Digital Learning and Collaborative Practices

Lessons from Inclusive and Empowering Participation with Emerging Technologies

Eva Brooks, Susanne Dau, Staffan Selander, Eva Brooks, Susanne Dau, Staffan Selander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367622558
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000403503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Digital Learning and Collaborative Practices offers a comprehensive overview of design-based, technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning in virtual settings. Today's digital communications foster new opportunities for sharing culture and knowledge while also prompting concerns over division, disinformation and surveillance. This book uniquely emphasises playful, collaborative experiences and democratic values in a variety of environments—adaptive, augmented, dialogic, game-based and beyond. Graduate students and researchers of educational technology, the learning sciences and interaction design will discover rich theories, interventions, models and approaches for concretising emerging practices and competencies in digital learning spaces.

PART 1

Designing for Collaboration

Frameworks of Learning

Eva Brooks and Staffan Selander

Introduction: Designing for Collaboration: Frameworks of Learning

This first part of the book provides frameworks and theories that can guide those interested in designing for particular collaborative experiences. It also provides operational frameworks on how to involve participants in processes of social activity. When aligned with participation, communication can be considered as an essential feature of collaboration as well as an interpersonal capacity that comes into play when individuals are provided with opportunities for social interaction. It is also argued that to empower interdependence, collaboration should be encouraged rather than enforced. Hence, designing for collaboration involves considering participants’ mutual engagement, in particular related to joint problem solving. To foster collaboration, problem solving tasks are suggested to be ambiguous and playful to instigate dialogue rather than obvious and straightforward accomplishments.

Relative to digital learning, the aspect of collaboration is often associated with a social nature of interactions evolving from social demands of collaborative activities. This kind of processes can be associated with a foundational participatory character, where participants become increasingly involved in collaborative undertakings. Expressed differently, we acknowledge that evolving collaborative processes among participants could be considered as a democratic and empowering involvement. This participatory character of collaboration is a well-established aspect within the field of participatory design and other design-oriented approaches, in particular within the Nordic countries. Currently, the term co-creation is often used interchangeably with participatory design. Other crucial elements to consider when designing for collaboration are boundaries and situational constraints that can hinder eco-social trajectories towards meaningful participation in collaborative settings. Here, playfulness is explicated as generating a mindset that can cross-cut different experienced constraints as well as opportunities.

The forthcoming chapters present mainly Scandinavian, design-oriented approaches in research, built on social and democratic perspectives focusing on theoretical frameworks and tools for research, reflection and deeper understanding of emergent practices. Through the various contributions, we aim to add to the understanding of what is unique about these theoretical perspectives, and what emerge as more generic dimensions across different design and research practices.

The first chapter Designing as play by Eva Brooks, illustrates how designing can be described as a play activity and as such contribute to the shaping of interactions and environments of creative collaborations among children. She uncovers characteristics of design and play, respectively, in terms of their material and immaterial resources and discusses in which ways they are linked to participants’ interests to foster participation and social dimensions of learning. Theoretically, Brooks leans on the conceptual ideas of co-creative exploration and participation, which entails aspects of play, dialogue and interaction, which are put forward as material and immaterial processes contributing to change and diversity.

Central to the chapter is an attempt to, in a concrete form, outline how designing as play can be practiced and theorised underlining the ethos of participants’ voices to be heard and considered. This is done through empirical examples carried out in digital as well as non-digital play and learning practices. Here, the author emphasises the material manifestation of children’s interaction, which moves beyond representation as a way of understanding designing as play.

The second chapter, Designs for learning and knowledge representations in collaborative settings by Ola Knutsson, Robert Ramberg and Staffan Selander, outlines a perspective on participatory designs for learning as a social activity that can be used not only to analyse and understand new learning sites and practices, but also to organise new collaborative learning environments. In doing so, they elaborate on the concepts of designs in and for learning including a focus on material and semiotic resources and how these can be applied during different learning sequences. Throughout the chapter, the authors argue for an understanding of learning as a dialogical process, where representations and representational artefacts can be used to relieve or reinforce cognitive processes. This is exemplified through a case study inspired by participatory design methodology where sketches, design patterns and design workshops are used as representational formats. The authors conclude by emphasising the importance of including communicative aspects when designing for learning and knowledge representation.

Chapter three, A learning ecology design by Susanne Dau, addresses current complex learning situations, which span across different physical and digital domains and which involve an increased personalised use of digital technologies. She does so by applying a learning ecology perspective on orientation and wayfinding in physical and digital environments. In her description of a learning ecology, she draws on the concepts of spaces, places, tools, techniques, technology, affordances and narratives and points to the interrelatedness of these different f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: Digital Learning and Collaborative Practices
• Contributors
• Part 1: Designing for Collaboration: Frameworks of Learning
• Part 2: Inclusive Practices through Digital Technologies
• Part 3: Empowering Participation
• Epilogue : Lessons from Inclusive and Empowering Participation in Emerging Technologies
• Index