch Andreasen

Educational designs supporting student engagement through networked project studies

The chapter discusses how student engagement can be facilitated through educational designs that make conscious use of various online communication technologies. The discussions are based on cases from the practice at the Danish Master Programme in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Learning (MIL), where students from all over Denmark within a networked learning structure are studying in groups combining on-site seminars with independent and challenging virtually organized project periods. The chapter discusses the involvement of students as co-designers of how courses and learning environments unfold, and deals with the development of students’ information literacy. Various teacher roles are addressed, as implementing new educational technology requires teachers who are flexible and aware of the different challenges in the networked environment. The aim of the chapter is to discuss the application of new technological possibilities in educational settings inspired by problem- and project-based learning.

Serious Games and English as a Foreign Language in Primary School: A Policy Perspective

In this chapter, we use the example of a recent study of a game-based platform for English teaching and learning (http://www.mingoville.com) to discuss the role of game-based learning in primary school viewed from the perspective of policy. We understand English teaching and learning as an increasingly significant aspect of the ways in which nation states participate and compete in global education contexts and how they forge educated citizens. In addition to this, we argue that digital media often are conceptualised by government policies as agents of change and reform that connect strongly with the aim of educating competent English speakers for the global community. In this chapter, we shall focus mainly on data which have been produced in connection with a research project called Serious Games on a Global Market Place (2007–2011). Data have been collected at various levels of national and local government through interviews with actors involved in policymaking. We approach the issue of policy through three case studies of educational policy in Denmark, Portugal and Vietnam. These case studies are interpreted through a variety of primarily anthropological theories that understand policy as complex articulations of cultural and social ideas of the educated person [Levinson & Holland. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. Albany: State University of New York Press; Shore & Wright. (1997). Introduction. Policy: A new field of anthropology. In Shore & Wright (Eds.), Anthropology of policy. New York: Routledge].