Rikke Toft Nørgård

Academic citizenship beyond the campus: a call for the placeful university

ABSTRACT Through combining theories of space and place with works on institutional being, virtues and modes of becoming, this article develops and promotes academic citizenship as the formation of dwelling, being and becoming on the placeful university beyond the campus. We argue that this is a prerequisite for the integration of the university in society and society in the university. We discuss the need for a concept of the placeful university to capture academic belonging in the nexus between university and society. As such, the conceptualisation of the placeful university provides an opportunity to re-imagine the possibilities of the university to integrate with people and society through dialogue and placeful-ness. Accordingly, supporting academic citizenship entails designing for the placeful university – a university that invites and promotes openness, dialogue, democracy, mutual integration, care and joint responsibility. Consequently, a comprehension of the placeful university is developed in the article to make the potentiality of academic citizenship for the future university emerge.

Crafting code at the demo-scene

This paper introduces the idea of craftsmanship as a way of understanding the shaping and re-shaping of code as a material crafting practice. We build our analysis on a qualitative study of a coder engaged in creative and expressive programming on an old hardware platform. The contribution of the paper is a set of conceptual categories: craft engagement, craftsmanship rhythm and craftsmanship expressivity, that conceptualizes coding as crafting.

Towards a pattern language for hybrid education

In this paper we offer an initial framework for a pattern language of hybrid education. With the term hybrid education, we imply the use of educational design patterns that actively strive to cut across, circumventing or upheave traditional dichotomies within education such as physical-digital, academic-nonacademic, online-offline, formal-informal, learning-teaching and individual-collective. In doing so, hybrid education invites uncertainty, open-endedness, risk-taking, experimentation, critical creativity, disruption, dialogue and democracy (back) into the heart of education. Accordingly we see, within hybrid education, the promise to push against and circumvent current trends of marketization, managerialism and standardization in higher education today. Here, a pattern language for hybrid education presents an alternative way of designing for future higher education in ways that are not focused on teaching to the test, playing it safe, rankings or gaming the system approaches. Rather, hybrid education focuses on open-endedness, risk-taking, relational entanglements, experimentation, exploration and empathy. In this way, designing for hybrid education is in this paper achieved, partly by taking a decidedly value-based and vision-driven approach to learning design patterns based on philosophy in higher education and critical pedagogy, partly by working together in hybrid ways and across disciplines and domains in order to open up both the field of teaching and learning in higher education as well as the field of learning design and design patterns. The result is the almost 80 design patterns for hybrid education. The paper presents the pattern categories for hybrid education, the different design patterns contained in these. Furthermore, the pattern mining ground and workshop process, the outcome of the value workshop and the vision workshop as well as three example scenarios is described in order to show both the underlying value and vision foundation for the pattern language as well as how it plays out in concrete scenarios.

MOOC Design Workshop: Educational Innovation with Empathy and Intent

For the last two years we have been running a series of successful MOOC design workshops. These workshops build on previous work in learning design and MOOC design patterns. The aim of these workshops is to aid practitioners in defining and conceptualising educational innovations (predominantly, but not exclusively MOOCs) which are based on an empathic user-centered view of the target learners and teachers. In this paper, we share the main principles, patterns and resources of our workshops and present some initial results for their effectiveness.

Expertise as gender performativity and corporeal craftsmanship Towards a multilayered understanding of gaming expertise

This article is an attempt to rethink the assumptions and presumptions made about work on expertise and gameplay in an effort to tease out how such assumptions and presumptions are not only implicated in our analyses to date, but also misleading with regard to what we would see if we had a different framework for viewing. Our starting point here is that expertise is not a measurable and fixed capacity but rather relational, something produced within a techno-social system, where technology, gender, corporeality and identity intersect in complex multilayered ways, conditioned by the social contexts of use and the corporeal–locomotive expressions of craftsmanship technicity. In this article, we show how different methodological lenses and conceptual frameworks can be used to highlight different but interconnected aspects of the performance of expertise with regard to gaming.

Sharing is Caring

Hybrid education aims at dissolving the dichotomies within education such as physical-digital, academic-nonacademic, online-offline, formal-informal, learning-teaching and individual-collective. It takes a more holistic view and take the diversity of students and teachers into account. In this paper we will focus on mixing the digital and non-digital world, digital and non-digital artefacts, in order to make sharing resources simpler and more open. This addresses educational values such as self-expression (as contribution becomes both simpler and more diverse), openness, flow of activities (avoiding any seams between media), and inclusion (allowing everyone to participate). This paper introduces five patterns of hybrid pedagogy which enable sharing between learners and educators.

Game-Centric Pedagogy and Curriculums in Higher Education

This paper examines some recent trends in game-centric education for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) fields, especially those that explore and promote collaboration among multiple disciplines. We discuss various multimodal design research activities that draw upon the applications and usage of popular technical hackathons and game design jams in educational environments. The intent of this work is to guide and inform new approaches to the core components of STEAM curriculums. Game-centric methods appear to be well-suited to a variety of education and training circumstances, particularly those that apply in transnational settings and/or serve highly diverse student populations. The benefits extend beyond the direct game-building activity; for example, the process can promote broader design thinking skills and encourage better appreciation of the typical understand-create-deliver flow process, which may be found in many different contexts. Other advantages can include the encouragement of critical thinking skills, the ability to safely tinker and experiment, and the empowerment to fail and start over. In these respects, we view game-making as a form of ‘future-making’, and thus a valuable vehicle for enhancing general education and long-term life skills. We conclude by describing some opportunities to undertake qualitative and quantitative research on teams of participants in popular game development events, such as the multinational Global Game Jam (GGJ) series. This process involves examining their background demographics, and characterizing the team dynamics and behaviors in the context of their game design and development activities during the game jam.

Critical robotics: exploring a new paradigm.

In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in voices advocating more human-centered and holistic approaches to research on robot technology. Towards this end, the adoption of broader perspectives and the exploration of critical questions related to the design and study of these technologies in everyday life have become increasingly pressing. In this workshop, we aim for researchers and industry experts to experience hands-on approaches to explore how we can address critical human-centered perspectives in robot research and whether critical questions within the area of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) can be considered a new emerging paradigm: critical robotics. We invite people from a variety of disciplines both inside and outside of HRI and HCI (e.g., education, media and communication, philosophy of technology, applied ethics) to submit a short position paper and join us in an open exploration of this burning topic already identified by leading researchers in HRI and HCI.

The Worldhood University: Design Signatures & Guild Thinking

Universities and higher education today are sites for entanglement of multiple forms of agency and lifeworlds. Enhanced focus is given to higher education strategies and frameworks that integrate more traditional forms of higher education curriculum with moral and political awareness, social agency, and economic consciousness. Such initiatives and socio-political forms of institutional agency are highlighted in current research on the ecological university and higher education ecologies, the global education industry, the professionalisation of higher education, and the social responsibility of higher education institutions. This chapter is one such example of trying to conceptualise such a ‘worldhood university’ as a way for a university to be integrated in the world in distinctive ways and to be a distinctive world for the people living there; what we term ‘design signatures’ and ‘guild thinking.’ Through the developing of the concept of ‘worldhood’ we intend, on the one hand, to focus on the ways the different designs of university structures and systems create specific signatures for being, doing and knowing in higher education. Something universities can work with intentionally to shape thinking in certain ways and create unique worldhood signatures for themselves. On the other hand, we also wish to draw attention to how particular ways of thinking conjures different worlds. Here, thinking becomes a guild’s craft embedded in and emanating from the sinews of the university.

Playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy

ABSTRACT Increased focus on quantifiable performance and assessment in higher education is creating a learning culture characterised by fear of failing, avoidance of risk, and extrinsic goal-oriented behaviours. In this article, we explore possibilities of a more playful approach to teaching and learning in higher education through the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’. This approach stimulates intrinsic motivation and educational drive, creates safe spaces for academic experimentation and exploration, and promotes reflective risk-taking, ideation, and participation in education. We present a model of playful learning, drawing on notions of signature pedagogies, field literature, and two qualitative studies on learner conceptions of enjoyment and reasons for disengagement. We highlight the potential of this approach to invite a different mind-set and environment, providing a formative space in which failure is not only encouraged, but a necessary part of the learning paradigm.